Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Will curtailing early hiring/unraveling help diversity?

If you run a company that hires very early, you likely hire from familiar places.  If talented recruits from more diverse backgrounds are harder to identify very early, you might want to slow things down a bit.  Here's a WSJ story, about what might signal a change in the famously unraveled market for young analysts in private equity:


Blackstone to Bypass Scramble for Investment-Bank Talent in Bid to Diversify Hiring
On-campus recruiting will be expanded to 44 schools from nine in 2015
By Miriam Gottfried, June 24, 2020

"Blackstone Group Inc., ...one of the most coveted employers on Wall Street, is throwing out a key section of its recruiting playbook in a bid to improve its hiring process and increase diversity.

"The investing giant and its private-equity peers have long engaged in a yearly race to pluck junior investment bankers already trained in spreadsheet and PowerPoint wizardry from firms such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley. The prize for those lucky enough to make the jump: entry-level jobs that can pay as much as $300,000 a year at some firms.

"Now Blackstone officials say the firm plans to sit out that contest in favor of on-campus recruiting, already its main source of talent and one that it is expanding to bring in more candidates directly from schools, including historically black colleges and universities and women’s colleges. Blackstone, which has been working for years to extend its campus reach, says it will directly recruit from 44 schools this academic year. That is up from just nine in 2015.
...
"Blackstone, the largest buyout firm with $538 billion of assets, received nearly 15,000 applications for just 90 full-time analyst roles that started last year. It has two main sources of new junior talent: campuses and investment banks, which have their own hotly competitive entry-level hiring operations.

In the case of the latter, recruitment used to happen during the summer after applicants’ first year on the job, but it has steadily crept forward as private-equity firms jump the starting gun in hopes of securing the best candidates. In 2019, recruiting took place in September, just a couple months after candidates began working at banks—for roles that wouldn’t start until summer 2021."

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Here's an earlier related post (from long ago, before Covid-19 and George Floyd...):

Monday, December 9, 2019

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