LO / MM HF Recruiting out of MBA

I started my career at McKinsey and left after 4 years (promoted to EM right before I left) to a UMM PE as an associate. I’ve now been at the fund for 6 months.

Looking to do an MBA at HSW for a mix of personal and professional reasons. My longterm goal has always been to move into a public markets role, either LO or a MM HF. To that end, trying to get some perspective on whether buy side would massively value the 2 years of PE or if I could effectively recruit after 1 year. Talk track would be, performed really well at McKinsey, did 1 year at PE prior to MBA to get some buy side experience, with the expected goal of getting into public markets.

Biggest questions are:

  1. How would recruiters think about 1 year in PE?
  2. With this background, how likely am I to land in one of the major MM HFs?
  3. Anything else I can do to make myself more competitive for this process? (e.g., CFA, in semester internships, etc.)
  4. Any blowback during MBA recruiting due to poor feedback from the fund, given I’m not staying the expected 2 years?
  5. Anything else I should be thinking about???


    Appreciate the insight! Quite a niche situation so couldn’t find anything directly relevant.
4 Comments
 
Most Helpful

Hi - I'm at an m7 looking to do LO/HF recruiting post graduation (I didn't do consulting but also am from a somewhat career switch)

  1.  It definitely would not be a detriment by any means, but at the end of the day interviewers really only care about your stock pitch and if your investing philosophy fits the firm.
  2. HFs ( at least 1st sem) are kind of a crapshoot. A lot of them are fill as they go and don't run a formal recruiting process, so it's really dependent on their needs for the summer/year. LO shops like Fidelity and T.Rowe are much more structured in the sense of how many seats there are, OCR, etc.  Like I said before, once you get to the interview round, it doesn't matter what your background is; it's all about how well you can pitch.
  3. CFA looks good but Idk if worth the time/effort. FWIW i don't have a CFA but am getting looks from multiple funds right now for interviews. In semester internships are really helpful both as a talking point and from direct experience (and serve as a way of idea generation for pitches) BUT it is definitely a time drain. You'll really have to cut down on social activities relative to your peers if you want to take on an in semester and gain meaningful experience out of it.
  4. this i unfortunately wouldn't know
  5. Harvard and Wharton are likely the best bets; I see a lot of funds that hire a bunch of HBS grads. Also if you do decide to do MBA, make sure to join at least one stock pitch competition. Those have on-site recruiting and really help with understanding the ins and outs of effectively researching and pitching a stock to PMs. If there is one thing I will say, your experience/networking/school gets you in the door (which shouldn't be too hard if you're gonna go to a HSW), but after that you're on equal footing with everybody else for the pitching portion of the interview and that's really up to your control. 
 

4. No one in publics is going to talk to your old PE fund unless they happen to be close friends with someone there. PE and public markets folks don't tend to be that professionally close. 

5. Stanford places well in LO. Capital always takes a few Stanford people. Columbia is possibly the best given the value investing program and opportunity to do an in-semester internship while being in NYC. HBS and Wharton are also key feeders to LO.

 

Can one get into a LO straight out of a 2 yr IB program? What’s the difference between the ER analyst positions say at a Wellington or at a T Rowe? Those all require years of experience…

 

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