Energy hiring

I haven't been following the hiring market closely this year, but last year there was a pretty significant amount of hiring during the slide in energy. Go look through the firm bios on their website or snoop linked-in, but a lot of non BB IB shops took 1-2 junior staff last year (don't know much about the BBs, can someone else comment). There was pretty strong recruiting from the buy-side as well, a lot of smaller energy focused PE shops dipped into the market and added at the MD/D and A/AS level. I would imagine that it's a pretty tepid market right now since we're just starting to see energy firms max out their RBL facilities for cash flow reasons (obviously), along with the bi-annual borrowing base recalculations which are also chopping off a lot of firms liquidity. The A&D/restructuring market will likely pickup in the 2nd half of this year and there may be some scattered hiring because of that, but I think a lot of firms were betting that defaults would start rolling in 4-6 months ago and they're still bridging two phases of the cycle. As far as Interns go, I think you're pretty insulated from all this. Firms know they need to keep a pipeline of candidates and that there's fairly predictable turnover at the junior levels. Since you're so cheap they probably won't cut intern count much unless they're struggling for deal flow and have no reason to add an intern at all (which I don't think is the case, I cover a lot of Texas relationships for my firm as far as deal sourcing goes and there's plenty of deal flow going on down here in the MM/LMM).