How to Apply to PSP Investments

8 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 2 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • PSP Investments uses Workday as its only application channel — apply at investpsp.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com and build a thorough candidate profile the first time.
  • Headquartered in Ottawa but the commercial and investment center is Montreal, with global offices in London, New York, and Hong Kong.
  • Maple 8 peer of CPP, CDPQ, OTPP, OMERS, BCI, IMCO, HOOPP, and AIMCo — comparable mission, slightly more conservative comp, and a stronger public-sector reporting overlay.
  • Two distinct hiring tracks: investment professionals (Private Equity, Real Estate, Infrastructure, Private Credit, Natural Resources, Public Markets, Capital Markets) and corporate professionals (Risk, Technology, Finance, HR, Legal, Communications).
  • Bilingual French/English is a meaningful asset across the Montreal HQ and a requirement for a subset of corporate roles.
  • Interview culture rewards long-term fiduciary thinking, intellectual humility, and cross-functional collaboration — not deal-jock theatrics.
  • Total compensation includes a defined-benefit pension under the Public Service Superannuation Act, which materially changes the long-term math relative to private-sector finance offers.

About PSP Investments

PSP Investments — formally the Public Sector Pension Investment Board — is one of Canada's largest pension fund managers and a member of the so-called Maple 8 alongside CPP Investments, CDPQ, OTPP, OMERS, BCI, IMCO, HOOPP, and AIMCo. As of fiscal year 2025 PSP manages roughly C$269 billion in net assets on behalf of the federal Public Service, the Canadian Forces, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the Reserve Force pension plans. Those obligations exist under the Public Service Superannuation Act and other federal statutes, which means PSP ultimately reports to Parliament through the President of the Treasury Board. That public-sector lineage shapes everything from compensation philosophy to risk appetite to how the talent function describes itself. The organization is headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, but its commercial and investment headquarters sit in Montreal, Quebec, where the majority of investment professionals, technology staff, and corporate functions are based. PSP also operates from London, New York, and Hong Kong to support its international Private Equity, Real Estate, Infrastructure, Private Credit, and Natural Resources teams. Headcount is approximately 1,400 employees across all offices — small relative to CPP Investments or CDPQ, but large enough to staff fully internalized investment teams across every major asset class. Deborah Orida has served as President and CEO since September 2022, joining from CPP Investments where she was Chief Sustainability Officer and Senior Managing Director. Under her leadership the 2024-2026 strategic plan emphasizes scale through total fund management, expansion of Private Credit, deeper sustainable-investing integration, and disciplined growth of the global office footprint. The Office of the Chief Investment Officer oversees asset-class teams led by Senior Managing Directors who report up to a CIO function rather than running independent silos — a structural choice that affects how investment hires are slotted and how cross-asset collaboration is rewarded. For candidates, PSP occupies a distinct niche in the Canadian institutional landscape. It is large enough to compete for senior investment talent against CPP, OTPP, and CDPQ, but its public-sector accountability model and Ottawa reporting structure make it more conservative on compensation than the Toronto-based plans. Glassdoor and LinkedIn reviews consistently describe a calmer, more family-friendly culture than CPP, slower decision cycles than CDPQ, and a strong defined-benefit pension for employees themselves. If you want world-class investment exposure with a public-mission overlay and bilingual Montreal energy, PSP is one of the most coherent options in Canadian asset management.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Open the public careers site at investpsp

    Open the public careers site at investpsp.com/en/work/careers/ to read the team pages, leadership bios, and the latest annual report before you ever touch the job board — interviewers expect candidates to reference specifics from PSP's strategic plan.

  2. 2
    Click through to the Workday job board at investpsp

    Click through to the Workday job board at investpsp.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/psp_careers, which is the single canonical posting source — postings on LinkedIn, Indeed, or eFinancialCareers all redirect back here.

