This U.S. alternative asset manager is poaching junior bankers in London

If you're a junior investment banker with less than two years' experience (say, an analyst working for a major U.S. investment bank) and you fancy a move to the buy-side, a U.S.-based alternative asset manager with an enormous $125bn in assets under management may hire you. At least, it's just taken on three juniors - two of whom match this description exactly.

Ares Management Corporation isn't new to London. - It's been in the city since 2006. Nor is it new to hiring juniors from investment banks: it seems to be a regular occurrence every first quarter. This first quarter, Ares recruited at least three new associates.

They include Niccolò Consonni, a former healthcare coverage analyst at Morgan Stanley, Alessandro Colacci, a former member of the luxury goods retail team at Merrill Lynch, and Lili Jones, formerly a manager in the debt advisory team in Deloitte. Jones is clearly the odd one out: she spent six and a half years at Deloitte, while Consonni and Colacci each spent precisely 21 months in banking respectively. Consonni and Colacci are going into private equity at Ares; Jones is going into European direct lending.

As we've noted before, private equity (PE) funds have taken to hiring junior bankers increasingly early in their careers. Once, it used to be common for PE funds to wait until analysts had completed at least two years in banking before trying to poach them. Now, PE funds set about trying to poach juniors almost as soon as they arrive.

In Ares' last published UK accounts, for the year ending December 2017, it said it employed 128 people in the UK, up from 127 one year previously. Average pay per head was £310k ($404k).

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