MBA / Lateral Recruitment | Interview Guidance

Hey All - 

I'm currently an associate at an UMM PE shop in my last few months on the gig ahead of going to get my MBA. I'm planning to re-recruit for buyout shops for my post-grad role. With this in mind, was wondering if any individuals out there could speak to the types of deal-specific (or technical) interview questions that you received during MBA recruitment? I imagine it's not too dissimilar from interviews for lateral roles so that might be a helpful data point as well. 

Mostly asking to make sure I'm collecting / rehearsing all the information on my portfolio companies / deals that I can before I lose access to a lot of this information. 

Questions that I have on my mind - 

  • How high level vs detailed can these get?
  • How can I adequately prepare? If you found that a one pager / tear sheet for each deal helped you personally, curious what you included on that to feel like you were ready to go.. Mainly hoping to understand whether I need to go beyond classic growth / margin profile / capex intensity / etc. that are the headline numbers that you'd see on the teaser page of a CIM 
  • How well do I need to know the specific model implications of deals that I looked at (e.g., debt paydown, implied MOI, NWC profile)? 
  • I've heard you get asked a lot about process and have to prove that you know how to QB a deal. What does that actually look like beyond me saying "yes, I ran the model / QoE / lender workstream" 
  • For those that didn't close a deal (but got plenty of deal experience), did you find that to be a challenge? 

As context, I recruited for PE from a consulting role, so I might just not be as schooled on how to talk through actual financials and what the expectation is as those that came from the banking universe 

1 Comments
 

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