Ares Management: The Interview's Motivation Round and Assessment Day

Ares Management exists because its founders left the firm they had helped build.

Antony Ressler and John Kissick were two of the six people on Apollo's original leadership team in 1990. Seven years later they walked out and started a competitor, with Bennett Rosenthal and David Kaplan, aimed squarely at credit. Almost three decades on, the two firms sit beside each other in the same league tables, and the one that left is now running the larger credit book.

That origin explains the thing candidates most often get wrong about Ares. It is not a private equity house that added lending. It is a credit business that grew a platform around itself.

$671bn

firm assets

30 June 2026

$440bn

credit assets

roughly two thirds of the firm

84%

in perpetual vehicles

producing 94% of management fees

Ares at a glance

Every figure in that table comes from Ares' own filings, and each is dated because each will move.

The angle: credit is the main business

Credit Group

$440.5bn

Everything else

$230.8bn

At most firms of this size credit sits beside a larger buyout business and competes with it internally for capital, attention and people. Two thirds is not a wing, and that single ratio is the most useful thing to have ready for a fit round.

At most firms of this size, credit is a wing. Two thirds is not a wing.

The ratio matters to a candidate for a practical reason. At a house where lending sits beside a larger buyout business, the credit team competes internally for attention, capital and the best people. At Ares the credit team is the institution, which changes what a junior seat looks like: more capital behind the desk, more seniority above it, and a career path that does not require moving business line to progress.

Two companies, two tickers, one very common mistake

This is the error interviewers hear most, and it is easy to avoid.

Ares Management (ARES, NYSE)

• The asset manager
• Earns fees for running vehicles
• Listed 2014
• Michael Arougheti, chief executive

Ares Capital (ARCC, Nasdaq)

• A business development company
• Lends its own balance sheet
• Listed October 2004 at $15.00
• Kort Schnabel, chief executive since April 2025

ARCC is not a division. It has its own shareholders, its own board and its own results. Ares manages it and is paid for doing so. A candidate who says "Ares' BDC" is fine; a candidate who treats ARCC's balance sheet as Ares' own has said something incorrect about the structure of the whole business.

The relationship is also the reason ARCC is worth reading before an interview. It is the most visible window into what Ares actually lends against, because a listed BDC reports its portfolio in a level of detail no private fund ever will.

The origin, and the founder question

Ares was founded in 1997. Ressler and Kissick had run Apollo's capital markets, high yield and leveraged loan activities from 1990. Rosenthal came from Merrill Lynch's global leveraged finance group. Kaplan came from Apollo as well.

One detail is worth having straight, because Ares' own materials blur it. Michael Arougheti is routinely called a co-founder, and he joined in 2004 — seven years after the firm was founded, from RBC Capital Markets, specifically to build the direct lending business that became Ares Capital Corporation.

Both things are defensible. He founded the business that defines the modern firm, without founding the firm. Knowing the distinction signals that you read something other than a careers page.

The six credit strategies

"Which desk" is a real question at Ares, and getting the six straight is the cheapest preparation available.

Two things fall out of that table that are worth saying in a room.

Direct lending is one of six, not a synonym for the whole. The distinction gets tested, and Ares is the clearest possible illustration of it: a firm can be the largest direct lender in the market and still run five other credit businesses beside it.

Alternative credit is the one to read about. It is where the growth is, and asset-based finance is the fastest-growing corner of private credit generally, and it underwrites something structurally different from a corporate loan.

How the platform grew

Ares expanded by buying capability rather than building it, and the pattern is consistent: each acquisition added an asset class or a geography onto a credit-dominant core without displacing it.

• 2017 — American Capital. Acquired by ARCC for roughly $3.4bn, the transaction that made it the largest publicly traded business development company.
• 2020 — SSG Capital. An Asia-Pacific credit and special situations platform, and the origin of what is now the APAC credit strategy.
• 2021 — Black Creek. Real estate.
• March 2025 — GCP International. $3.7bn upfront in cash and Ares shares plus up to $1.5bn of earn-out, adding roughly $42bn of assets across Japan, Europe, the United States, Brazil and Vietnam. It made Ares a top-three global logistics owner and operator at more than 570 million square feet, and brought digital infrastructure and self-storage with it.
• February 2026 — BlueCove. A London systematic fixed income manager with about $5.5bn, relaunched as Ares Systematic Credit.

