Harlem Capital Family,

Please join us in welcoming our Winter Intern Class: Mariel Thompson, Ariana Linara, Kameron Hutchinson, Emily Herrera, Pallavi Hukerikar, & Zhenny Gong. They are joined by 2 fellows from our Fall 2021 intern class: Lizbeth Nunez & Sharlene Guiriba. 

ABOUT THIS COHORT

The 6 applicants were chosen from a pool of 836 applications, marking a 0.7% acceptance rate.

This intern class has 3 undergrad students, 1 MBA student, and 2 full-time employees.  The current undergraduate students hail from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Columbia University, and Northeastern University, while the MBA student attends MIT Sloan School of Management. The 2 employees work at Meta (prev. Facebook) and Duolingo. The class is 33% Black, 33% Asian, and 17% Latino, as well as 67% first-generation American and 17% first-generation college students.

Additionally, 50% of this class applied more than once, with 1 applying three times. In fact, at every stage of the Winter 2022 interview process, we over-indexed on individuals who have reapplied to the program. We appreciate the determination and loyalty to HCP and we reward those who reapply.

A DIVE INTO THE WINTER ‘22 APPLICANT POOL

Let’s take a look at the diversity of the Winter ‘22 applicant pool. Alongside race & gender data, we also started tracking some other important diversity data stats in our application (optional for candidates). 

For this class we collected data on:

1) First-generation college students
2) First-generation Americans
3) Childhood zip codes (K-12 education years)

The Winter ‘22 applicant pool was 38% Black, 25% Asian, and 15% Latino, as well as 42% first-generation American and 39% first-generation college students.

Diving into childhood zip codes, we collected this data to approximate the socioeconomic backgrounds of our applicants. We used U.S. Census Data to match zip codes to median household income. It’s the first class where we analyzed this data and we found that of those who responded (58% of applicants), the median childhood household income in their zip codes was $74K. Notably, the median childhood household income appeared to have dropped towards the last two rounds of our interview process; the median childhood household income of our 6 Winter ‘22 interns’ zip codes is $46k.

AN INSIDE LOOK AT HOW HCP REVIEWS INTERN APPLICATIONS

In honor of our 13th class starting, we wanted to give you an inside look into how a small firm like us tactically conducts our process. Candidates go through 4 rounds: (1) Resume drop, (2) Video submission, (3) Presentation submission, (4) Live interview. Internally, we divide the review steps (rounds 1-3) evenly amongst team members, while we collectively tackle the live interviews (round 4) & final candidate selection together.

For this class, we had 836 total applications to review. We started with round 1, where each of the 7 HCP team members reviewed 120 resumes. Moving to round 2: video submission review & round 3: presentation review, each HCP team member reviewed 16 & 7 submissions, respectively. For the live interview round, we blocked off 5 hours across 2 days to perform interviews. For live interviews, ALL team members are on the call, but only ONE leads each 20-minute interview, the rest just listen in. We rotate the team member who leads the interview to make the back-to-back calls easier on the team. Finally, after the 4 rounds are completed, the entire HCP team convenes to select which candidates from the live interviews will become HCP interns. Of the 16 we interviewed, 6 made it through.

We take pride in our intern interview process. Our interns are our secret sauce and we recognize the value they bring to Harlem Capital, but we would not be able to manage the intern program if we didn’t implement these tactical steps to review all applications. We hope this sheds some light for new companies & other emerging firms as they consider building out robust, but manageable, intern programs. For more information on this, check out our Senior Associate, Nicole DeTommaso’s Twitter thread laying out the process!

CONCLUSION

We have now had 76 interns over 13 classes with 7,440 applicants, equating to an overall 1.0% acceptance rate. Given we can’t provide opportunities to the majority that apply, we are offering access to our HCP talent platform to anyone we interview in the first round. We currently have 75+ investment firms looking for top diverse talent and are looking for additional investment firms, please complete this form if looking for top diverse talent. 

Our Summer 2022 application is now open until February 15th, APPLY or SHARE.   

Regards,

The Harlem Capital Team