Morning Coffee: Private equity's peculiar interviews require ruthlessness. Jain Global's not so good year

As we noted yesterday, the US private equity industry's on-cycle interview season has begun as it recruits junior investment bankers for jobs they won't start until late 2027. The process is notoriously peculiar.

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The Financial Times spoke yesterday to one New York-based analyst at an investment bank who said he began interviewing with private equity firms at 7.30am in the morning on Monday and that he'd accepted a job for 20 months in the future by 9pm that night. 

In previous years, private equity firms have interviewed through the dark hours. Business Insider spoke to a junior banker in June who said he'd been interviewed at 2.30am and then again at 7am during a recent cycle and that it was one of the most stressful 12 hour periods of his life.

Leading private equity firms aspire to hire the same junior bankers. Therefore, once one starts interviewing, they all do. Candidates are selected during a brief hiring frenzy. Yesterday, the FT said Blackstone, Apollo, Carlyle, TPG, Silver Lake, General Atlantic, Hellman & Friedman and Warburg Pincus were all interviewing; some offers have already gone out. Others are being made today.

Junior bankers want to work in private equity because it still pays well. Apollo is rumoured to be offering $400k to the 24-year-old associates it chooses. If this piques your interest, Apollo's 2027 associate roles are sadly already thought to have been filled. 

The speed with which private equity firms interview and hire junior bankers means the bankers in the process need to approach it ruthlessly. Speaking on the site formerly known as Twitter, one buy-side professional said yesterday that as soon as you make a mistake in the model test or case study, you need to cut and run. "Simply walk out and leave," he advised. You will not be hired anyway, and "the opportunity cost during on-cycle is simply too high."

The junior banker interviewed by the FT said some of his peers had adopted this approach and thus abandoned one private equity firm on Park Avenue to interview at another across the road. The analyst who spoke to Business Insider last summer also described being texted during one interview by another firm that wanted to interview him immediately. 

Junior bankers who receive offers this week will be in an awkward spot. They don't start their new private equity jobs until late 2027 and employers like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are now demanding that they are informed when juniors have secured private equity offers. Informing banks will mean junior bankers with offers aren't staffed on particular deals where there are conflicts of interest with future employers. It may even make them more susceptible to being laid off.

Separately, hedge fund Jain Global was a big deal when it launched in July 2024, but its first full year of returns were not inspiring.

Bloomberg reported yesterday that Jain's returns for 2025 were just 3.7%, following an even more meagre 0.5% for five months in 2024. Muddy Waters Research observed yesterday that Jain Global has effectively raised $5bn to underperform US treasuries.  

Jain's poor performance comes after observations that it has hired a lot of people. Founded by Bobby Jain, who spent years at Millennium, it employs around 350 people. 

Meanwhile...

Citadel Securities hired Keith Pregnell, the former chief risk officer at Eisler. (Risk) 

Chris Hohn paid himself a $81m dividend last year. (The Times) 

Wintermute is paying its people $1m each (on average). (Financial News) 

JPMorgan has a new advisory group run by Liz Meyers who previously ran the global equity capital markets business. It will focus on long-standing, top-tier clients, including companies that want the bank as lead adviser on initial public offerings, established clients pursuing transformational deals, and mid-sized firms aiming to make J.P. Morgan their primary banking partner. (Reuters) 

65-year-old Yann LeCun was the head of AI at Meta until he was replaced by 28-year-old Alexandr Wang. He says Wang is "young" and "inexperienced" but that the average age of engineers at Facebook is 27 anyway. (Financial Times) 

xAI said it has raised $20bn in new funding. It develops the chatbot and model Grok, and initially targeted a $15bn round, at a $230bn valuation. (Financial Times) 

Working with agentic AI could cause new nightmares. Overseeing AI systems, catching their errors, and managing the resulting complexity will be a source of mental health pressures. (The Register) 

Happy hour died and it is making young employees sad. (WSJ) 

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