Northwestern Mutual likes to think of itself as a storied American institution offering specialized financial advice. The 168-year-old financial giant, ranked 109 on the Fortune 500, and regularly anointed one of the World’s Most Admired Companies by the magazine, describes its financial advisers as “expert listeners” or a “trusted partner who helps you continue to reach goal after goal”.
It also tops Forbes’s list of Best Employers for New Grads, a title that makes it attractive to hundreds of college students desperate for an internship that could launch them into a career in financial services. Each year they file into Northwestern’s glassy offices across the country for a three-month internship that they hope could change their lives. There, they are slotted in beside thousands of full-time “financial representatives”, many of them recent graduates themselves.
In the corridors of US colleges and business schools, Northwestern recruiters push the dream of a blue chip career in finance. Posters appear with slogans like: The Career You Want at a Company You’ll Love. Recruiters in polo shirts sit at tables asking students if they would like to be financial advisers. Job ads for these positions, posted on sites like LinkedIn, describe “performance-based pay” and “uncapped earnings for the entrepreneurial”, phrases that shimmer with vague promises of potential wealth.
For anyone confused by friends blocking you thing here is the meat paragraph:
But when it came to the interview for his internship, the questions felt more like a fraternity recruitment. How big was his family? What did his parents do? Where did he go to high school? He was sent away with “market information surveys” to complete. The worksheets, seen by the Guardian, required Jeremy to interview 10 friends or family members about their finances – listing their names, occupations, phone numbers, and asking each of them to refer him to 10 more people he could contact about their financial planning.
It goes one with essentially having them telemarket their friends and family at work. Even if you did not go for what your “friend” was selling they had put your contact information into the company databases. Wow. Just wow.
Oh sure, I have 10 friends who would love to share their financial information with you.
I was named after Hugh G. Rection!