u/Kind-Sweet-7069

I am curious how people genuinely useful when it comes in recruiting for first sell-side position.

There are alot of advices online whether its about networking, technical prep, modeling issues, interview questions, but those topics felt more repetitive.

For those who successfully broke into IB, ER, S&T, Corporate Banking, or Capital Markets, what actually made the biggest difference?
A few things I’d especially like to hear about:

-What did you prioritize during interview prep?
-How much did networking actually matter?
-Which technical topics were worth spending the most time on?
-Was there anything you thought was important but turned out not to matter much?
-For anyone who went through recruiting recently, what surprised you about the process?

Would be especially interested in hearing from people who recruited from non-target schools or had to break into the industry without a strong existing network.

I always thought the travel blogger life was basically reserved for people with huge followings. Like you spend years building an audience, eventually a hotel notices you, they fly you somewhere nice and you post a Reel from the pool.

I was looking into travel creators recently though and found a Sideshift article about how travel brands are working with creators now

A hotel or tourism brand doesn't always need someone with 300k followers. For them is better to find someone who can make good travel content that they can use on their own socials, website or ads. So I started looking at real travel creator portfolios bc I wanted to see what “good” looks like when you're selling the content rather than just your audience.

I found a creator called Roxanne Labat and her portfolio was probably the one that made it click for me

She's worked with Visit California, Hyatt, Klook, Kimpton and other travel brands, but her portfolio doesn't feel like someone just threw their prettiest vacation reels onto a website. She presents the work more like actual campaigns and, in some cases, shows how the content performed too. Her Visit California work for example includes the results alongside the videos, so a brand are seeing that the content got people to watch and engage.

And once you start looking at it from the hotel's side, it becomes pretty obvious why they would pay for this even if the creator doesn't have a massive audience.

A hotel needs content constantly, normal stuff showing what staying there is actually like. Someone walking into the room, having breakfast, using the spa, going out for dinner nearby, showing what you can do over a weekend. A creator can shoot all of that during a stay and the hotel suddenly has content it can keep posting or use in ads long after that person has gone home.

That's the part I hadn't really considered before. You could go somewhere for a normal weekend, shoot it like it was a client job instead of taking random vacation clips, and probably come back with the beginning of a travel portfolio before anyone has ever paid you.

Then instead of contacting a hotel saying “hey I love traveling, can I stay for free?”, you're showing them exactly what you could make for them.

The SideShift article goes quite a bit deeper into how travel brands choose creators and the different types of partnerships they use, which is what sent me down this whole rabbit hole in the first place:

https://sideshift.app/blog/travel-influencer-marketing

And Roxanne's portfolio is worth looking at alongside it because it shows what that advice looks like when someone is actually doing it professionally:

https://www.travelugccreator.com/

I still don't think anyone is going to film two nice hotel videos and suddenly spend the rest of the year flying around for free hahah but it definitely seems like a realistic way into travel content

https://preview.redd.it/pfaw3zgvs9mh1.png?width=1086&format=png&auto=webp&s=77f1b1333f048cd8afb4fdb3b31e3a0969fd4f50