Private equity firms are treating junior bankers like 'star athletes'
The firms are gunning for analysts, as entry-level investment bankers are known, who've just graduated from college and spent the past year or so developing their skills at large investment banks, reported The New York Times' William Alden and Sydney Ember.
This year's race to tap into young Wall Street talent reportedly kicked off last week after a San Francisco firm made a bunch of offers on Thursday. That's when things really heated up: major PE firms panicked, bumped their recruitment periods up by several weeks, and started bringing bankers in for interviews on Saturday and Sunday, the Times reported.
"It's as if these were star athletes," the Times quoted one PE recruiter as saying. "The irony is they are professionals six, seven months out of undergrad. It's hard to imagine you can tell if someone's a star or not."
Making the switch from investment banking to PE is not a bad idea for young bankers - for one thing, the firms tend to pay better (about double what they'd might make as an entry-level banker at Goldman Sachs, the Times reported).
Expect the offers to start rolling in soon.
Read the full story in The New York Times here >>