Prior PE experience can be valuable, but it shouldn’t become a shortcut for assessing the specific pressures, skills and behaviours a mandate demands.
The safety blanket of prior PE experience
One of the biggest constraints in the PE talent market is the perceived need for candidates to have already worked within the PE ecosystem. While the requirement is sometimes genuinely justified by the nuances of a role, it’s too often used as a safety blanket rather than a true reflection of what the role actually demands.
Well intended. It saves a thousand contextual lines for ease of communication. We don’t want to explain every angle of the PE operating environment, do we? Really what’s happening here is a proxy standing in for substance – because it’s quicker to check a CV line (X backed by Y) than to properly assess whether someone can do the job.
Without challenge, this can become dangerously restrictive. It narrows the search to a shrinking pool of candidates who’ve cycled through portfolio companies, often solving the same problems the same way. It rewards familiarity with the PE playbook over the traits the role actually needs: pace, ownership, comfort with ambiguity, prioritisation, operating in a lean environment, etc.
Not all PE experience is equal
Think about it in another way. Not all PE firms operate the same: use of leverage, strategy (buy-and-build vs organic growth), hold period, sector focus, minority vs majority control, growth-stage vs mature buyout.
“Private equity is not a homogenous industry. It certainly has shared traits and distinctive commonalities, but it’s fallacious to treat it as a ‘catchall’ term.”
Someone who thrived inside a heavily levered, two bolt-ons a quarter roll-up has learned a completely different discipline to one who spent four years driving organic EBITDA growth in a lightly-geared, founder-retained minority position. Both tick the “worked in PE before” box on a CV. Neither experience necessarily prepares them for what the other environment demands.
This exposes the flaw: “Has PE experience” isn’t one credential but dozens of different operating realities filed under the same label. Treating “PE experience” as a single, interchangeable qualification is exactly the kind of shortcut that gets exposed during interview stage, or worse, once the new hire is already in seat. Some PE firms are so incredibly different that it’s nigh-on impossible to correlate them beyond the label at all.
“Diagnose the pressure of the mandate and access candidates against them. It’s highly likely that successful candidates may already have PE experience, but that’s neither definitive nor a necessary thing.”
Diagnose the mandate, not the CV
So, the real diligence isn’t “have they worked in PE” but “have they operated under the specific pressures this deal creates” – evidently this requires a deeper dive during the brief taking. I reckon it actually requires more domain knowledge to really challenge, too. As a recruitment partner, we must exercise the discipline of unearthing the true ‘need’ – it is always to the benefit of the client, to attract the best person for the vacancy.
Look beyond the existing ecosystem
Here’s the irony – some of the strongest operators have never sat inside a PE-backed business. They’ve built and scaled in founder-led companies, corporates, even public markets, often under just as much pressure to perform. They’ve dealt with leverage, complex board environments, double-digit growth targets, lean teams and capital constrained projects in tight timelines. They’ve worked on refinancings, carve-outs, exits, bolt-ons and mergers. They’ve worked cross-functionally, directly for C-suite, interacted with external investors or debt providers. Should the lack of ‘PE experience’ discount the breadth of all that here? Probably not.
“Hiring managers aren’t lowering the bar for quality, nor should they. The goal is to define that bar more precisely by identifying the pressures, skills and behaviours the role actually demands, then assessing candidates against them.”
We’re actually seeing an uptick in candidates outside of the existing PE ecosystem being selected for interview and receiving offers to join PE backed firms. But, the data is showing a minimal increase rather than a paradigm shift. I still think the ‘safety blanket’ approach is being deployed too frequently and we have a long way to go to really open up the talent pool longer-term. Of course, it will continue to be natural for PE to keep producing talent within its own confines – it absolutely should do, too; there’s real value in people who’ve lived the PE cycle first-hand. It’s difficult to know exactly how the data could illustrate a movement, given the nuances around the overall M&A market and new-deal volume, talent constrictions at certain levels etc, but anecdotally, I’d like to see more and more talented candidates get into PE portcos for the first time.
Contact Jack Lane
If you’ve found yourself guilty of over-indexing on ‘needing PE’, or perhaps have used it just as a convenient filter, when you’re targeting best-in-class portfolio talent, perhaps we should have a chat?