How to Run an Investment Banking Coffee Chat

Start with your school or club channel if you have one, since recruiters expect you to use it and clubs have rules about who contacts whom. If there is no school pipeline, use the alumni database, LinkedIn, or cold email, and start with alumni near your level: a thoughtful analyst or associate conversation beats a generic MD cold email. Keep the email under five sentences with a subject line like '[School] Informational Call': who you are, one specific reason you want to speak with this person, three 1-hour windows, and your resume attached. Offer weekday windows between 8 AM and 8 PM in their time zone, start them on the hour or the half hour, and name the zone every time. Block those windows on your own calendar the moment the email goes out, because offering a time you no longer have burns the contact. If there is no reply after five to seven business days, follow up once. Persistence is expected; pestering is not.

Build your questions in advance and tune them to the seat, because an analyst, a VP, and an MD can each answer different things. Two categories are worth knowing about before you get on the call: questions that invite a bad memory, and questions that probe something on their LinkedIn they may not have chosen. Both land badly and you will not see it coming, and both have safer versions that get you the same information. Stay off compensation, your chances, and the referral itself, and save the last two minutes for the one ask that matters: who else you should be speaking with.

Yes. Coffee chats are casual in tone but evaluative in function. Bankers assess your preparation, communication skills, and genuine interest, and the first few minutes carry more weight than the rest of the call. Treat every chat as an interview regardless of how it is framed. These conversations are pipeline components: they generate first-round interviews, especially at boutique firms where networking is mandatory.

The number is not fixed, and it varies more by firm than most advice admits. Some processes are structured and short; others expect a long run of conversations before anyone puts you forward. You do not find out which one you are in until it is over, so plan for the high end. One conversation rarely converts, so run several per target firm, especially at boutiques where networking is mandatory. First rounds go to candidates someone inside is pushing, and that push starts in these conversations, so end every chat by asking who else you should speak to.