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by Brian DeChesare | 194 Comments

How to Get a Private Equity Job in 2,550 Words

“How can we fight this fight with the brightest and best educated rushing off and working night and day to do private equity deals and derivatives trading?”

-Ben Stein, Looking for the Will Beyond the Battlefield

Derivatives trading… maybe not so much anymore. But PE continues to be a big draw, pulling in bankers like bees to honey – despite the fact that most firms are barely doing any deals lately.

Yes, we’re at that stage of the year when newly minted Analysts (and some Associates…) are thinking about what they’ll do next, only months after starting out in investment banking.

But no one seems to know much about the recruiting process, how it works, who’s involved, what you need to do, and how long it takes.

Who – Firms & People Involved

I normally avoid discussing specific firms (no, I still won’t “rank” banks, sorry), but we’ll break that rule here.

Private Equity Firms

I divide PE firms into “The Big Guys” – Blackstone, KKR, TPG, and anyone else focused on the largest deals – and “Everyone Else” – middle-market and smaller firms that do everything from tiny $20MM deals to acquisitions up to the hundreds of millions or low billions.

Even with a terrible market, each firm recruits at least a few new hires each year (places with only 5-10 “investment professionals” might just hire 1 person).

Headhunters

Almost every PE firm uses headhunters to recruit candidates.

These aren’t banks where you have tens of thousands of employees and room for HR – these places are lean and efficient, and they view recruiting as something that can be outsourced (at least the “getting resumes” part of recruiting).

So if you don’t have a wide PE network, you need to contact these headhunters to have a...