The GCP deal is the one to understand, because it is the largest and because it is the clearest evidence that Ares is no longer only a credit house. The BlueCove deal is the one to mention, because it is the newest and it created a team that is actively hiring.

The book, and where it is under strain

A guide that only lists wins is marketing, and ARCC's filings make the stress easy to read.

31 Dec 2025

1.8%

30 Jun 2026

2.4%

Own post-2008 average

3.0%ref

BDC sector average

4.0%ref

The top two rows are the reported figures six months apart. The bottom two are reference levels, drawn hollow because they are benchmarks rather than later observations. The move is real, and it sits below both.

Four new non-accrual names arrived in a single quarter, and they were not concentrated in one sector. Net asset value per share fell about three per cent over the half.

Two things to say about that, and saying both is what a credit person does. It is a deterioration, and it is worth naming rather than talking around. It is also still below ARCC's own post-2008 average of roughly 3% and well below a business development company sector average nearer 4%, so it is a move within a normal range rather than a break.

The economics, and why they explain the culture

One statistic tells you more about Ares than any other: perpetual capital is 84% of assets and produces 94% of management fees.

A traditional closed-end fund has a clock. Raise, invest, harvest, return, raise again, with fee income stepping down as capital is returned. Perpetual vehicles have no such clock, so repayments are redeployed rather than distributed and fee income compounds rather than decaying.

In the second quarter of 2026 that machine produced management fees of $1,017.6m and fee related earnings of $491.1m, against incentive fees of only $42.8m. The overwhelming majority of what Ares earns is recurring and predictable, not performance-linked.

For a candidate, three consequences:

1. Fundraising never really stops, because perpetual vehicles absorb capital continuously rather than in campaigns.
2. The firm behaves like a compounding balance sheet. Growth comes from more assets under management at a stable margin rather than from a large realisation.
3. Investor-facing and product roles are genuine investment-adjacent careers here, not back-office ones, which is why several open junior roles sit in that part of the business rather than in deal teams.

What a junior actually does

The honest answer depends entirely on which of the six strategies you land in, which is why "which desk" is the question to ask before anyone asks you anything.

On a direct lending desk, a first-year analyst spends most of the week on two things: underwriting new opportunities and monitoring existing ones. Underwriting means the model, the covenant analysis, the diligence read and the credit committee paper. Monitoring means quarterly compliance across a book of borrowers, and it is the part nobody mentions in an interview and everybody does.

Monitoring is worth taking seriously as a candidate, for two reasons. It is where you learn what actually goes wrong with credits, which is the education the job exists to give you. It is also where the firm finds out whether you are reliable, because a missed covenant test is a real event and a missed one on your watch is a career fact.

The other five desks

On an alternative credit desk, the work is more structural and less company-specific. You are underwriting a pool and its collateral performance rather than a management team, so the analysis leans on data and cash flow modelling rather than on diligence calls.

On a systematic desk, it is closer to quantitative research than to lending, and the technical bar is different in kind rather than degree.

Who runs it

• Antony Ressler — co-founder, executive chairman.
• Michael Arougheti — chief executive since 2018, at the firm since 2004. Stepped back from the president title in February 2025 to concentrate on firm-wide strategy.
• Kipp deVeer — co-president since February 2025, previously head of the Credit Group and chief executive of ARCC until April 2025, and still on its board. New York.
• Blair Jacobson — co-president since February 2025, London, with a European markets background. The presence of a London co-president is a genuine signal about where the firm expects growth.
• Mitchell Goldstein and Michael Smith — co-heads of the Credit Group since 2017.
• Kort Schnabel — chief executive of ARCC since April 2025.
• John Kissick — co-founder, retired from the board in 2020.

Geography, and what the leadership tells you

Ares appointed two co-presidents in February 2025, one in New York and one in London. That is not a detail to skip over in a fit conversation.

A firm that puts a co-president in London is signalling where it expects the next decade of growth, and European private credit is the obvious answer: the market is younger than the American one, banks are still withdrawing from mid-market lending there, and the largest platforms have been building out local origination teams for several years.

The practical reading for a candidate:

• London is a growth office, not a branch. The systematic credit team, roughly sixty people, sits there.
• New York remains the centre of gravity for the flagship direct lending business and the vehicle that funds it.
• APAC credit is a separate platform with its own history, so treat it as its own decision rather than as a regional posting.

Where the junior seats actually are

Ares runs its own hiring rather than borrowing a rotation from another business line, which is not universal among firms of this size and is a point in its favour.

