In a sign that things might be getting back to normal in the world of private equity recruitment, EQT Group, the Swedish private equity firm with €40bn in assets under management, is back recruiting again. Even better, it plans additional hiring to compensate for this year's lack of it. The fund, which announced its third quarter results yesterday, said it introduced a hiring freeze in spring, but has now lifted it. "We have already started easing the hiring pause and we now expect the...

In America, private equity funds are said to be pulling back on recruitment as a result of the pandemic. In London, at least one fund is forging ahead. HG Capital, the private equity fund which spun out of Merrill Lynch and Mercury Asset Management in 2000, has hired at least three new investment professionals in London and one in Munich in the past two months. Insiders suggest there are more recruits in the pipeline. The new additions in London include Simon Comfort and Shiv Pabari from...

A new accusation is being leveled at students who want to work in the financial services industry. Not only are they, it seems, prone to psychopathy, they're also a lot less trustworthy than students with other aspirations in life. The new personality defect of young people who want to go into banking was unearthed by professors at the German University of Cologne*. Using a series of experiments run on over 200 students at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, the professors set out to...

JPMorgan is no stranger to blockchain. The bank has been working on distributed ledger technology since around 2015, but it seems to be going deeper into the area in late 2020. In the past few weeks JPMorgan has released at least 11 new blockchain engineering jobs, which seems a lot given that the bank reportedly only had 25 people working on its Quorum blockchain team in February 2020. Seven of the new roles are located in the U.S., mostly in Jersey City or New York. Another four are in...

If you're a junior banker hoping to move into private equity, last week's revelation that Blackstone will be pivoting towards its own graduate recruits instead of poaching juniors from banks in future will have come as bad news. For the moment, though, it looks like hiring across some of the top buy-side funds might be picking up again. Data from LinkedIn suggests that new hires at KKR hit 92% of 2019's level in June. At Apollo Global Management the comparable figure was 75%, while at...