Stay at BB (keep looking for opportunities) or go to no-name PE

I love how iggs99988 mapped out a number of heuristics for you. They are really sound.

Since that's the tack I normally take and I feel it's well-covered here, I'll go straight to some practical advice.

Here I actually wouldn't take the job. You're not at a bad bank with truly limited prospects -- picture a MM in a regional city with very few buy-side options. You're also not facing the same cycle that existed 10 years ago where if you got the associate promote it was a death knell for your PE recruiting potential.

Let me encourage you as someone on the other side of the table and reassure you how many off-cycle, 'as-needed' hiring processes exist. There's an entire universe of competent, respected firms that have something unplanned happen (someone gets poached by a competitor, relocates for a spouse's career, has a familial problem and goes on leave or leaves altogether, announces business school attendance very unexpectedly, etc.) and start a process for an immediate start or three months out.

That is separate from the universe of formal, on-cycle hiring that the major firms do. Almost all of the guys that use Oxbridge, Amity, Henkel, etc. tend to reserve one or two slots in their class for attractive second-year analysts. It makes sense, given that they now have first-year analysts recruiting 30 weeks after graduation for a job starting 18 months later.

The perils of accepting a busch-league buy-side job are numerous. It happened to one of my very best friends in the world. I want to be really anonymous about describing him because of how close we are. The most I'll say is that he really got beat up by a toxic culture (in firms that small, everything is often driven by one single personality; if it's a good guy, you're in luck ... if not, tough), their dealflow was minimal to non-existent, and he ended up with effectively wasted space on his resume.

You're correct to question whether it limits your future interviewing prospects. The harsh reality is that it will. Yes, you can be really coherent and articulate about why you wanted to step into a lower-middle-market role, and sure, said with conviction and charisma it probably goes over well enough, but you're way better off spending the next year scouting for a better platform to join.

This is a brute force task. Hopefully your group has a shared folder with all recruiting info that you can look at to see where your alumni have placed. That, plus LinkedIn, plus manual searches across the team page of every single fund you can find should net you several dozen names of people who worked at your bank and/or group who are currently in PE.

Once you have critical mass (I would safely define this as 50-100), start running a process. You need to do this in the batch method. Reach out to all of them at the same time with a tight email that has a simple ask: coffee or a call where you can absorb their insights. Schedule everyone who replies. Every time you have a call or meeting, log it and note that you need to follow up in two months.

Once you've had (ideally) three healthy touchpoints with someone, you will be able to read the pulse of the dynamic to know whether it's safe in that third meeting to ask "I have really appreciated everything you've shared so much. It's shaped how I think about my career prospects, and after some reflection, I'd love to know if I could speak with someone at your firm about interviewing to join the team?"

Bonus points if in your prior conversations you learned the names of other people, specific deals they've worked on or teams that are siloed with a specific focus ... any kind of specific you can insert into that ask to make it more targeted.

You can do all of this yourself with a simple Excel or Google file, and the beauty of it is that you can run it simultaneously to a headhunter process for those off-cycle or late-cycle roles that do exist.

To succeed in those, by the way, you need to look like a mature guy who either (a) had a real reason for not participating in recruiting the first time or (b) just didn't talk to that headhunter in the on-cycle. The point is that you can't look like damaged goods. No headhunter will show you to someone who said no to you once before. So, cross any recruiting firm off your list that you struck out with already and focus only on new ones.

Then all the conventional advice applies. Make sure you have a distinct interest (e.g. you need to be articulate enough to go "one of my upper-level electives in my politics minor was international trade policy and I did a lengthy project on import tariffs, so I was really happy to be placed into the consumer group at my bank; I'm now interested in a consumer-focused role where ideally I would be exposed to cross-border M&A" .... even if half of that is concocted bullshit). Make sure your headhunter meeting goes better than a first date with a supermodel; get all your stuff dry-cleaned, maybe get a new tie, do whatever it is that'll make you feel great going in because you need them to see dollar signs when they meet you because you're a candidate that will get them paid.

Good luck.