About
The asset class grew faster than the job did.
Private credit went from a niche corner of the loan market to one of the largest pools of capital in the world in about a decade. The career path did not keep up. We report what each firm actually asks, which desk it hires from, and what the seat turns out to be.
The problem this site was built for
Almost nobody in private credit started in private credit. The senior people arrived from leveraged finance desks, restructuring groups, rating agencies and bank credit committees, each bringing the training they happened to have. There is no agreed apprenticeship, so what a firm tests is really a question about where its partners came from.
The titles compound it. The same work is an analyst seat at one firm and an associate seat at another; a third calls the whole team investment professionals and grades by year. A candidate comparing two offers is often comparing two different jobs wearing one name, and the published salary tables quietly average across both.
What we report
Firm by firm: which strategies it actually runs, whether the junior seat sits in origination or underwriting, who is on the panel, whether the exercise is a credit case, a timed modelling test or a term-sheet read, and what the seat pays once you have it. Where a firm has never published any of that, we say so rather than guessing.
Spreads and multiples carry a date
Pricing moves quarterly. A unitranche margin or a leverage multiple is only meaningful alongside the month it was true, so every one of them here names its source and its date and gets re-read when the market moves.
Every number gets a second reader
No figure reaches a guide on one person's reading of a filing. Somebody who did not write the piece opens the document again, checks the sentence against what the page actually says, and does it again each time the article is revised.
Nobody here is paid by a lender
No manager, placement agent or recruiter named in these guides has a commercial relationship with this site, and none of them sees a guide before it publishes. Where a link goes to something paid, the sentence around it says so plainly.
Written and edited by Clara Lindqvist , a pen name. How each claim is checked, and what happens when one turns out wrong, is set out in the editorial standards. The operating company is named in the Impressum.
Where to begin.
Five pillars: the firms themselves, how people get in, the strategies, what a credit interview tests, and what the seat pays.