On-Cycle PE Recruiting without deal experience

I am an incoming FT analyst at a BB. I want to do on-cycle PE recruiting, but last summer my group had some pretty slow deal flow. I only worked on pitches (no modeling), some menial tasks, and a summer project. I'm sure there are many other people in my position and I'm curious how important having deal experience is given that the timeline for on-cycle recruiting continuously moves up. I've read that talking about deal experience takes up the bulk of the interview, but not sure how that will work given the timeline. From other people's experiences, am I in a position where I should wait to build up my resume before entering recruitment or are most potential candidates at a pretty level playing field.

7 Comments
 

Not at all important. No intern does fulsome modeling. If you try to tell someone about your "deal experience" from an 8 week internship they will laugh at you. Not that people don't work on deals, but moving logos and doing the benchmarking excel is not the same as the senior analyst running the model and making 30 decks

You are fine

 
Most Helpful

If you worked on something that closed and did significant work on it, sure. But just putting something on there for the sake of having it is inviting a lot of questions you probably don't have the answer to, and it's not a great response to say "oh, the FT did the model but I helped out a lot with call notes, the WGL and some PPT slides".

People know you are right out of college and they are not expecting deal experience. But if you say you have some, you need to be prepared to talk in depth which most interns are not.

 

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