Wall Street’s best hires don’t look anything like the résumés it worships, said Jeff Aronson, a cofounder of Centerbridge Partners, a private equity firm managing more than $42 billion in assets.
“I joke with people I couldn’t get a job at my own firm,” Aronson said in the Goldman Sachs “Exchanges” podcast on July 16.
“I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. I didn’t graduate Phi Beta Kappa. I don’t speak six languages. I didn’t discover the cure for cancer when I was nine years old,” he said in the recording uploaded on Tuesday.
Aronson came up through Johns Hopkins, where he earned a BA with honors, and NYU School of Law, a path outside the Ivy League track that dominates Wall Street recruiting. US News and World Report ranks Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins sixth on its top national universities list.
Wall Street is often stereotyped as an Ivy League stronghold. But data from Revelio Labs showed that only 11.7% of New York-based front-office workers at top firms — including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup — graduated from Ivy-plus schools, defined as the Ivy League plus Chicago, Stanford, Duke, and MIT.
For Aronson, credentials aren’t what make someone a great investor. What matters is mindset, he said.
“Attributes, it’s the same thing that you folks look for: people who are smart and hardworking and driven,” he said.
But he also prizes people who are “really intellectually curious.”
That’s partly why he believes Wall Street keeps overlooking promising talent.
“So we’re all scrambling and tripping over ourselves, looking for the same people,” Aronson said.
But the real edge comes from hiring those who think independently, he said.
He recalled asking candidates whether they compared notes with friends on the buy side — a question he phrased to encourage a “yes.”
But what he actually wanted to hear was a “no” — because he wanted people who would do their own work, and make their own decisions.
That contrarian streak has also shaped where he looks for talent. Rather than only competing for the same Ivy League graduates as every other firm, Aronson also turned his attention to the City University of New York.
With over 240,000 degree-program students, CUNY is the largest public urban university in the US, but one that few Wall Street recruiters seriously consider.
“I met some of these kids, and they were smart and they were hardworking. But you know what else they had? They had grit. There was no millennial stuff,” he said.
“Zero. They had grit. Most of them worked their way through school. And so we started hiring them. And all they wanted — it reminded me a little like when I started. ‘I just want a chance. Give me a chance,'” Aronson said.
“And we started hiring these kids, and they were great,” he said.
Calling CUNY “the undiscovered jewel that no one’s thinking about,” Aronson has partnered with John Waldron, president of Goldman, and billionaire Mike Bloomberg to invest millions into programs linking its students with finance jobs.
The initiative, he added, has been a win for everyone involved: “It’s been a huge win for these students. It’s been great for New York City. And it’s been smart business.”
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