It’s 2am, and recruiters are still cold calling with a “are you free? fund x wants to hop on the phone ASAP” and getting emails with “MODELING TEST TONIGHT”
who the fuck thinks this is a good way to recruit talent? absolute joke
update: got an MF offer on day 3, absolutely exhausted. i stand by my points above.
Mod Note: Here are some more PE recruiting related discussions:
Heard on-cycle kicked off last night
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| +22 | What do you think of PE Value Creation Careers in 2026? | 5 | 2h |
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| +12 | NY LMM PE Recruiting | 3 | 1d |
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It's wack, but lowkey I love this shit. It's kind of a rush/high pressure, and I prefer that over some long, drawn-out process
Absolute mess of a process. Have spent probably 90% of the time on zoom waiting rooms smh. Firms just blatantly trying to waste our time at this point
For what it’s worth they would have just wasted your time putting you in some office / conference room if things were in person this year
Screw PE, imagine taking a pay cut for the same hours just to be back on the bottom of the totem pole. All that “investing” isn’t what you’re doing as a junior. Just another 2 years of crap. Rather go corporate.
ngmi
No, you’re not ngmi clown
Doesn't matter, offers for APO, BX, KKR, WP and others have already been given out..
Thanks Intern in IB - CB
I have an interview with one of these in a half hour, just because they had a round of interviews doesn’t mean they’re done recruiting. Do people think these firms fill their entire class from the first 10 people they talk to? It keeps going with more and more rounds until the class is filled up.
Some of that does sound pretty crazy but honestly that's the job market. People are not here to kiss your ass. Have not received 2 a.m calls but in the regular job market, plenty of stuff like, "Hey can you come in for an interview tomorrow at 10 a.m."
I sometimes wonder if PE recruitment is really as crazy as people say it is on WSO or whether they are encountoring a real job market process for the first time in their life?
Note on campus recruitment is not real life as far as how recruitment goes...so some of this may be a shock to those that have never done it.
LOL you do realize that getting a call at 2am asking to interview at 3am (and pull an all-nighter interviewing) is a LOT different than being told to come in at 10am the next morning right?
On cycle recruiting is one of few accurate things on WSO. It is a shit show for both the candidates and firms. I work at one of the MFs and we literally had people running around interviewing all night with limited sleep.
If they are interviewing people at midnight, that's a big red flag for culture and work life balance.
Imagine trying to interview a top quant or software engineer at 2am. They would tell you to phuck off and basically get the firm blackballed on levels/blind/glassdoor. Goodbye engineering talent going forward.
Finance is full of huge cucks to put up with this.
I think y'all are missing the point. The firm is trying to interview the "top" candidates before they take an offer elsewhere. Having been on the other side a few years now, I see the rationale. Good candidates go fast.
Everyone gets the rationale—you only get the hardos who are willing to put up with that bullshit and make a decision on little information/ without talking to other firms. It’s the exact same rationale for reaching out to banking candidates as sophomores in college. Anecdotally, I don’t think it actually gets better candidates from looking at where my friends ended up and the dipshits I know at megafunds, but hey maybe you are right.
As a dipshit going to a MF, this is pretty true. Id consider myself a grinder / bit of a hardo, which is why im in this industry in the first place and got locked into it due to sophomore year recruiting, but my really intelligent friends from college went to academia/quant/startups. You dont gotta be smart to do pe/consulting/swe at the entry level tbh, but that’s good for people like me lol
Why bother? PE is dead anyways, returns are becoming lower, PEs negotiate about some decimal places to reach hurdle rate, and even MF are cutting costs which were considered peanuts back then.. it ain't the 80s guys, doesn't bode well for the future
It's a broken system. At a UMM fund that filled ~50% of its incoming class - we don't do exploding offers or 2 AM interviews but the process could have been managed so much more effectively. There are still a few hundred kids who haven't met with CPI yet so we aren't in any rush to fill our class at the moment. Based on what I've heard from friends at other UMM funds, a lot of them are also holding a significant portion of their classes vacant so I wouldn't lose hope.
I personally know of kids who went off market with offers at MFs on Day 1 who are ridiculously awful analysts. Many of these firms are cutting modeling tests / skimping on interviews and/or hiring based on pedigree and I can tell you many of them will be in for a rude awakening pretty soon.
Anyone else feel like they've been getting dinged from interviews for no apparent reason? I totally get how competitive these roles are, but I'm struggling to make sense of this process. I've even had a few where the interviewers literally said "great job on the technicals" or "I think you'd be a great fit here" and then get dinged for the following round. Kinda discouraging given the lack of feedback we get
That’s because, though nobody will admit it, the recruiting process is a circle jerk of “top candidates” who aren’t actually top candidates at all.
Ever notice how the “top candidates” for IB on paper or through interviews often aren’t top bucket? It’s almost like, intangibles like grit, work ethic, and EQ matter (shocker, I know). You can’t test for that well in an interview process, let alone a 48h one. Thus was created the illusion of “top candidates” since no firm is willing to admit that hiring for PE is a total fucking crapshoot.