Ken Griffin’s Citadel companies just hired 350 interns—only 0.36% of over 115,000 young applicants made the cut

Financial holding giant Citadel is recruiting more entry-level talent for its internship than ever before. It’s a welcome opportunity in a dire market for Gen Z.

Up-and-coming professionals are vying for limited summer work, with some early-career opportunities growing more competitive than Ivy League colleges. Unlike other employers reeling back their entry-level hiring, financial holding company Citadel just welcomed its biggest internship class yet. 

But even as Ken Griffin’s companies expand their entry-level ranks, landing the summer gig has never been harder.

More than 350 interns across Citadel and the company’s sister firm, Citadel Securities, just kicked off their program this Monday. Citadel’s young hires are starting their summer gig with an offsite in Palm Beach, Florida, where Citadel Securities will end their stint for the season. It’s the largest intern cohort the business has ever had, spanning 90 colleges globally, but that didn’t mean fresh-faced professionals had an easier time landing a spot. 

This year’s competition hit a boiling point, with more than 115,900 applications flooding in for the limited spots, up 6.4% from the 2025 record. Only 0.36% of candidates wound up making the cut this year, marking another record for some of Gen Z’s most coveted internship spots. 

Inside Citadel’s internship: real business responsibilities with $4,300+ weekly salaries 

During the summer gig Citadel interns work on team projects that have a tangible effect on the business across pipelines including quantitative research, engineering, and investing. Nearly all of the recruits come from backgrounds in computer science, physics, and statistics, while around a tenth are economics and finance majors. And Citadel is looking to build the skills, knowledge-base, and network of its young talent over the two-and-a-half month internship; throughout the process they’ll be clued in with other company employees, paired with a mentor for career guidance, and meet weekly with their managers for one-on-one conversations.  

At the end of the program, the early-career talent will present their projects in hopes of securing a return offer. Citadel’s leadership predicted that a majority of interns will receive a full-time work opportunity after the program, as many have in years past. And they turn out to be more successful hires in the long-run; the company found that campus recruits are twice as likely to one day become a high-performer at the financial titan. 

During their 11-week-long stint, the interns won’t have to survive on ramen noodles and instant coffee while working at the financial giant. Interns at Citadel and Citadel Securities receive around $4,300 to $5,800 weekly in base salary, which is dependent on their job and professional experience. 

Additional perks include a signing bonus and a $15,000 housing stipend, or the choice to live in the corporate housing. Citadel is looking to attract the brightest quants and traders—and it’s willing to shell out to snap up the best young talent. 

“We’re going to continue to have an almost insatiable appetite for exceptional talent, and we’ll continue trying to identify as much of it as we can because we believe it’s a critical competitive advantage,” Fabian Figi, leader of recruiting at Citadel Securities, recently told Business Insider. “Once we identify that talent, we’ll move incredibly fast to secure it.”

Fortune reached out to Citadel for comment.

Bright spots in a dire hiring market for young talent 

Young professionals looking to launch their careers in office internships are watching the opportunities slip through their fingers. Even workplace leaders are being blunt about the issue; Hayden Brown, the CEO of freelance marketplace Upwork, acknowledged that there’s been a lot of “fear-mongering” about entry-level prospects in the AI era. And WeWork CEO John Santora admitted Gen Z’s hiring nightmare is real—and called out leaders to fix the dilemma. 

“There’s no question that the entry-level hire is under pressure,” WeWork CEO John Santora said onstage at Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit earlier this year. “It’s incumbent upon all of us to bring that talent in and to educate the talent and teach them to be the future growth of all our organizations.”

Internship postings on Handshake, a platform for early-career professionals, plummeted 16% earlier this year. In the tech sector alone, hiring for recent college graduates among the 15 largest businesses has dropped by over 50% since 2019, according to a 2025 report from VC firm SignalFire. Talent right out of school made up 15% of big tech hires before the pandemic; now, they account for just 7%.

And those vying for the few open positions are up against a tidal wave of competition. The internships listed on Handshake received nearly double the number of applicants during the 2024-2025 academic cycle than it did the year before, sharply increasing from 62 candidates per job up to 109. The applicant ratio has risen starkly within just a matter of years; internships during 2022-2023 only received an average of 43 applicants, two and a half times fewer than last year’s tally. 

Luckily for Gen Z, more companies are ramping up their early-career efforts to bring in more young talent. The CEO of IT firm Cognizant, Ravi Kumar  Singisetti (also known as Ravi Kumar S), said that he would create more opportunities for entry-level professionals, “hiring more school graduates than ever before.” And the leader of social media platform Reddit says that the business is actually ramping up its recruitment of Gen Z workers. Rather than let AI automate junior roles, billionaire Steve Huffman is hiring young digital natives precisely for their tech savvy.  

Tech giant IBM is also on the hunt for Gen Z workers. Earlier this year the $253 billion company revealed that it’s tripling its entry-level hiring and will even be onboarding for roles supposedly endangered by AI, including software developers. 

“The companies three to five years from now that are going to be the most successful are those companies that doubled down on entry-level hiring in this environment,” Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM’s chief human resources officer, said earlier this year.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com