by Megan Goldin
I was escorted along a wide corridor where priceless artwork was displayed under security glass panes. I didn’t have a chance to look at the art itself as the assistant led me directly to a double door, which she opened to reveal a large executive lounge. At the side of the room was a long buffet with fruit platters, mason jars of granola with berry coulis, and pastries arranged alongside old-fashioned soda bottles filled with an assortment of freshly squeezed fruit juices and health shakes.
Nine other recruits were sitting on chairs around a long table, flipping through the pages of their welcome packs. They all looked up as we entered. The men were clean-shaven with new haircuts, neatly pressed suits and shoes that had been polished until they shone. The only other woman sat in the far corner. We smiled at each other encouragingly. Her name was Elizabeth and her thin smile suggested that she was almost as nervous as I felt.
It struck me that we were like kids on the first day of elementary school, wearing brand-new outfits and shiny shoes. Except our outfits cost a fortune and we didn’t need a single kleenex among us, quite the opposite: none of us could wipe the smiles off our faces.
Induction was like boot camp with a corporate twist. Maybe that’s why they chose Janet to host the sessions. She’d been a naval officer before graduating from Harvard and joining the firm. She had cropped blonde hair and wore a fitted grey suit that told us that she wasn’t to be messed with.
‘Congratulations. You’ve achieved the career equivalent of winning the lottery,’ Janet told us in her opening address. ‘You won’t need to buy lottery tickets now that you’re at the firm. You’ve already won.’ Everyone laughed.
We didn’t need Janet to tell us that we’d hit the jackpot. We only had to stroll through the executive foyer where a Ming dynasty vase was in an alarm-protected glass cabinet, and where a gilt-framed Picasso sketch of his mistress hung under a glass panel opposite a Monet oil painting. It was a small one, but a Monet is a Monet. In the corner of our meeting room was a bronze dancer tying her ballet slippers as she looked up at us with sympathetic eyes.
‘You can see in these charts —’ Janet clicked through to a coloured bar graph ‘— just how tough it is to get to where you are sitting right now.’
‘Over the past year we’ve received over 9000 applications for graduate positions.’ She used a red laser to point to the relevant section of the graph. ‘Some were formal applications. Others were referred by current staff and alumni, who are always on the lookout to ensure that we hire the best.’
‘We shortlisted 900 candidates, who were all sent online tests. These were analysed by a complex algorithm developed by psychologists who are leaders in their field. That helped us refine that shortlist to 250 candidates. Those candidates went through an initial telephone screening interview with external consultants, who we have trained to understand our exacting requirements. Just 100 candidates were invited for a first round of formal interviews at one of our global offices. From that number we chose fifty for the full gamut of our intensive interview process. That meant, as you all know, four rounds of interviews at a minimum. Of that number, thirty candidates were offered jobs, including yourselves.’ She paused to let her words sink in.
‘It’s quite an accomplishment for you all to be here today. Congratulations.’ Janet clapped her hands in slow-motion applause. ‘You belong to an exclusive club.’
With that resounding endorsement, she introduced the line-up of speakers due to present to us for the rest of the week. Janet said they were all current staff or former executives who had moved on to start their own funds, or retire at forty to manage their investment portfolios. That was the investment bankers’ dream.
Their speeches over the course of the week covered a range of topics like legal issues, strategy and crisis management. They came from a range of disciplines and backgrounds but they all had one thing in common: they spoke about the firm in superlatives.
‘We only hire the smartest people.’ ‘Our remuneration is the most generous in the industry.’ ‘The firm handles the biggest deals in the world and has the most prestigious client list.’
Every speaker parroted variations of the same hyperbole.
‘You won’t find another company anywhere that will give you this level of experience from the get-go,’ said Max, a forty-something former senior executive. He told us that he kept busy in his semi-retirement by doing consulting work and flying to London for five days a month to teach an executive MBA course. ‘One day at Stanhope is like a month anywhere else in terms of experience.’
