Lending is not a new business for Wall Street, but the private-credit gold rush has opened the door to a hiring spree that’s only expected to heat up in 2025.
After the 2008 financial crisis, banks removed much of the riskiest lending from their balance sheets. Investment behemoths like Apollo Global Management and Blackstone have been picking up the slack, underwriting loans to real-estate developers and blue-chip firms like Intel or funding corporate buyouts.
Asset managers from New York to Singapore have been getting in on the act, and on Monday, Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs announced a new structure to capitalize on the trend. The bank launched a new group it is calling the Capital Solutions Group to support demand for alternative sources of lending to mainly corporate clients.
As private credit’s star has risen, demand for talent has surged, financial-industry recruiters say. Finding the right talent, however, can be challenging — a situation that could worsen in 2025 as demand for corporate lending accelerates.
With so much interest in this field, Business Insider talked to three financial-industry recruiters and two consultants who have worked with private-credit firms to understand what it takes to break into this burgeoning field, where the career path is less obvious than some other jobs in the industry. They said most private-credit shops want people with experience in the field, especially at the senior levels. Given the surge in nonbank lending, however, other pathways are opening up.
“If you understand credit and you have some stomach for risk or are willing to do workouts to take control of companies if something goes south, there’s an awful lot of money to be made in credit,” said Robin Judson, the founder of the recruiting firm Robin Judson Partners.
Depending on the job, it can also offer a better work-life balance — by Wall Street’s standards anyway.
“Now, that doesn’t mean it’s 9-to-5, but maybe it’s 9-to-9 or 9-to-8, which is a much more doable day,” Judson said, though she added that there are still some very late nights and early mornings to close deals.
John Rubinetti, a partner at the executive recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles, said private-credit professionals may have a more consistent workflow than dealmakers, who are constantly hunting for targets or preparing investment memos that go nowhere. It also means they may close half a dozen deals a year, well above that of their private-equity counterparts, who may work on dozens of deals in a given year but close just one.
Here are five skills and experiences that could help you get a foot in the door of one of the industry’s hottest sectors.
For senior talent, it helps to have private-credit experience
“At the senior level,” Judson said, “most funds say, ‘I’m only looking at people who have direct experience, who have a Rolodex, who know what they’re doing, and who’ve got a track record.’”
But it’s not so easy to find those people. Judson said there were more open roles than experienced people who could fill them, a dynamic that would only increase as more private-credit funds launch. It has forced more firms to get creative about where to scout for talent.
“The folks with the acumen to do it exist,” said Kevin Desai, the head of the tax and consulting firm PwC’s private-equity consulting practice. “The folks with the experience who have done this before do not exist.”
The investment-bank pathway for junior talent
Investment banks are the most common route for young people to move to so-called buy-side firms, whether a hedge fund or a private-equity shop. The same is true when it comes to private credit because investment-banking-analyst programs have proved to be a great training ground.
“The most important skill sets are evaluating whether a company is going to make money, how the firm can structure an investment to make money, and how to protect yourself from the downside,” said Jennifer Cragin, a search consultant at BellCast Partners who was previously a director of the capital-markets group at Lazard.
“Those are the skills young financial professionals tend to learn in investment banking or credit underwriting,” she added.
The investment-banking roles firms will want to see on a résumé may vary, but all three recruiters said a background in leveraged finance could be very helpful. Leveraged finance, or LevFin, is the part of the bank that helps finance private-equity buyouts and other transactions through debt. Bankers in leveraged finance need to be able to underwrite loans and predict future cash flow, making it the most direct banking analog to private credit.
Outside of those roles, extensive debt experience in a particular line of business can help, especially if it aligns with an industry the employer is targeting, like infrastructure or climate transition.
“It depends on what their lending base is going to be,” Cragin said. said. “If it’s infrastructure, you may see people coming from project finance or some of the direct lending seats within the banks or from restructuring.”
For senior bankers, it depends on the firm
At the senior level, it can be harder to break into private credit from investment banking, where the focus is on getting the deal done versus thinking like an investor, recruiters said.
“If you’re a billion-dollar fund, pulling somebody at a senior level from a bank is very risky,” Judson said, adding, “It’s not about getting the deal done on the investing side; it’s about getting the right deal done.”
Unlike smaller firms, some of the largest and most institutionalized firms will still hire senior bankers with the right experience because they have the resources to train them.
Indeed, Apollo CEO Marc Rowan recently said the firm had hired hundreds of senior bankers to fill its growing credit business, including its 16 origination platforms. “For the last five, six years, we’ve taken 300 to 400 senior bankers from their job inside the banking institution to our firm,” he said at the Goldman Sachs Financial Services conference last year. “There’s been a movement of knowledge and a movement of relationships and a movement of competency.”
Investment bankers with strong connections can also be hot hiring targets.
Rubinetti said some investment bankers with expansive Rolodexes who were poached by private-credit firms “essentially bought those relationships.”
Private-equity experience can help — to a point
The earliest private-credit firms were launched to provide fundraising for private-equity firms’ corporate buyouts, creating a natural pathway from private equity to private credit, recruiters said.
“For private-equity candidates, three-quarters of what they need is there. They think like investors, they understand how deals are structured and what they look like, and they understand risk,” Judson said. “What they don’t necessarily have are credit skills.”
The longer you stay in private equity, however, the harder it may be to make a move, since debt and lending experience become increasingly important the higher you get on the corporate ladder. Rubinetti said an obvious candidate might be someone who worked in private equity and then went to business school, though they’d need to get their foot in the door soon after.
“Once you’re three to four years post-MBA, it just makes no sense,” he said.
Skip on-cycle recruiting
Though private-credit shops will hire from private-equity firms, the recruiters who talked to BI suggested that bankers interested in a private-credit career skip what’s known as on-cycle recruiting.
Private equity has become notorious for this recruiting schedule, in which junior investment bankers are recruited for jobs that won’t start for two years, usually after their analyst training is complete. In practice, this means some young bankers have their next job lined up before they even set foot in the office for their first gig.
But recruiters said on-cycle recruiting could backfire for people looking to break into private credit, as many private-credit shops don’t participate in it.
“A lot of the best candidates we see for private credit didn’t participate in on-cycle recruiting,” Judson said. “Instead, they hunkered down, learned their stuff, participated, put their hands up, and got extra work, which as an analyst means that they basically don’t sleep. They then decide to pursue what they want to do next, once they’re better equipped.”
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