The Importance of Deal Size

Yes and no.

• larger firms often have better training and just higher caliber people. As a result, they are given preference in recruiting. As an example, Goldman Sachs vs some regional investment bank. You likely know this.
• really small deals can be simpler in diligence complexity and operations and as a result the experience isn’t really the same as someone facilitating an m&a transaction. In other words, if the largest transaction your bank has seen is <$100m there just a different caliber person that usually works at those places and the transactions are different
• If you are saying does a PE firm care about the size of the deals you’ve done? As in two candidates coming from the same shop or similar, are people giving preference to the one who has done larger deals? the answer is no. For a few reasons:

1. size of deal doesn’t really matter past certain inflection points in terms of how the process is run. There’s micro deals, mm/umm deals, and massive deals. Mm/umm deals and massive deals are mostly the same aside from there being fewer buyers for larger transactions and public market considerations are often weighed more heavily. But really the analyst role and experience is going to be pretty similar if you work at Goldman Sachs and do a $500m transaction or a $5B transaction.
2. Size of deal is ultimately out of your control and based on staffing needs over your skill or ability. Further, recruiting is often done before you have even closed a transaction. So this concept of comparing deal experience is pretty meaningless anyway.
3. Being staffed on a transaction isn’t closing a transaction. Lots of analysts are “on deal teams”, but what matters is what you did on a transaction. If you joined a 6 month process for the last half month, you didn’t really do much. What matters when talking about deal experience is what you were directly responsible for—running the model, facilitating diligence, etc.