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Ace Your Private Equity Interview: Tips and Strategies for Success
OfficeHours Coach
March 08, 2025
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Depending on how your first interview goes, you may be selected to advance to later rounds or eliminated from the process entirely. If it’s the latter, then the door to that job is (potentially) closed forever.
Given that firms often pack interviews into a short time period, you may have the opportunity to interview with only a handful of firms at most.
Like it or not, the truth is that the years of preparation to get into private equity – from getting the best grades in your undergraduate studies and padding your resume with extracurriculars, to landing that prestigious banking job – all come down to these crucial interviews. It is incumbent on you to do the right preparation ahead of time to maximize your chance of success.
Of course, there are opportunities to break into private equity through off-cycle or non-traditional paths, but statistically speaking your best odds to land one of these highly desired roles is to do so via on-cycle recruiting.
How To Prepare
As table stakes, you’ll want to ensure that you’re rock solid with your technicals. This covers the full gamut from basic accounting (walk me through how $10 of depreciation impacts the three financial statements) to more advanced valuation and leveraged buyout questions.
Unlike in your banking interviews, interviewers in private equity will probe to see how much you understand beyond what online guides are telling you to regurgitate.
How do you react to a curveball question you haven’t seen before?
Do you really understand how the 3 financial statements are linked, or did you just memorize the answer to the usual questions?
To maximize your chances for success, make sure you are practicing your mastery of technical concepts. This means understanding the concepts and their applications rather than memorization of long question lists.
Practice your Excel modeling and paper LBO work until it becomes second nature.
Realize that it is much more difficult to do this sort of work in a high-pressure environment where a senior private equity professional is watching your work product, or you have a short deadline to turn-in a deliverable.
That said, you should assume all of your peers will also be locked-in on their technical preparation. Correctly handling most or all of your technical questions will never get you the job, but making serious missteps here will have you eliminated very quickly.
The first area where you can really set yourself apart is having a compelling vision and narrative for why you want to work in private equity.
Hint: The answer should not be “because it’s the next step in the prestigious career ladder of Ivy League school + investment banking”. This does NOT qualify as a compelling reason.
I’ve conducted countless Megafund private equity Associate interviews, and it was always easy for me to identify candidates who were recruiting by simply “going through the motions” vs. those who took the time to thoroughly prepare.
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Full disclosure: You will be best served to come up with a unique + genuine reason on “Why PE?” and “Why [this firm]?” before you begin your interviews.
To craft this narrative, you should ask yourself why you want to do private equity in the first place. At its core, private equity is a fundamentally different job than the investment banking role (from which you are most likely exiting).
Do you have a genuine interest in being an owner of a business rather than an advisor to businesses? If so, why?
It could be due to personal experience (you worked for or started an operating business when you were younger) or something you saw as professional (worked on an interesting private equity transaction in banking). This answer will differ for everyone, but having a logical, genuine explanation for why you are interviewing for these roles in the first place will go a long way toward setting your candidacy apart.
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Next, you should have a solid understanding of the details about the firm you're interviewing with. I’ve noticed that many interviewees think of private equity as one undifferentiated strategy, whereas the reality is far from that. There are firms that focus on buyouts with intensive operational components (such as Bain Capital) and those that focus on more complex situations where more value creation occurs at the time of acquisition by virtue of valuation and structuring (such as Apollo and Centerbridge). There are firms that focus on specific industry verticals, such as Vista and Thoma Bravo in technology or Sycamore in consumer and retail. Other firms may pursue buy-and-build strategies where portfolio companies are used as platforms to consolidate specific industry niches. Of course, firms do not fall neatly into any individual bucket and often move between strategies, but understanding where your target firm sits is important. This allows you to showcase your understanding of the role you’re targeting.
One way to do this is to stay up to date on the recent transactions that your target firm has closed. If you can, find out as much as possible about their investment thesis on these deals (such as by looking at the CIM for the acquisition financing) and try to contextualize that in the context of the firm’s stated investment strategy. You can also reach-out cold to deal team members and ask for high-level overviews on recent deal closings.
To the extent you’re able to incorporate details from these topics into your interview responses, you’ll go a long way to showing you are capable of differentiated research and that you took initiative to set yourself apart from the pack.
Lastly, you would be well served to take a holistic look at the market as a whole to understand how the current environment is impacting your target firm.
Beyond that, you should have an opinion on what your firm can do given that the firm is still responsible for deploying LP capital – should they look to private credit, or consider over-equitizing deals with the expectation of refinancing when the market improves? Whatever you suggest, showing that you can “talk the talk” like a true private equity professional is an important quality.
Entry-level Associate roles are the most surefire way to break into the closely guarded private equity industry. Given the limited chances available to secure these seats, make sure you do everything you can to diligently prepare and put your best foot forward on interview day. Good luck!
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