What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence

by Stephen A. Schwarzman

Pete and I always resolved to hire 10s. Today, Blackstone gets to choose from the very best young graduates. For our 2018 class of junior investment analysts, we received 14,906 applications for 86 spots. Our acceptance rate is 0.6 percent, much lower by far than the most selective universities in the world. If I had to apply for a job at my own firm today, I seriously doubt I’d be hired. But it took many years of trial and error to get here. Early on there were challenges to finding and keeping the people we wanted. The first was not our fault. Under the terms of my departure from Lehman, we could not hire our former colleagues. These were the people we knew best, whom we trusted, and with whom we had worked well. They would have been the ideal partners in our new venture. The second problem was that the big firms on Wall Street at that time were more like tribes than businesses. For someone to leave Goldman Sachs to join Morgan Stanley was like a Comanche leaving to join the Mohawks. And back then, Blackstone barely constituted a hunting party, let alone a tribe. The scale and systems at Lehman had largely spared me from having to fish through Wall Street’s hiring pools. But now there were no bureaucratic layers to protect me from the truth that finance is an industry that encourages self-delusion. People think they’re great and tell you they’re great, never that they failed at their last job, only that they are looking for “more opportunity.” You hire them, and they oft...

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