When I was in my final year at university, a generation ago now, I’d have to wait in a long queue of other 20-year olds, hopeful and unsullied by the working world, eager to get our hands on a hot-off-the-press copy of that catalogue on graduate recruitment schemes, or the glossy new tome on the world’s finest law firms.
On benches outside, groups would gather, wax lyrical over the pay and promise on offer at, say, Deloitte, Clifford Chance and Bingham McCutchen (now I’m showing my age), our impression of the corporate world somehow undimmed by the trickle of stories on the developing subprime mortgage crisis that would, eventually, leave swathes of us in employment purgatory.
