'Friends end up blocking you': Northwestern Mutual sold college grads a dream job. They left in ruin and debt

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/24/northwestern-mutual-insurance-jobs-hiring

‘Friends end up blocking you’: Northwestern Mutual sold college grads a dream job. They left in ruin and debt
Expecting to be financial advisers at the Fortune 500 firm, some hires say they were ‘gaslit’ into peddling ‘terrible’ life insurance to all their contacts
Niamh Rowe
Mon 24 Nov 2025 07.00 EST

Northwestern Mutual likes to think of itself as a storied American institution offering specialized financial advice. The 168-year-old financial giant, ranked 109 on the Fortune 500, and regularly anointed one of the World’s Most Admired Companies by the magazine, describes its financial advisers as “expert listeners” or a “trusted partner who helps you continue to reach goal after goal”.

It also tops Forbes’s list of Best Employers for New Grads, a title that makes it attractive to hundreds of college students desperate for an internship that could launch them into a career in financial services. Each year they file into Northwestern’s glassy offices across the country for a three-month internship that they hope could change their lives. There, they are slotted in beside thousands of full-time “financial representatives”, many of them recent graduates themselves.

In the corridors of US colleges and business schools, Northwestern recruiters push the dream of a blue chip career in finance. Posters appear with slogans like: The Career You Want at a Company You’ll Love. Recruiters in polo shirts sit at tables asking students if they would like to be financial advisers. Job ads for these positions, posted on sites like LinkedIn, describe “performance-based pay” and “uncapped earnings for the entrepreneurial”, phrases that shimmer with vague promises of potential wealth.

When Jeremy Biar, a senior at Texas A&M University, spotted one of these booths, one with a big laminated placard that read Northwestern Mutual, he was relieved. He had yet to organise a summer internship and was glad when the recruiters began courting him.

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