All the other new recruits had only just graduated from business school. I was the only one who had been looking for work since Christmas. I was well aware that I was there by the merest fluke of fate; if it hadn’t been for the accidental meeting with Vincent then I would never have been hired.
Over the five-day induction I was transformed from a disillusioned business graduate who spent months waiting tables for tips to an entry-level graduate at one of the world’s leading financial houses.
The message they pummelled into us was that our world revolved around money. Making it. Accumulating it. Spending it. In that order. It was Stanhope’s version of the holy trinity.
‘I feel like I’m joining a cult,’ someone whispered, as we stood around drinking coffee during a break. ‘And let me tell you, I for one am more than happy to drink their Kool-Aid.’
‘I don’t know why they call it an induction – it’s more of a full-blown indoctrination. But hey, I’m not complaining. Stanhope is everything I ever imagined,’ said another.
The firm spoiled us rotten during induction week. We didn’t realise that we were being wooed for a long, heady love affair with greed. By the end of the week any ideals we’d held before we started working at the firm, whatever half-baked notions we held on everything from climate change to social justice, were wiped away in one fell swoop
On each chair was a gift bag filled with corporate gifts. Silk ties for the men. Italian silk scarves for the women. We were presented with leather organisers on the second day. On the third day, we entered the meeting room in the morning to discover Samsonite compact suitcases arranged against the wall. Each was monogrammed with our initials.
‘You’ll all be doing lots of travelling so we thought we’d get you started with the right gear,’ said Janet, as we each located our own suitcase.
Inside the suitcases were fitness watches, the best wireless headphones on the market and a bunch of other stuff that probably cost a couple of grand all up. The next day we were presented with member ships to the fitness centre on the third floor of the building. On the final day, we were given tickets to a Broadway musical as the guests of Harrison Stewart, a board member. That night we sat in his box and afterwards went for drinks at his private members club.
Even the most cynical among us was seduced by the five-star treatment. A waiter came in and out of our training room to bring us cold-pressed fruit juices and coffees made by an in-house barista. In between sessions, he would serve an assortment of tasty amuses-bouche prepared by the firm’s executive chef.
Lunch was served in a private dining room on the executive floor.
‘You should lose that tie,’ Brad whispered to Luke on the first day. He shut up as the waiter brought them both oversized plates with the entrée of lobster tail and browned butter.
‘Why?’ Luke asked when the waiter had gone. ‘I heard every one who is anyone wears Hermès.’
‘That’s exactly the problem,’ said Brad. ‘I worked here as an intern last summer. One day my boss turned to me during a stand-up meeting with our entire team. “Brad, I don’t give a fuck if you can afford to buy Hermès. In this place, you have to fucking earn the right.” He cut off my tie with scissors in front of everyone and made me go downstairs to buy another one.’
Luke turned pale. He slipped away after lunch and returned late to the next session wearing a striped navy Gucci tie.
The second day we had a presentation
by Steven Mills, a department head with sandy hair and a propensity to punctuate his words by jabbing his finger into the air.
‘If you work hard,’ said Mills, ‘then you’ll be rewarded. We pay well at Stanhope. Better than our competitors. We take care of you so that you can put all your talents into taking care of our business, and our clients’ business. That means growing wealth. Everyone’s wealth, yours included.’
He pressed play on a series of profile videos of staff members we were supposed to see as role models.
‘They were in the same graduate intake,’ said Mills. ‘Eight to ten years ago, every one of them sat exactly where you are now.’ Footage appeared on the screen of a man wearing aviator sunglasses. His dark blond hair was ruffled by wind. He spoke to the camera while driving a black Lamborghini along a coastal road.
‘When I left grad school,’ said the man, who the graphics identified as Dean, ‘I never imagined in my wildest dreams that my life would look like this.’
