Do you want to work in private equity? It’s not for everyone. Even if the €37m+ ($43m+) historic paydays are appealing, you won’t be able to get your foot in the door without the right skillset. But what skillset is that exactly?
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To start with, because private equity firms recruit overwhelmingly from investment banks, they expect to hire people who already have the standard banking skillset: building financial models in Excel to value companies and pitchbooks in PowerPoint to win deals, as well as an exceptional capacity to work. But these are increasingly just table stakes, rather than the standout things that get you the job.
What funds actually want is an all-rounder; someone with insightful thinking and the ability to build relationships. “Private equity professionals need to be confident and persuasive, but also hard-edged when it comes to negotiating. They sell with their eyes and mouths and buy with their brains,” said Gail McManus, founder and former managing director of Private Equity Recruitment (PER). In this new world, where AI can build financial models and pitchbooks, she says personality is even more important.
Private equity funds are looking for “Action Man or Action Woman,” said McManus. You need to make things happen, to be “ultra-competitive, not let things stand in your way.” And you need relationship skills alongside that: “it’s all about winning the deal,” McManus explained.
This doesn’t make modelling skills redundant. In the US, private equity firms have developed a habit of hiring junior investment bankers early and sometimes before they’ve even joined banks, and they do so during one frenzied night of recruiting. UK firms do not do this, but assessment centres are still tough.
Juniors going through the private equity recruitment process are assessed on their financial modelling and on a case study, which examines their judgement of what makes a good investment. Second to personality, it is good commercial judgement that is now the key differentiator in private equity recruitment, says McManus.
McManus says she likes to ask candidates, “if you were thinking of buying a coffee shop, what’s the first thing you’d do?” If your answer is that you’d go and visit your local shop, to check whether the toilets are clean, count the customers, work out how many staff are on a shift and whether they look happy, then a career in private equity is probably for you. If your instinct is to go and find an analyst report on the coffee sector, you’re probably better off working at an investment bank.
The point is not that research is bad. Research is good. It’s that private equity is a business of owning things, and owners must form a view of how a company works, and not just what its numbers look like. You need to be interested in the mechanics of businesses rather than sitting behind a desk looking at spreadsheet (although there is an element of that too).
You also need to learn how to speak up. Being a private equity professional means being able to argue for or against a particular investment opportunity or sector in a room where people will push back. A passion for understanding the inner workings of business is essential, and so is the willingness to put a view on the table and be wrong in public.
In a world of high interest rates, understanding how a company operates and being able to improve it are increasingly important. A report from consulting firm Bain & Co, written in February 2026, noted that when private equity firms inveted in companies in 2015, they typically borrowed 50% of the purchase price at an interest rate of 6-7%. When investments were financed like this, Bain said the companies being purchased needed to generate 5% annual growth in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) over a five year period. This way, they would generate the 2.5x multiple on invested capital which private equity firms aim for when the company was sold five years later.
The world is very different when rates are 8-9%. At this interest rate, Bain said firms need to generate 10-12% annual growth in EBITDA to generate the 2.5x multiple they want.
Achieving 10-12% growth is not easy. To generate that kind of profit growth, a company needs to have falling costs and rising revenues, or both. And this means that the private equity firm which has bought the company needs to really understand how it works.
Because of this, private equity firms also increasingly need operational expertise. – People who can improve the firms they’ve invested in.
Recruitment consultancy DRAX summarised the newly desirable ‘operational profile’ for private equity firms in March 2026 as comprising, “commercial judgement with advanced analytical skills, people who can underwrite more accurately, pressure-test assumptions rigorously, navigate ambiguity, whilst having good ‘grit’ to go the extra mile.”
Alongside this, private equity firms are also increasingly interested in technological and data skills as AI permeates the industry. Apollo is hiring for an “AI solutions and quantitative strategist” associate role, for example, that sits between its hybrid investments team and its quant team, ensuring that AI initiatives are “practical, high-impact and embedded into day-to-day workflows.”
You do not need to be a crack software engineer, but you do need to be versed on what these tools can and can’t do. The majority of private equity firms expect AI to have a “material impact” on their portfolio companies in 2026, Bain reported this year, with cost savings and revenue growth the most likely culprits. You need to be familiar with AI – we wrote more about that specifically here.
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