Big 4 Recruitment...what did I just watch...

Toronto is an extremely competitive market. I received an offer from pwc this recruitment season and i can probably guess and say there approximately were atleast 7 full-time offers for schulich, 12+ from laurier+waterloo, 5-6 from ivey, and 2-3 from mcgill, mcmaster, queens (tax + audit) for all the offices in Ontario. I did not notice any Rotman, UTSC or Brock but that may be because I was in a different PPTC(second round interviews) than those schools, which is where I met a lot of the second round candidates. FYI PPTC is PwC's group case interview, individual case interview, and partner interview for the second round. It definitely seemed like the bulk of the full-time offers went to Waterloo/Laurier/Western/Schulich especially if you creep the recruiters on twitter and their offer party tweets.

Honestly, Ontario is the MOST competitive market for accounting jobs. The top business schools in the country are all in the area so extracurricular activities is one of the only ways to differentiate yourself on your resume (unless you go to Waterloo AFM, Laurier Co-op, or UTSC Co-op). The big 4 get thousands of applications, if your not an exec on ANY school club or a decent summer job its very difficult to beat afm and laurier coop kids who have all these coop terms at big banks, fortune 500 companies and bay street coop terms, on top of that they may be execs of different campus clubs. During PPTC I asked these Laurier and AFM kids about their work experiences and honestly there is no way non-coop school could beat them in experience. All of them had bay street corporate accounting or finance jobs since second year university and this one guy from laurier had buy-side equity research at a big bank and small public accounting firm experience.

Reality is that when recruiters look through thousands of resumes, work experience, exec positions stand out a lot, grades are not the most important part. If your not competitive, your just another name on a piece of paper. Big 4 hold networking sessions at all of the schools going to them is a MUST if you want to differentiate yourself.

/r/Accounting Thread