The video cut to aerial drone shots of his car going up a curving, tree-lined driveway to stop outside a white colonial-style house with blue accents, a manicured garden and an art deco swimming pool. It cut back to Dean in his leather fighter-pilot jacket getting out of his car and walking up to the porch. A woman with long pale-blonde hair embraced him. She was holding a photogenic toddler in a knitted sweater. It was as if they were all taken straight from central casting.
The video for Joe was the same except at the end of his car trip he stepped onto a yacht and gave instructions to a captain. The last shot was the camera pulling back, showing Joe with his arm around his cover-girl wife, who was dressed in a white evening gown that covered only one shoulder and enhanced her ebony complexion. The shot dissolved as they sailed off into the night.
The only video that was different was also the only one showing a woman. When she climbed out of her silver Mercedes convertible, outside an English manor house, she was embraced by an older man with salt-and-pepper hair and two young children holding on to the lead of a playful beagle.
‘She must have used a surrogate to have those kids,’ Elizabeth whispered to me. As the only women in our induction group we’d gravitated to each other. ‘My sister’s best friend worked here and she had to hide her pregnancy until she was in her sixth month. When she came back from maternity leave, she had no clients left. She said that getting pregnant killed her career.’
I had no intention of having kids for years, probably not until I was well into my thirties, but I still felt uncomfortable at the thought that I’d have to hide my baby bump until I was in my final trimester. It wasn’t enough to put me off the firm. I figured that I’d cross that bridge if I came to it.
Our first week at the firm was nothing short of full-blown seduction. The generous gifts. The deferential treatment. The endless little perks. We embraced it all with the unbridled enthusiasm of the young and ambitious. And why not? For me, it was a hell of an improvement on eating doggy bags of leftovers from Rob Roy.
By 12.30 p.m., on the dot, we’d all be salivating in anticipation of our 1 p.m. gourmet lunch. Sous-vide wagyu beef served with potato fondant and chargrilled asparagus, or Atlantic salmon with a thyme infusion paired with parsnip mash, or whatever other culinary delight the executive chef had cooked up for the day. Each meal was matched with Californian vintage wines.
On the last day, we were each given bound copies of The Winning Way with instructions to memorise key passages.
‘At the firm, we quote The Winning Way with the same reverence that my grandmother used to quote scripture,’ Janet explained. ‘Think of it as your road map to success.’
It was a 100-page book that detailed the firm’s history and philosophy of creating value going back to the thirties. Whenever anyone at the firm used the term ‘value’ they really meant ‘money’. The terms were used interchangeably, but it was considered crass to talk just in terms of money. We were supposed to pretend that we were delivering a service to the community beyond making Stanhope and its clients exceedingly rich.
The book had lines such as: ‘Our people are exceptional because, to be the best in the business, you need the best people in the business, solving the toughest problems in the business.’
It took ten pages to spell out the firm’s founding vision, complete with black-and-white photographs of the original Mr Stanhope and his sons, who were treated like demigods at the firm. Their portraits hung in every one of the firm’s forty offices across the country and twenty-one offices around the world.
‘For every two of you who will make it, one of you will fall short,’ Janet told us in the final session. She didn’t seem to care that she was completely contradicting her assurances on the first day, when she said that we’d all won the lottery. It turned out that only some of us got to take home the prize.
‘Thirty per cent of all our graduates leave in the first year because they aren’t up to scratch,’ she said. ‘If you want to stay then you’re going to have to work harder than you’ve ever worked before.’
By the time we walked out of the training room fully ‘inducted’, we were like trained dogs. I thought of the eagerness with which we’d anticipated the gourmet lunches. We had been conditioned to do whatever the firm needed in return for a reward.
In the blind, cult-like reverence that followed the induction, each and every one of us would have taken a bullet for the firm. If truth be told, I think that most of us would have killed for Stanhope.
Warm air wafted out of the ceiling vent in a relentless stream of heat. At first they welcomed it because it took the edge off the cold. As time went on, in the tight confines of the escape room, the heat became intolerable.
