Introduction
Recently, a client asked me why one of our shortlisted junior candidates was priced so far above the others. All the candidates on the list held the same title: junior analyst, with almost identical years of experience.
I told him the truth: the numbers alone were never going to tell him much. That’s why we always prepare a qualitative description of each candidate alongside the hard numbers.
Half a year of an internship spent on repetitive execution does not equal a year in investment banking spent actually learning and understanding the process. Two analysts can carry the exact same title and be standing in completely different places, and the title itself will never show you where.
AI takes over the routine execution
This gap used to be easier to miss, because the work itself hid it.
The early years in a Big Four M&A or valuations team teach useful discipline. You learn to work accurately under pressure, manage multiple workstreams at once, and produce analysis that withstands review.
You also learn something else along the way: a technically correct answer can still be commercially unhelpful.
That distinction becomes more important now, as the standard parts of the job become easier to produce.
Research, market summaries, precedent transactions, first-pass drafting, and parts of the modelling process can now be completed faster than before. This doesn’t remove the need for junior professionals. But it does mean routine execution stops being what sets one junior apart from another, which is exactly the gap my client’s question was about.
Greenhouse’s research on hiring in private equity put it well: AI is automating nearly everything except the parts that only humans can do. The tools handle the prep, so that people can spend their time on evaluation, relationships, and decisions.
Which sounds great on paper, until a junior has to do it on their own, but has never been trained how.
Judgement is not only the CEO's job
The junior who moves up in their career will still need a strong technical base. The difference is that senior colleagues will increasingly expect something beyond clean output, and they’re starting to expect it earlier.
There’s a reason this shows up sooner than most firms plan for.
I recently came across some interesting data from Russell Reynolds’ research: a failed CEO hire can cost up to 15 times base salary once you count the lost productivity around it. That’s a steep price for getting talent wrong. That’s why the best firms now bring talent judgement into the deal cycle earlier rather than after the fact. Leadership referencing and culture diagnostics have become standard inputs to the investment committee, not an afterthought bolted on later.
It might seem beside the point here, since we’re talking about juniors, not CEOs. But the logic applies just as much further down. If judgement only gets tested once someone is already senior, you find out too late whether they have it.
What "beyond execution" means
In M&A, going beyond execution means understanding why a process is losing momentum, whether buyer interest is genuine, and whether the equity story is convincing outside the presentation itself.
In valuations, it means recognising when the underlying information does not support the level of precision in the model. It also means seeing when the real disagreement isn’t about methodology at all, but about misaligned expectations.
Neither of these is separate from the technical work. They’re what makes the technical work useful.
Why this matters more in Central Europe
This is particularly relevant in Central Europe. Many transactions in this region still involve founder-led businesses, uneven reporting, and management teams that understand their companies better than they can explain them on a call.
The fragment from EY Luxembourg’s article on family-owned businesses captures the scale of it well:
“Within the next decade, nearly 40% of European family-owned businesses expect a leadership or ownership transition, but only 30% have a formal succession plan in place.”
Multiply that gap across a region where founder-led companies are the norm, rather than the exception, and you start to see why a junior who leans too hard on templates will miss half the story.
The better professionals learn to read the situation as well as the numbers.
They notice where the data is weak, where management is avoiding a point, and where the formal brief does not quite reflect the real problem. They do not need to dominate the meeting. They need to understand what matters before everyone else has finished discussing what’s visible.
That is usually when progression begins.
Not when the work becomes faster, but when the judgement behind it becomes useful.
Same title, different person
This is what I was really trying to explain to that client.
One junior analyst does not equal another junior analyst.
We see the practical side of this gap constantly in our own work. In FirstPoint Partners’ compensation & benefits report across Polish PE funds we prepared in 2025, the hardest range to benchmark was 0 to 3 years of experience.
Two candidates with the same job title can arrive with completely different levels of readiness. One might be straight out of a three-week internship. Another might already have a year and a half in investment banking or consulting. Their title says analyst either way.
Base salaries in that bracket ranged from roughly 8,000 to 23,000 PLN, with a median around 16,750. That’s a wide spread for one job title on paper.
Funds aren’t just pricing years of experience, but also judgement. And judgement doesn’t arrive on a fixed schedule.
Closing thoughts
That client did end up hiring the more expensive candidate. Why? Because our qualitative notes described someone who’d already learned to sit with an uncomfortable number rather than smooth it over.
That’s really what he was paying for, even if the invoice never says so.
The title on a CV was never going to capture that. Neither will a model, however clean. The only way to see it is to ask the right question early and pay attention to the answer.
