Rolling recruitment
Fit & BehaviouralAssessing applications as they arrive and filling places continuously, rather than allocating them all at the closing date.
Also written: rolling basis, rolling applications
Rolling recruitment means a firm reviews each application when it lands and makes offers throughout the window. Places are consumed as the window runs, so the population a late applicant competes against is not the same as the population an early one faced. What changes is not the standard, it is the number of seats still available to meet it.
This is the dominant model for London summer internships, where applications frequently open a year ahead of the internship itself. It is much less common in continental Europe, where many firms recruit against a need rather than an annual class.
The consequence runs against most candidates' instincts. The natural approach is to keep improving an application until it is as strong as possible, then submit it. Under rolling review that optimisation is competing against a shrinking pool, and the marginal improvement rarely compensates for the seats lost while making it.
The advertised closing date is the misleading part. It tells you when applications stop being accepted, not when they stop being useful, and by that point a large share of the class is frequently already filled.
Worked example
Two candidates apply to the same London programme. One submits a good application in the week it opens, the other submits a stronger one four months later.
The first is assessed against a full complement of places. The second is assessed against whatever remains, competing for a materially smaller number of seats with a marginally better application.
The standard did not move. The number of places did.