Getting an entry-level job at Blackstone is harder than getting into Harvard, says Steve Schwarzman. Here’s how to ace an interview and land a job there.

• Getting a job at private equity giant Blackstone is getting more competitive.
• Out of some 62,000 applications for the firm’s 2023 first-year class, just 169 people were hired.
• In 2020, Insider spoke with president Jon Gray to learn how to stand out and land a job Blackstone.

The billionaire that built Blackstone doubts he’d land a job at the private equity titan today. It’s that competitive.

Speaking to Wall Street analysts on its second-quarter earnings call, Blackstone founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman said the firm attracted 62,000 unique applicants this year. That’s triple the amount it received in 2020 when it said 19,000 applied. 

The $1 trillion alternative asset manager only offered roles to 169 analysts, meaning a selection rate of 0.27%. Harvard has an acceptance rate of 3.3%.  

“Getting an entry-level job at Blackstone is 12 times harder than getting into Harvard. I doubt I’d be able to be hired today,” Schwarzman said before adding, “Not sure that’s a great thing.”  

In a 2020 interview, Blackstone president Jon Gray told Insider what it was like when he was hired as an entry-level analyst at a then-seven-year-old private equity shop in New York in 1992 — a firm that would eventually go on to become the world’s first $1 trillion alternative asset manager.

Gray said that fresh out of the University of Pennsylvania, he was interviewed by Blackstone’s cofounders, Schwarzman and Pete Peterson, themselves. At that time, he couldn’t have predicted that he would go on to be named Blackstone’s president and chief operating officer in 2018.

“For me, a kid from suburban Chicago, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this seems really exciting.’ And it was obviously terrifying being interviewed,” he recalled.  

It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that other young Wall Street hopefuls still experience Gray’s jitters when applying to the firm these days. 

So how exactly do applicants dead-set on working for the firm land one of its highly-prized entry-level gigs? Insider spoke with Gray, headhunters who recruit on Blackstone’s behalf, and the firm’s global head of human resources to learn what it takes to ace the interview. Here’s a peek inside the process.