Hey guys so I have a tricky situation here. Refreshing my resume with the deal experience I've gotten for PE recruiting, and there is this absolutely great and high profile deal that I was on where I advised a megafund on a multibillion dollar buyout bid. Except:
I took them through 3 bidding rounds over the course of 4 months, but we lost at the final round to just 1 other buyer. I was involved in everything, this was my life. But yeah, deal is dead.
The press widely covered the bid process. Big news outlets all talked about who the bidders were (incl. us), who made it to which round, the valuation, etc.
The target announced the auction process in the beginning, so their being up for sale was clearly known.
BUT my client themselves never issued announcements in regards to the deal, and never told anyone who their advisors were (us). However, it seems like literally everyone from other banks and PE shops knew it was us, as we handled a whole host of similar transactions for them in the past.
Given the above, is it safe to put the following line on my resume?
Advisory of [Buyer Name]'s [$100B] buyout bid for [Target Name]
Or is it better to just leave names out?
This is pretty straightforward Did your client publicly disclose that they were bidding on target? YES or NO Did your client publicly disclose that they had hired your bank as its adviser? YES or NO
Unless the answer to both these question is a yes, you CANNOT put the names on your resume. It blows my mind that we see this question asked here so often despite all the compliance training that's given these days. Do IBD analysts not have common sense anymore????
In any event, what really matters if the actual deal experience (ie. what you did and learned while working on a transaction), not the headline.
I think if you wanted to include names, @mtnmmnn has a fairly good decision-map laid out. However, from an ethical perspective, you could put buy-side advisor on bid for $XXXB take-private transaction. Now in the details, you would want to reference it was not a successful bid, to ensure adequate transparency and avoid misleading. In addition, I would avoid providing too many specifics in regards to the Company. People can work backwards, judging by your group's industry focus and recent M&A transactions to determine what the Company was, if they so please.
There is another component as well. If you have enough deal experience, why waste valuable resume space on an unsuccessful deal. If the previous deals in the past were with much smaller deals/less prestigious PE Funds, this could be helpful to show breadth of experience in terms of size.
In the past, when I applied to PE funds, I changed my resume for every fund I applied to, incorporating the knowledge I had of the PE fund focus on industry, geography, size range, situation/transaction structure, as well as what I knew the Associate role to be at the PE fund. However, I worked for a lean, generalist EB where I had broad experience across the aforementioned criteria, and had worked on multiple deals.
Best of luck!
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