• The UK summer programme is Ares-branded, ten weeks, London, open to any degree discipline at a 2:1 or above, and requires UK working rights. It names direct lending among the teams that take interns. The search is run through an external recruiter, so the first contact a candidate has is often not with Ares itself.
• Experienced hires go through Ares' own Workday tracking system directly.
• Systematic credit is the newest team, roughly sixty people and mostly in London, which makes it the part of the firm most likely to be adding seats at any given moment.

The process, and what it weights

Candidates describe a process with more stages than most, running roughly: a recruiter screen, numerical and verbal testing, one or two interviews built around motivation, a technical or modelling exercise, and an assessment day that combines further interviews with a group case study.

The distinctive feature is how early and how hard motivation is tested. For a firm of this scale that is unusual, and it is a rational filter. Ares receives a very large number of applications from candidates whose preparation is buyout preparation, and "why credit" is the fastest way to find out which ones have actually thought about lending.

So the two questions to over-prepare are the two that sound softest.

The two answers to over-prepare

Why credit, rather than equity. A weak answer describes credit as safer. A strong one says something about the work: that the analysis points at the downside because the upside is contractually capped, that you are paid to be right about repayment rather than about growth, and that you find the second question the more interesting one.

Why Ares, specifically. The material for this is in the article above. The credit-to-firm ratio. The six strategies and which one you want. The perpetual capital structure and what it means for how the business compounds. Any of those is a specific answer. "Because Ares is a leader in private credit" is not.

What the technical work looks like

A group case study inside an assessment day rewards different behaviour from a solo modelling test, and candidates routinely misjudge it.

• The output is a recommendation the group can defend, not the most sophisticated analysis in the room.
• Being the person who structures the discussion scores. Framing the exercise as a lending decision in the first two minutes, and assigning the pieces, is visible and valuable.
• Talking over people does not. Assessors are watching for whether you would be tolerable on a deal team at eleven at night.
• Bring the discussion back to the downside. Groups drift toward the growth story because it is more fun to talk about. The person who says "what happens if this misses, and does the covenant hold" has done the job.

The individual technical work is standard credit ground: the bridge from EBITDA to free cash flow, leverage and coverage, a debt schedule, and a downside carried through to covenant headroom. The credit case study is the same exercise in its solo form, and preparing for one prepares you for the other.

Why Ares rather than the obvious alternatives

The fit round will get here, and "it is a leader in private credit" is true of several firms. Three answers that are specific to this one:

The weighting. At the other large platforms, credit sits next to a bigger or equally large private equity business. Here it is two thirds of the firm. If your reason for choosing credit is that you want it to be the main event rather than an allocation, this is the firm where that is structurally true.

The breadth inside credit. Six strategies means you can move between lending styles without leaving the asset class or the building. A candidate who says they want direct lending now but expects to be curious about asset-based finance in five years is describing a real path here rather than an aspiration.

The permanent capital base. It changes the rhythm of the job:

• Capital is deployed more or less continuously rather than in a fundraising cycle.
• More transactions means more repetitions, which is how a junior actually learns.
• There is less of the feast-and-famine a closed-end fund imposes on a learning curve.

Whichever you use, ground it in something you can point to. A reason that survives having the firm's name swapped out is not a reason.

How to prepare for Ares specifically

1. Read ARCC's latest quarterly exhibit. Twenty minutes in a public filing gives you the portfolio, the non-accrual trend and the net asset value, and almost no candidate does it.
2. Pick your strategy and be able to defend the choice. Six strategies means "I'm interested in private credit" is not an answer.
3. Learn the ARES and ARCC distinction cold, because getting it wrong is a fast way to look unprepared.
4. Have a view on the non-accrual trend. Not a defensive one. A lender's one.
5. Rehearse "why credit" until it is thirty seconds and specific. It is weighted more heavily here than at most firms.
6. Know one thing about the platform beyond credit — the logistics acquisition is the obvious candidate — so that "why Ares" has a second dimension to it.

The bottom line

The opening fact is also the closing one. Ares was built by people who left a firm to compete with it in credit, and credit is still two thirds of what they built. Everything a candidate needs to say convincingly follows from that: why the lending seat is a core seat, why there are six strategies rather than one, and why a firm that earns 94% of its fees from permanent capital behaves the way it does.

Prepare the ratio, pick the desk, and have an honest view on the book.