Non-target 2024 PE Full Time Recruiting: No leads
How the hell am I supposed to get a PE job when I’m invisible to recruiters?
I have no head hunters reach out to me, I have no PE firms recruiting on my campus, and I have no connections or alumni in the industry.
I desperately want to leave banking and pivot straight into PE from undergrad, but it seems impossible.
Whenever I reach out to recruiters or people on LinkedIn / email, they never respond.
I understand that I’m facing an uphill battle, but I feel like I wasn’t even invited to the race!
What can I do to help me land a PE gig ? I have 2 IB BB internships in NYC under my belt, and had a stellar performance review last year.
Despite my performance, I feel like I’m not even given the opportunity to compete against others.
I don’t know how else I can be put in the spotlight. I’d appreciate if someone could help me out or maybe calm my nerves.
I understand it’s a ruthless industry, but I just can’t find any opportunities or leads and it’s very depressing that I’ve worked my ass off my 4 years in college, Exec board of various student orgs, Founder and President of finance club, IB experience, athlete, scholar, and I’m not even given a chance to prove myself.
Head hunters generally aren't working on analyst roles (I know CarterPierce does occasionally if you like tech/west coast stuff), so you would need to target reaching out to firms who have them or go through OCR. Market right now is just brutal, nothing else to it really so frankly the odds of getting your way into an active process in general right now are much lower than usual. Odds of getting PE right out of undergrad unless you have some type of leverage is even tougher. You're better off trying to go through banking given your internships for now because if the slots aren't there for PE analysts they just aren't there and there's nothing to be done. By all means keep trying cold outreach over email/LinkedIn, but also recognize that most analyst roles for PE unless it's UMM/MF are going to be sourcing intensive, not execution so they're not going to care as much about your banking internships. Maybe try finding leads one of their portcos could acquire or interesting, unbacked companies in the same/adjacent sector you can highlight in the email. Try attaching a small 2-3 slide deck highlighting those leads, nicely formatted, talking what you think makes them interesting, etc. I know I would answer an email like that if I got one from an undergrad kid, and I regularly ignore emails from people just because of how busy work is + they don't include anything compelling/that stands out.
Recruiters don't do campus recruiting roles, even at Harvard the HHs are not reaching out for FT jobs lmao. PE jobs are through campus recruiting / directly though the firm, and most (like.. 90%+) of the spots are filled through internships either soph or junior year, and the rest are posted at target school Handshake sites. Assuming you want UMM/MF and not some tiny boutique place, you are probably looking at like... a dozen or two dozen total open FT spots in this slow market, and most of those are going to target school students or diversity. It's just not realistic to expect name brand FT PE interviews from a non target even if you have good internships.
Also intern performance review really doesn't matter as long as you have a return offer... it's great you think you were a good intern and you are probably a smart kid, but 8 weeks of work is not really a huge gold star, so don't walk around talking about your intern review like it's some big thing
PE analyst jobs are kind of rough because there is rarely a formal training program (outside of like, BX), you're doing a lot of admin work and not cool deal work/modeling, and at many places analysts end up behind the people who do 2 years of banking and come in at associate, simply because they don't get trained as well as they would have at a bank. I would take the FT IB offer, or if you really want out you can network directly with boutique PEs. But I would focus on being the best prepared candidate for oncycle rather than some tiny chance of a big time PE offer.
shoulda worked harder. Better luck next time
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