Are PE interviews that hard?
Can you bullshit your way through PE associate interviews like in IB? Im not naturally that smart. Average at best. But have a good gpa in school thanks to grinding like hell and managed to join a top BB (again, through grinding when networking and memorizing technical guides- which is honestly ridiculously easy). Will this shit fly with PE? I’m planning to buy the WSO PE guide and grind on that a couple months before joining FT.
I’ve finessed my way through so far but usually fall apart with stuff like brain teasers / mental math.
Any thoughts or advice on this?
Also, forgot to ask.. but is the WSO guide my best bet for prepping?
Going to vary a lot. But for the most part you can grind prep as well and be successful. Commonly some technicals, paper lbo, model test all of which you can study and practice. Probably more mental math than brain teasers but sometimes some consulting style case interviews - but you actually can practice all of those. Eventually the pattern recognition will kick in and voila you will perform well.
The parts you can't study away are having real experience you can talk about and in some rare cases a firm will give an aptitude test. Vista being the most well known. Don't think you can prep for those but regardless, it's pretty rare.
Lastly - because it will also help in interview, you should let yourself have more confidence...what you're describing as "grinding" to "get by" is actually just you learning the content...and therefore becoming smart. I promise a lot of the people you think of as smart in reality also studied / had lots of reps just as much as you're describing in order to come across that way.
Their difficulty is overblown. Confidence is key.
Mental math is an integral part of the interview process. You need to know how to do a paper LBO and a more difficult ~90 min modeling test. These jobs are really difficult to get but doable as long as you study and get lucky.
I think it’s certainly difficult but not insurmountable bc firms are purposefully over hiring associates for a 2 year role so they need tons of bodies. Senior associate/vp and beyond truly gets more challenging given it’s a long term role firms will be highly discerning
There's a longer list of things you need to be prepared for than banking, so it is not hard on an absolute basis compared to interviews you will do later in your career but likely much harder than any type of interview you have had to date. I would describe it as a nice baby step to the way executives are evaluated as you can strongly check every functional box but still not get the job due to not having solved softer factors and vice versa. Bar is higher and there's no room to be "weak" in any one area the way we sometimes gave passes to interns / analysts in banking interviews.
Definitely not impossible but will likely be the most extensive screen among any path you are practically pursuing out of banking (corp dev/strat, VC, consulting, other bank, etc.). I would say the challenging part is not any individual interview, but consistently showing well across an entire team that is effectively looking for reasons to ding you given the sheer candidate pool (either because you fumble a technical, can't explain your deal well, mess up your modelling test, don't fit culturally, etc.). This is not too dissimilar from banking, although the expectation level for a sophomore in college is meaningfully below an Analyst 1.5/2.
Yes and no. Most PE interviews are fairly standard - you are generally asked the same flavor of technical questions, you do some sort of case study, are asked about deal experience, and asked common behavioral questions. These are all pretty easy to rehearse.
The hard part is the fact that you have 20+ equally qualified (on paper) candidates interviewing for the same role. At the end of the day, whether or not you get the offer is dependent on so many factors outside of your control, even if you ace the interview. Even top-notch candidates wiill often get rejected by 5+ firms before landing a role, the process is just so competitive.
I completely agree with this, especially at the post-MBA level. The hardest thing about PE recruiting isn't the interview itself--it's how obscenely qualified every person in every process is. You could absolutely nail every interview but the problem is so will 10 other people in the process. This is a really rude awakening for a lot of people recruiting for PE jobs (post-IBD, post-MBA, etc.) who have never been rejected by anyone before but the reality is that it's just that competitive. The key is just to roll with the punches and persevere.
In my experience the “hardest”, in the sense that you can’t necessarily just grind your way through, will be if they give you a CIM and ask for an investment recommendation.
You can definitely still prepare for these, and with reps you’ll start to recognize similar characteristics, but it’s a lot harder when you need to recognize it live and be creative on the fly rather than regurgitating memorized answers
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