PE Recruiting as a 2nd Year Analyst

If you didn't participate in the cycle your first year, you're probably better positioned if not only because (a) you can actually point to a ranking (ideally top-bucket or top of 2nd bucket) and (b) you have more experience, deals to talk about and are more mature and polished in general (hopefully).

Also depends if you're staying a 3rd year - if you are, you can just do the cycle and recruit with the first years. If you want to leave by the end of your second year, then it's much more ad-hoc (and in my opinion a bit more difficult) since there's just not that many slots available mid-cycle at the upper MM / bulge bracket firms)

I recruited in my second year for associate positions starting after the end of my third year. Generally headhunters and interviewers seemed to like that I had more deal experience, more meaningful roles on my deals, and had seen deals start-to-finish.

Timeline is exactly the same as for a first year (you are in the same pool as them, after all) - reached out to headhunters in the fall, interviews started in January.

You recruit on the exact same timeline as if you were a first-year. There was a fairly recent thread here talking about this where I was surprised to see people speaking strongly about some kind of disadvantage you have as a second-year. Their logic was that interviewers frowned on that and thought the candidate either struck out as a first-year or hadn't made up their mind what they wanted to do.

My anecdotal experience is that the analysts who knew they wanted to go to the buy-side but really wanted to develop their skill-set and therefore slowed things down by a year placed just as or even more strongly than the kids who followed the traditional timeline at the 8-month mark. This may be a function of the fact that both the group I interned in and the one I went to after school were among the top five that people on this forum obsess over, so maybe the strength of the candidate was just high enough to allow that.

I don't think there's a negative to it as long as you can honestly say you didn't recruit as a first-year. If the answer is "I wanted to hone my skill-set, develop a more well-rounded perspective of my focal industry, and establish myself as a professional", you will be fine.

Very helpful - thanks for the posts

Is it possible to recruit 2nd year then start after the 2nd year? Or is the cycle the same as recruiting during first year where you have to finish 3rd year in order to start as associate? Or is this pretty much firm-dependent?

Bump