Sweat trickled down Sylvie’s neck and between her breasts. Her legs itched under her nylon hose. It became so bad that she slid off her shoes and unrolled her stockings. They were stuck to her thighs with sweat. She tugged at her stockings to get them off, her nails tearing through the nylon fabric until her legs were stripped bare and the sheer nylon was shredded beyond recognition.
‘There must be a way to turn the heating off.’ Sylvie fanned her hand in front of her face to cool herself down. Her hair was damp and limp, her makeup was melting. She was far from her usual impeccable appearance. For the first time since they’d stepped inside, she was grateful for the darkness. It shielded her from their prying eyes.
‘We tried,’ said Vincent. ‘It won’t turn off. The screw heads on the control panel aren’t standard, so we can’t even get at the wires.’
‘It’s unbearable. I’m not sure how much more I can take.’
‘Well then let’s find the rest of the clues so we can get out of here before the hour is up,’ said Vincent. ‘The quicker we solve this puzzle, the faster we get home.’
‘I can’t believe they brought us to such a dump,’ complained Jules. ‘Everything is malfunctioning. No lights. The heater is set too high. We’re stuck on God knows what floor. And there aren’t even any more clues to solve! How do they expect us to get out?’ He tried to sound funny rather than hysterical. He didn’t want the others to know how anxious he felt in the dark.
‘I’m sure there are more clues,’ said Vincent. ‘We need to try harder. If we work together then we’ll figure it out.’
He turned on his cellphone flashlight and ran the narrow beam across the floor of the elevator, looking for more crumpled up pieces of paper or anything else that might provide a clue. All he could see were Sylvie’s shoes, neatly arranged next to each other by the wall.
Sweat poured down his face. He mopped it up with his handkerchief. The heat really was unbearable. Vincent removed his jacket and hung it next to Jules’s jacket on the chrome handrail on the back wall. He loosened his tie and opened his shirt collar.
‘This isn’t like any other escape room that I’ve done,’ observed Sam. ‘This is hardcore. There’s no staff. No instructions. No obvious clues. It’s hot, dark, and we’re half way up a skyscraper in a real elevator.’
Sylvie pushed wisps of hair away from her face and straightened her jacket, which she refused to remove despite the heat. If this really was an exercise to determine who in their team might be laid off, she would be damned if she looked like a mess when they finally got out. The men could get away with wearing loose ties and open shirt collars, but if the elevator doors opened and her shirt was unbuttoned, or her hair was a mess, then people would assume she’d had a meltdown. That she hadn’t been able to handle the pressure.
With that thought, she decided to slip her feet back into her high heels. It would hurt like hell to stand in them for so long, but she absolutely refused to look like a barefoot hippie in front of her superiors. It was bad enough that she wasn’t wearing stockings. Putting on her shoes, Sylvie lost her balance and fell against Jules. He grabbed her with pretend gallantry so that she wouldn’t fall. His touch was like acid. She flinched and pushed him away with more force than intended. She could feel his surprise at the violence of her reaction.
Sylvie instinctively stepped further back to get away from him until her back hit the handrail hard enough that she winced. ‘Ouch.’ A bruise would form later, but she didn’t mind. Even a bad bruise was better than Jules’s touch.
The mere thought of being in physical contact with Jules made her want to retch. It was bad enough that over the past eight months she had to see Jules, work with him, talk to him, as if nothing had happened. Touching him was more than she could handle.
She moved as far away from Jules as she could manage in the tight space of the elevator, but it was pointless. Regardless of where she stood, she would always be within touching distance. It was tiny. They were so close that she could hear the others breathing. Her nostrils filled with the earthy scent of their perspiring bodies.
Sylvie slid along the handrail to get further away, accidentally knocking off a jacket that had been folded over the rail. It fell on the marble floor with a metallic clang.
‘What the hell was that?’ Vincent asked.