How to talk about non-public deals in PE interviews?

As soon as you get into any sort of detail, it’ll become obvious which company you’re talking about.

In a PE interview, how does a candidate demonstrate knowledge of a business and MnA process without divulging MNPI?

 

Curious about this as well.

If a person is working at a bank on sell side in Power & Utilities, selling a small power plant facility or something, would they be allowed to vaguely describe that in an interview? Or is that MNPI / should that be avoided?

 

You can still describe what the company does at a high level and there are so many companies out there that it would be fairly difficult for them to figure out what company you are talking about unless you are working on a very high profile company. Just keep everything high level about the business and what is more important is describing what your roles and responsibilities were throughout the process. Your interviewer doesn't care about the company but does care about your involvement on the deal and what learning opportunities you had.

 

OP here, I’m sort of surprised by this advice. Thought interviewers might expect me to be prepared for a deep dive on the company. I feel like if you stay high level, you run the risk of not demonstrating your full understanding of the business and how it’s valued. There are plenty of businesses out there that have a unique footprint/portfolio of products and what they really are can feasibly be sussed out through a 5 minute description of what it does—let alone a 20 minute back and forth. Maybe I’m just off the mark on what PE interviews are really like, though.

(On mobile, formatting is a little weird, apologies)

 

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