  3. 3
    Create a Workday candidate profile (you cannot apply without one)

    Create a Workday candidate profile (you cannot apply without one). Use a personal email, fill in the parsed-resume fields rather than relying on the auto-extract, and add both English and French language proficiencies if applicable.

  4. 4
    Submit a tailored resume plus a short cover letter

    Submit a tailored resume plus a short cover letter — PSP's investment and corporate teams both read cover letters seriously, and applications without one are visibly weaker in the Workday recruiter view.

  5. 5
    Expect an initial screen by a Talent Acquisition Partner within one to three wee

    Expect an initial screen by a Talent Acquisition Partner within one to three weeks for active reqs; PSP's recruiting team is centralized in Montreal and works business hours Eastern Time.

  6. 6
    Move into a hiring-manager interview, then a panel of two to four cross-function

    Move into a hiring-manager interview, then a panel of two to four cross-functional interviewers. Investment roles add a case study or modelling exercise; technology roles add a technical screen; corporate roles add a behavioural deep-dive.

  7. 7
    Complete reference checks and a third-party background check (criminal, credit f

    Complete reference checks and a third-party background check (criminal, credit for finance roles, education verification) — PSP is a federally regulated entity and the background process is stricter than typical private-sector checks.

  8. 8
    Receive a written offer with base, short-term incentive target, long-term incent

    Receive a written offer with base, short-term incentive target, long-term incentive eligibility, the defined-benefit pension enrollment, and your work-location designation — PSP currently runs a hybrid model with three days per week in office for most roles.

Resume Tips for PSP Investments

recommended

Lead with your asset-class fluency

Lead with your asset-class fluency. PSP organizes investment teams by Private Equity, Real Estate, Infrastructure, Private Credit, Natural Resources, Public Markets, and Capital Markets — name the asset class explicitly in your headline and most recent role.

recommended

Quantify total-fund or AUM impact

Quantify total-fund or AUM impact. Recruiters skim for dollar-weighted accomplishments: deal sizes closed, portfolio NAV managed, basis points of alpha generated, or operational cost saved — generic 'led a team' bullets get cut.

recommended

Mention bilingual capability if you have it

Mention bilingual capability if you have it. French/English proficiency is an asset for almost every Montreal-based role and a near-requirement for several corporate functions; list it under a clearly labelled Languages section near the top.

recommended

Use Workday-friendly formatting: single column, no text boxes, no tables, no hea

Use Workday-friendly formatting: single column, no text boxes, no tables, no headers/footers, standard fonts (Arial, Calibri, Garamond), and a .docx or text-layer PDF — Workday's parser is one of the stricter ones and will silently drop content from creative layouts.

recommended

Show familiarity with institutional benchmarks

Show familiarity with institutional benchmarks. Mention CFA, CAIA, FRM, CPA, CBV, or actuarial designations explicitly; for tech roles call out cloud certifications (AWS, Azure), data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks), and any FactSet/Bloomberg/MSCI/Burgiss tooling.

recommended

Highlight regulated-environment experience

Highlight regulated-environment experience. Working at a bank, insurer, OSFI-regulated entity, government department, Crown corporation, or another Maple 8 plan is a strong signal — name the regulator and the framework (e.g., OSFI E-21, SOX, NI 31-103) where relevant.

recommended

Surface ESG / sustainable investing exposure

Surface ESG / sustainable investing exposure. PSP publishes a separate Sustainable Investment Report and the function is well-resourced; even one well-described ESG project on your resume materially helps.

recommended

Keep it to two pages maximum for non-executive roles, three pages for SMD/MD lev

Keep it to two pages maximum for non-executive roles, three pages for SMD/MD level. Canadian institutional norms run shorter than US investment banking resumes — recruiters at PSP are reading dozens per req and rewarding clarity.

