What Kinds of PE Roles Are Most Open/Welcoming of MBA applicants?

Let's pretend you had finance experience, but never did IB, or PE prior to MBA. You land at a top M7, HSW MBA and want to go into PE

What kinds of PE roles, firms, are most welcoming of MBA applicants? Obvious answer is LMM, but that's why I asked about roles, since I think plenty of people on this site are curious about this. 

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The ones where you have previous IB/C+PE or straight PE or top IB/C+CorpDev or just top IB/C experience. Probably 60-80% of formal post-MBA PE roles go to people w/ PE experience and the rest to people with top notch CorpDev / IB / C experience. 

Anything outside of those, you’re going to be relying on networking and someone giving you a shot as a non-trad hire. LMM is more accessible to this idea in general and maybe some lesser known MM funds in regional cities will also be.

Same story with VC (except you can lump in PM in tech and any startup operating experience) and GE - though you could again probably convince some lesser known shop to give you a chance. Ditto PrivDebt / Secondaries / GP Stakes / Distressed-to-Control etc. Private Capital Investing in general is not super accessible out of b-school for most people. Same goes for HFs

Probably the only buyside field with structured recruiting and little to no strict background reqs is probably Investment (Equities / FI) roles at Traditional / Long-Only AM shops. But there are so few seats that you may as well recruit for SS ER/CR too. 
 

 

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