Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/BI
Blackstone, unlike some of its private markets competitors, has a long history of hiring straight out of college. Jon Gray, the firm’s president and CEO Steve Schwarzman’s heir apparent, started in 1992 after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and never left.
But Blackstone hopefuls looking to land one of those coveted spots after senior year had a harder time than ever in 2025.
During a September presentation, Gray said the firm’s job acceptance rate for its 2025 analyst class dropped to just 0.2%, with 57,000 applications for just 138 entry-level roles. That’s down from the already incredibly selective 0.4% in 2021, when 29,000 people applied for 103 first-year analyst roles.
As the industry continues to grow in size — Blackstone, for its part, is managing over $1 trillion for clients — the private equity career path has stepped front and center for ambitious young people.
Job hunters, with their eyes set on six-figure entry-level salaries that quickly reach aspirational levels, are drawn to the industry’s increasing popularity and prestige.
But there’s also a more direct cause: the firm is increasingly turning to recruiting entry-level workers, and moving its direction with candidates earlier and earlier, with contact as early as sophomore year. The importance of its summer internship is paramount.
According to Taylor Kanfer, the firm’s head of campus recruiting, the “large majority” of the firm’s full-time analysts are hired through their summer analyst internship. Many of these 2025 jobs were already filled at the end of last summer.
The 2025 class started in July and is made up of recent college graduates from 65+ universities.
How one analyst networked her way to a job
One of these 2025 analysts, Brigitte Webb, started even earlier. After her sophomore year at Georgetown, she attended the firm’s Future Leaders program, a two-day event that gives undergrads an introduction to the firm.
She returned to the firm as an intern the summer after her junior year, spending 10 weeks working with the real estate teams before receiving an offer to come back full-time this year.
She told Business Insider that hearing the acceptance rate was “surreal” after all the work she put in to get her job.
“It underscores the importance of starting early and building your network early,” Webb said. She spoke to a few Georgetown alumni who worked at Blackstone — connections she made through professors and investing clubs— and one of them introduced her to the Future Leaders program, which ultimately brought her to the firm.
Networking was emphasized at Georgetown, which places many students on Wall Street. But as recruiting for these roles “branches out more and more to other schools,” she said, it’s worth emphasizing for any interested applicants.
Kanfer said that Blackstone engages with over 1,000 universities, whether online or on campus, up from just 9 in 2015. Webb, who is from Oklahoma, said she has already been receiving networking calls from students all over the country.
The firm remains a prolific recruiter of Associate-level candidates with roughly two years of experience in investment banking or related fields (although it has declined to participate in on-cycle recruiting in recent years, instead running its own process months later).
While Webb works in real estate, where the traditional career path of two years in investment banking before joining a buy-side firm isn’t as essential as in private equity or credit, she still interviewed for investment banking roles as well.
Her choice, Webb said, came down to culture. She didn’t want to work somewhere where many of her peers would spend two years and leave, Webb said.
“Whereas here, specifically at Blackstone, people tend to stay,” Webb said.
A firm spokesperson said that over a third of its real estate managing directors and senior managing directors started as analysts.
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