I’ve been prepping for PE interviews for the last couple months and I’m finding the standard mock prep pretty hollow. I did the typical LBO model walkthrough, nailed the technical questions, but when I actually started talking to people who work in PE, the feedback was different from what the online prep guides suggest.
I’m wondering if anyone else has felt this gap? Like, the frameworks work, but something about how I’m communicating my thinking or structuring my answers is apparently off from what PE teams actually want to hear. I’ve had a few informal conversations with people at firms I’m targeting, and the patterns in their feedback are pretty consistent but not what I expected.
Specifically: they don’t seem to care as much about perfect model execution as they do about how I’m thinking about risk and downside scenarios. And my storytelling around my consulting background is apparently sounding too much like I’m pitching a client engagement rather than analyzing a real business problem.
For those of you who’ve done this—what was the disconnect between standard interview prep and what actually resonated with PE teams in the room? And did working with actual practitioners for mock interviews change your approach?