MM PE Final Round Associate Interview Conversion Rates (Off-Cycle)

Lurker here... agree that MM PE off-cycle recruiting insight is a bit lacking on this forum. I have some downtime in between jobs and can speak to this anecdotally having just recently gone through the process and accepted an offer myself.

Disclaimer: I'm an ASO to ASO lateral from another MM PE fund, however: (a) from personal experience, I don't think the process is much different for IB to PE when it comes to off-cycle recruiting, and (b) when it comes to the MM, each fund is unique (to an extent) and will have a different recruiting philosophy and "funnel" (i.e., target number of phone calls, case studies, on-sites, etc.). Also for what it's worth, my future firm's latest fund size is ~$500M (not sure how large the fund you interviewed with is).

The above said, I think my situation may have been somewhat unique, but the Partner who gave me my offer told me explicitly that they'd had ~20 on-sites (i.e., Superdays) over the course of the previous 3-4 months, and ~100+ candidates total. These numbers were a bit higher than I would've expected (maybe others have had similar experiences), as my firm was only looking to hire a single Associate. I suspect they had trouble attracting high quality candidates given that their current office location is a suburb outside of a Tier 1 market (~50-60 minutes via subway or car, not NYC), as opposed to being more centrally-located / downtown. Further, this was for an experienced PE hire (YMMV).

Process-wise, it sounded like they'd gone out and recruited candidates in several "batches" (unclear how many there were), filtering with phone calls to whittle down candidates to bring in for final on-site interviews. That said, if my new firm had found somebody earlier on, then they obviously would've interviewed far fewer candidates than they did, but I think some multiple of a ~10:2 ratio of total candidates to on-sites would generally hold (e.g., 20 total candidates, 4 on-sites, 1 offer). I'd suspect this is a fairly common "funnel" for firms, though would be curious to hear what others say.

While not directly involved with ASO recruiting myself (handled at Sr. ASO and Principal / VP level), I can also share that my current fund (which is a similar size as my new fund) seems to take a similar approach to recruiting. In our current process (which is for the traditional IB to PE candidate), we're conducting ~20 interviews and will likely have ~3-4 candidates on-site for Superdays to fill a single seat.