Morning Coffee: 21-year-olds applying to private equity’s most desired job urged to be “nice”. Jefferies' CEO says good times are back

efinancialcareers.com:

The young people who get an undergraduate internship at Blackstone might consider that they’ve pretty much won the lottery.  There are very few of them – the “summer analyst” class is no more than 150, but that includes people from MBAs and law school.  The private equity firm's 0.3% acceptance rate is lower than Citadel’s 0.5%, and they get paid somewhere in the region of $20,000 for ten weeks of work.

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But of course, the real prize for winning that lottery is the opportunity to enter another lottery – to be one of the chosen few who get an offer to join Blackstone full-time, entering the world of private equity at one of the biggest and most prestigious firms, without having to go through the rigmarole of joining a bulge bracket investment bank and then immediately starting the “on cycle” recruitment process to move into private equity further down the line.  If you can swing the-internship-to-job-offer combination, you could be on the fast track to the top – Blackstone’s current COO, Jonathan Gray, himself joined straight out of university in 1992.

So, how to do that? Presumably, Blackstone interns will already be aware of basic advice like never wearing a crop top , going through Rich Handler’s checklist and never mentioning the name of a certain French finance professor .  They need to think about how they are going to stand out from an equally exceptional crowd.

Jonathan Gray dispensed three top tips, in his speech to the 2024 summer analyst class.  One of them is pretty obvious – come in early and triple check everything.  According to Gray, this demonstrates that you’re hard-working and care about your job. And it also probably acts as a simple filter – if