Do you still need to be a junior banker to get hired by Blackstone?

Private equity has long been the career dream for many aspiring finance professionals, even in a tough market, but getting into a top firm isn’t easy. Historically, to work in private equity for a firm like Blackstone, many people got a job at one of the major investment banks, then accepted a deferred offer to join Blackstone in their first year. Today, paths into private equity aren’t as one-dimensional.

Follow eFinancialCareers on Google News here. 

Speaking this week’s LSE’s Alternative Investments Conference, Saleh Panahi, a senior MD at Blackstone, said times have changed. Although banking “is probably still the most common route into private equity, it now sits alongside a wider range of entry paths.” 

Panahi himself started out in banking himself with boutique firm Lazard and “didn’t know what private equity was” when he first joined the bank. He was convinced to join PE when he “noticed some of my more senior colleagues moving into it.”

That was back in 2012. Since then, Blackstone has massively ramped up its internship and graduate program. Business Insider reported last June that the firm hired over 170 interns in 2025. Blackstone has been hiring students from universities for over 30 years and used to be very selective. In 2015, Business Insider said it was hiring from nine schools. In the past 10 years, Business Insider said it reportedly hired from 1,000. 

The only problem with this route is that Blackstone’s acceptance rate is incredibly low and getting lower; Business Insider reported it accepted 0.4% of applicants in 2021 and 0.2% of applicants in 2025.

Blackstone has also ramped up its hiring into non-investment roles which don’t need bankers. As Blackstone grows, Panahi said the firm needs “more specialised expertise, and that widens the funnel for the types of CVs that make it into private equity.” For example, he said that teams of quants analyzing Blackstone’s portfolio companies have “really taken off for us over the last ten years… really helping the top of house spot megatrends before it turns into publicly available data.” Blackstone’s data scientists sit within its operating team led by Rodney Zemmel, a PhD biologist who spent just shy of three decades at consulting firm McKinsey before joining Blackstone last march. 

The firm’s data science team is led by an ex-Credit Suisse M&A banker, Matt Katz, but you don’t need banking experience to join the data team. Recent hires include Tim Bush, a PhD physicist who joined as an MD from DefenceTech firm Palantir. Recent associate-level hires have previously worked at hardware startup Arena and Starbucks (as a data scientist, not a barista). Working as a quant or data scientist in a bank is also a route in. The issue with joining in these kinds of non-investment roles is that you’re less likely to get paid carried interest, the key appeal of working in PE for many people. 

Blackstone has been diversifying its talent pool, while investment banks have been looking to cut off the supply of banking analyst talent. JPMorgan told juniors last year that it would fire anyone that it found taking a future-dated offer, and Goldman Sachs made its analyst swear they had not taken a private equity offer on a regular basis shortly after. This seemingly put a kibosh on PE hiring last year, but many big firms simply pushed their recruitment drive to this January. 

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: WhatsApp: (+44 20 7997 7910), Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, Signal: @AlexMcMurrayEFC.88 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email [email protected].

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.

Image Source: Envato