Thank you Brian!

Relevant parts of the interview:

“Q: But how did you meet those criteria [deal experience, know the industry and company in-depth, and can run deals by themselves]?

You had no deal experience, and you had never run a deal by yourself.

A: No, but I had run projects across the entire company before.

Data science ties into all the other departments, so I said, “While I may not have run M&A deals before, I’ve done something similar with Projects X, Y, and Z, where I had to disseminate information, work with senior executives, and speak with all departments at the company to win project approval.”

I argued that “deals” were similar to the “projects” I had been working on; in both, you act as the central communicator.

And since I had performed well at the company already, the corporate development team had more faith in my technical skills than banks.

Q: OK. What about the process itself?

A: I spoke with two Associates, three VPs, and one MD, all on the same day. It took about 3-4 hours total.

We have a pretty big deal team – over 15 people – since this is a Fortune 100 company. So, I spoke with ~1/3 of the team during interviews.

They asked me:

-Technical questions similar to the ones you might receive in IB interviews – depending on the interviewer.

-Pitches for acquisition or joint-venture ideas for the company, which took a lot of time to research.

-Questions about why I wanted to move into corporate development and how much I knew about the deal process.

They also gave me a 30-minute written test at the end, but it was pretty simple: They showed me a potential acquisition target, presented the revenue and cost synergies, and asked how much I would recommend paying for the company.

If you’ve ever built a merger model or valuation, it was not difficult to answer.”

Got it that makes sense. I am particularly interested in how the data science interviewee spin his/her experience into sounding like deal experience and broke into CD, but this article skips over the details. Would you mind sharing more details about that example? Thanks a lot.

Thanks. Yes, we deleted that article because it didn’t generate much traffic, and pretty much everything in it was covered and summarized in this overview article instead.

With a lot of the interviews on this site, people say pretty much the same things over and over, so we prefer to consolidate the insights and takeaways into single articles covering one specific career or recruiting process.

The PE options will tend to pay more than corporate development. If you want to earn more but have a worse lifestyle, infra PE or RE PE are better. You will also be more specialized in both of those. If you want more of a relaxed lifestyle but at the expense of lower pay, and you want to be more of a generalist, the CD offer is better.

I feel as though because both are equally “good” options for me, i should just take the one that has higher pay?
Would you agree with this?
If so, which career overall do you think pays better? (Though also understand that it depends on many things, but would be great to get your opinion in general)

I don’t think the lack of a sensitivity table will hurt you, especially if you mentioned that you would also create one with more time/space. They mostly want to see if you can think logically and present coherent arguments for or against a deal.

I think it would work well for VC roles, but it would be tough to use that experience to get into PE because they normally want to see more traditional M&A experience. You might be able to use it to get into IB because bankers sometimes don’t go into a ton of detail on what you did, exactly, in each deal.