ATS System: Workday

PSP Investments uses Workday as its applicant tracking system, hosted at investpsp.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com under the psp_careers tenant. Workday is the dominant ATS across the Maple 8 — CPP Investments, OTPP, CDPQ, OMERS, BCI, and HOOPP all use the same platform — so the same profile-creation workflow, file-format constraints, and parsing quirks apply across the entire Canadian pension peer set.

  • Build your Workday profile thoroughly the first time. Workday auto-fills future applications from the saved profile, so the work history, education, and skills sections you save become the source of truth for every PSP req you apply to going forward.
  • Upload a .docx if possible. Workday's resume parser handles Word documents more reliably than PDFs; if you must use PDF, generate from Word or Google Docs with selectable text, never a scanned or image-flattened export.
  • Avoid all multi-column layouts, text boxes, header/footer regions, and embedded icons or graphics — Workday parses left-to-right line-by-line and these constructs cause severe content loss.
  • Spell out acronyms at least once: 'Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB)', 'Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI)' — Workday's keyword matching does not expand acronyms automatically.
  • Set up a Workday job alert from your candidate profile. Alerts fire within hours of new postings, which matters because investment-team reqs often close to applications within seven to ten days of going live.
  • If you applied previously, sign in to your existing profile rather than creating a duplicate — PSP recruiters can see prior applications and duplicate accounts can flag a weaker process discipline.

Interview Culture

PSP interviews are structured, multi-round, and noticeably more collegial than the Bay Street or Wall Street equivalents.

Expect a recruiter screen, a hiring-manager conversation, a technical or case round (modelling test for investment roles, system design or coding for tech, scenario-based for risk and corporate), and a panel that may include a peer, a cross-functional partner, and a senior leader. Most rounds are virtual via Microsoft Teams; final rounds are increasingly in-person in Montreal or Ottawa, particularly for investment and senior leadership roles. Interviewers are trained on a competency framework that emphasizes intellectual humility, collaboration, judgement under uncertainty, and what PSP internally calls 'long-term ownership' — your answers should show patience, attention to second-order effects, and comfort with ambiguity rather than aggressive deal-jock energy. Bilingual candidates may be asked one or two questions in French to confirm working proficiency; this is informational, not adversarial. Behavioural questions lean on the STAR format and frequently probe how you have navigated disagreement with a senior stakeholder, how you have handled a position that went against you, and what you have learned about your own decision-making. Compensation conversations happen late, are anchored to PSP's salary bands, and the upside relative to private-sector finance comes through the defined-benefit pension and long-term incentive plan rather than aggressive cash bonuses.

