What are hedge funds interviews like?
For people looking to switch from PE to HF, what is a typical process like? Roughly how many interviews did you do before getting an offer? Did most interviews have a Stock pitch take up most of the time?
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I can add some light here. It depends on the mandate of the hedge fund you're applying for and the strategy. For us, we're a L/S US Equities fund focusing on Technology and Retail...yes, we got hit pretty hard this year and I'm not pleased with the results, so save your comments.
We typically do 4 rounds of interviews:
Round 1 - We ask you behavioral questions. very simple most people pass this round.
Round 2 - We get a lot more technical. "How do you get from TEV to Equity Value?", "If I buy a bike for $100, what happens to the 3 financial statements" , "pitch me a stock."
Round 3 - We give you a take-home case study. We give you 4 days to complete it and produce a write-up / model (majority of candidates either forfeit or fail here).
Round 4 - If you made it this far, you basically have the job and this is where we negotiate your salary etc.
This is a fairly standard structure. Some funds take it too far *Cough Point72* and have a ridiculous amount of rounds. We did this in the beginning but it was completely counter productive.
You're definitely going to be asked to produce a stock-pitch of some sort. Some funds want a 30min pitch, some others want 1min..it all depends.
hope this helps.
Do you only consider PE candidates in your hiring process?
Will you hire me?
Really? That sounds ridiculously easy
It's doable for everyone, which increases competition, which means at the end you have to present a killer case. Not as easy as it sounds. Try doing that to TCI then hit me up if you get the offer.
Do you hire out of undergrad (incoming EB SA). If so would the process look similar for UG hires?
No, we don't. But I know a lot of funds that typically do.
We don't because, we prefer candidates who already know how to do the job. This means we spend less time / money training and they can be effective immediately. Undergrad candidates require too much resources and are typically less loyal to the company (exiting in 2-3 yrs, this is considered long).
The guys that we hire have either a MBA or CFA, worked in the industry for 5+ yrs and have excellent recommendations from their previous employers and are extremely passionate about equities.
How come most folks don't make it thru the case study? Super hard? I had one recently where the information was really rough to work with. It seems like doing the model etc. with straightforward info is something a lot of folks can probably do. Obviously lots of ways to really go over the top in terms of what you put in the model
We have candidates from all backgrounds. Big 4, IB, PE, HFs etc.
I have a Big 4 M&A background myself, so I know that these candidates are extremely technical because Big 4 shops are naturally technical.
How big is your fund roughly?
$1.5b AUM.
At a large credit focused HF.
I can't think of the last person we hired on the analyst team that didn't already have a buyside seat (PE, illiquid credit, other HFs) in the past 5+ years. We are open to interviewing restructuring / M&A IBD analysts but haven't actually converted one to hiring, I assume partially due to case study quality (easier to do a case if you already have kind of done that job before especially in time constraints).
Our process isn't a ton different than the L/S US Equities process above though we have one more behavioral step prior to case study that we sometimes waive.
Apologies, what would qualify as illiquid credit?
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