Campbell Lutyens is a specialist private capital advisory firm, founded in London in 1988, with offices across Europe, North America and Asia. It is a different proposition from a generalist investment bank or a private equity fund. Its two main practices are secondary advisory and primary capital advisory (fund placement). The firm advises general partners and limited partners on fund-level liquidity transactions, continuation funds and GP-led recapitalisations, LP-led portfolio sales, and primary fundraising across private equity, infrastructure and private credit. For a candidate, ECS's reading is that the differences are clear: the team is small, the technical content on secondaries is specialised, and mandates come through senior relationships. ECS's view is that applications are strongest when they explain the secondaries market rather than recite generic private equity vocabulary. Across recruitment work and ECS advisory, Hassan Akram has reviewed more than 10,000 applications and related candidate materials. This page keeps three things apart: how Campbell Lutyens recruits, as far as the process is publicly known or commonly reported; ECS's interpretation of how to prepare; and ECS's documented candidate outcomes, of which there are none at Campbell Lutyens to publish.
The application pathways at Campbell Lutyens
ECS groups the routes into Campbell Lutyens into three pathways. Recruitment is more relationship-driven than at the bulge bracket banks: the team is smaller and there is no high-volume, standardised cycle of the kind Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley run. In ECS's reading that has two consequences. First, timing is less predictable, so a candidate cannot rely on a recruiter's timeline. Second, having met people at the firm, understanding the secondaries practice in depth and having a specific Why Campbell Lutyens answer count for more than they would at a generalist bank or large fund.
Direct undergraduate entry via the Analyst programme
The analyst programme is the main undergraduate route, aimed at final-year UK and European students who can show quantitative depth, commercial judgement and an understanding of how specialist private capital advisory differs from generalist banking. Classes are small. ECS prepares candidates to understand, before interview, how a continuation fund is structured, what a strip sale is, how an LP-led secondary is priced and how a GP-led recapitalisation is staged; ECS's view is that a candidate without that grounding is unlikely to get far. For a candidate committed to specialist advisory, direct entry avoids a generalist banking stint, but it means competing with lateral candidates who already have one or two years of experience.
Lateral from generalist investment banking
Lateral entry from a generalist investment bank is the second pathway. It is taken by Analysts and Associates from bulge bracket M&A or Financial Sponsors Group teams, and from elite boutiques with strong sponsors coverage, typically twelve to twenty-four months into the IB Analyst stint. Lateral candidates compete with analysts the firm has already trained. ECS advises them to be able to explain why secondaries advisory is a better long-term fit than a generalist sponsors role or a move straight to a buy-side fund, and to show a specific understanding of what a specialist secondaries adviser does that a generalist bank does not.
Lateral from a private equity fund-level role
The third pathway is the lateral move from a private equity fund-level seat into Campbell Lutyens at Associate or Vice President level. It is the rarer of the three pathways and is typically driven by a candidate's deliberate choice to move from a direct-investment seat into the advisory side of the secondaries market. The move is relationship-driven, and a senior introduction often matters. Candidates on this path are typically two to four years into a private equity fund, with deal exposure on the buy or sell side, and treat the move as a long-term shift into specialist advisory.
The application process structure
The stages below describe commonly reported patterns rather than a fixed specification; the firm's careers pages are the authoritative source for any current process.
Written applications have asked two main questions: why private equity secondaries, and why Campbell Lutyens. Both are short, and ECS's view is that neither can be answered well without research at practice and transaction level. ECS prepares candidates to show they understand secondaries as a distinct market with its own pricing, liquidity drivers and transaction structures, not as an extension of generic private equity, and to explain what differentiates Campbell Lutyens from other secondaries advisers.
Where online assessments are used, ECS's understanding is that they are less standardised than the volume testing used by the bulge bracket banks. ECS prepares candidates for numerical and commercial reasoning.
Multi-stage interviews are then deployed. These run across phone, video, and in-person rounds depending on stage, and test Why PE secondaries, Why Campbell Lutyens, competency depth, commercial judgement, and technical fluency on secondaries transaction structures. ECS prepares candidates to hold a reasoned view on a secondaries transaction under challenge from senior interviewers.
A modelling exercise has typically featured at later stages, based on a secondaries case: continuation fund pricing, LP portfolio valuation, GP-led recapitalisation mechanics or a structured-secondary returns analysis. It is more specialised than the generic LBO test used in most buy-side processes, and ECS prepares candidates accordingly.
Final rounds are typically with partners. In a small firm, ECS's reading is that those conversations matter a great deal. ECS prepares candidates for questions on judgement, ownership and defending an investment view without becoming rigid, alongside technical accuracy, and for the question of fit that any small team will weigh.
How ECS's six frameworks apply to Campbell Lutyens preparation
ECS's six frameworks were developed by Hassan Akram from his recruitment and advisory practice. They are ECS's preparation tools, not Campbell Lutyens's assessment criteria; the firm does not score candidates against them.
STAR-3® is ECS's competency framework. It is designed to help candidates develop an example in layers rather than as one undifferentiated 'Action' section: the story itself, what the candidate learned, and how they would now operate differently. In ECS's experience, senior interviewers often probe past the first telling of a story, and STAR-3® prepares candidates for that depth.
PEAL-3® is the Why PE secondaries narrative framework. It moves candidates from generic "I am interested in private equity because it combines analytical rigour with strategic thinking" answers to a sequenced, evidence-anchored narrative built on Point, Evidence, Analysis, and Link, repeated across three layers of specificity. At Campbell Lutyens, ECS uses it to build the Why secondaries answer, which in ECS's view doubles as an early test of technical understanding.
PEAL-X® is ECS's firm-motivation framework. For Campbell Lutyens, ECS anchors it on public, verifiable material: the secondary advisory and primary capital advisory practices, the partners named in the firm's own announcements, and its published transaction record on continuation funds, LP-led secondaries and GP-led recapitalisations. The aim is an answer that shows the candidate understands what a specialist private capital adviser does differently from a generalist bank, a private equity fund or a competing adviser, grounded in the firm's actual work.
VTMR™ is ECS's CV framework. It rebuilds each line around Verb, Task, Metric and Result, so that each bullet evidences judgement, ownership or quantitative rigour, the qualities ECS advises an advisory or investment CV to show. Generic society-officer lines and unattributed group-project bullets are replaced with specific, quantified entries the candidate can defend under questioning.
BDC™ is ECS's framework for group exercises (Began, Developed, Confirmed, adapted for buy-side and advisory settings). Where a process includes a group component, it helps candidates balance contribution, listening and leadership. In ECS's observation the two common failure modes in group exercises are silence and dominance; BDC™ is designed to help candidates avoid both.
Commercial Fluency™ is the investment thesis layer that sits underneath every interview answer, and ECS relies on it heavily for Campbell Lutyens. ECS prepares candidates to discuss secondaries with the grounding of a junior professional: how a continuation fund is structured and priced, what drives discounts and premiums in LP-led sales, how a GP-led recapitalisation creates value for the GP, the existing LPs and the secondary buyer, the difference between single-asset and multi-asset continuation vehicles, how the secondaries market has grown relative to private equity as a whole, and where future volume may come from. It also covers value-creation framing, downside, exit logic and the language of LP returns in a secondaries context.
Documented outcomes
ECS has no documented Campbell Lutyens outcome to publish. Some ECS clients choose anonymity; that reflects their preference, not the strength of the outcome, and no client is named on a public page without written consent.