What PSP Investments Looks For

  • Long-term, fiduciary mindset — candidates who can articulate the difference between maximizing a single deal IRR and stewarding a multi-decade pension obligation.
  • Demonstrated technical depth in the asset class, function, or technology stack you are applying for, with specific named examples rather than generalist language.
  • Bilingual French/English capability is a meaningful tiebreaker for Montreal-based roles and a hard requirement for a subset of communications, legal, HR, and executive support roles.
  • Comfort operating in a federally accountable, audit-rich environment — prior experience at a Crown corporation, regulator, Big Four, OSFI-regulated bank or insurer, or another Maple 8 plan reads as low-risk.
  • Cross-functional collaboration — PSP's total-fund operating model rewards investment professionals who can work with Risk, Tax, Legal, ESG, and Technology rather than treating those teams as obstacles.
  • Sustainable investing literacy — familiarity with TCFD, SBTi, net-zero alignment frameworks, and the practical mechanics of integrating ESG into underwriting is a real differentiator.
  • Geographic flexibility for global roles — willingness to spend time in London, New York, or Hong Kong is genuinely tested for senior investment hires expected to cover international portfolios.
  • Cultural humility — PSP recruiters explicitly screen against 'star culture' behaviour; candidates who center the team, the portfolio, and the beneficiary land better than candidates who center themselves.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ATS does PSP Investments use to receive job applications?
PSP Investments uses Workday, hosted at investpsp.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/psp_careers. Every PSP role — Ottawa, Montreal, London, New York, and Hong Kong — flows through this single Workday tenant, and there is no alternate email or LinkedIn-only application path for posted roles.
Where is PSP Investments headquartered, and where will I actually work?
PSP is legally headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, but its commercial and investment headquarters is in Montreal, Quebec, where the majority of investment, technology, and corporate staff sit. International offices are in London, New York, and Hong Kong. Most postings name a primary office, and PSP currently operates a hybrid model that expects roughly three days per week in office.
Do I need to speak French to work at PSP Investments?
Not for every role, but bilingual French/English is a meaningful asset across the Montreal headquarters and a hard requirement for some corporate, communications, legal, HR, and executive support positions. Investment roles based in London, New York, and Hong Kong are English-primary. List your French proficiency clearly on your resume if you have it.
How does PSP Investments compensation compare to CPP Investments, CDPQ, and OTPP?
PSP sits within the Maple 8 compensation envelope but tends to run slightly below CPP and OTPP on cash compensation while offering a stronger defined-benefit pension under the Public Service Superannuation Act. Long-term incentive plans, short-term bonuses, and pension accrual together produce competitive total comp, particularly for tenured employees, but candidates optimizing only for cash should model the all-in package carefully.
What is PSP Investments' current AUM and strategic direction?
PSP managed approximately C$269 billion in net assets at the end of fiscal year 2025. The 2024-2026 strategic plan emphasizes total-fund management, expansion of Private Credit, deeper integration of sustainable investing across asset classes, and disciplined international growth out of London, New York, and Hong Kong under President and CEO Deborah Orida.
How long does the PSP interview process typically take?
Most processes run four to eight weeks from initial recruiter screen to written offer. Investment Management Track roles tend to run on the longer end because of additional case studies, panel scheduling across geographies, and reference depth. Corporate roles can move faster, particularly when a hiring manager has a clear short list.
Does PSP sponsor work permits for international candidates?
PSP has sponsored work permits for senior and specialized roles, particularly in Investment Management, Risk, and Technology. Sponsorship is decided role by role and is more common for hard-to-fill, senior positions than for entry-level corporate roles. The London, New York, and Hong Kong offices have their own immigration norms and timelines.
What background checks should I expect from PSP Investments?
PSP runs criminal-record verification, education and employment verification, professional-designation verification (CFA, CPA, etc.), and credit checks for roles with financial signing authority. As a federally accountable entity the process is more thorough than typical private-sector checks and can take two to three weeks; respond to verification requests promptly to avoid delaying your start date.
What does PSP Investments look for in an investment-team candidate?
Recruiters and hiring managers screen for asset-class depth, fiduciary mindset, comfort with multi-decade time horizons, intellectual humility, and the ability to collaborate across Risk, Legal, Tax, ESG, and Technology. Candidates who center the portfolio and the beneficiary outperform candidates who center their personal deal sheet.
How can I get my resume noticed if PSP Investments is not currently posting my target role?
Set up a Workday job alert from a candidate profile so you are notified within hours of any new posting that matches your filters. Build relationships with PSP investment and corporate professionals on LinkedIn, attend Maple 8 industry events, and consider sister-organization moves — talent moves regularly between PSP, CPP, OTPP, CDPQ, OMERS, BCI, IMCO, and HOOPP, and prior Maple 8 experience is a strong signal.

Open Positions

PSP Investments currently has 2 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 2 open positions at PSP Investments

Related Resources

Related Articles

Sources

  1. PSP Investments — Careers (Public Site) —
  2. PSP Investments — Workday Job Board —
  3. PSP Investments — About Us —
  4. PSP Investments — Annual Report Fiscal Year 2025 —
  5. PSP Investments — Sustainable Investment Report —
  6. Public Service Superannuation Act (Justice Laws Canada) —
  7. Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions — Pension Oversight —
  8. Workday — Candidate Help (Job Search and Profile) —