Coffee Chat Etiquette for IB Recruiting

There is one fact that sits underneath every coffee chat, and almost no student keeps it in mind: you are asking this person for help, and they are in no way obliged to provide it. They are senior to you, busier than you, and a phone call with an undergraduate sits at the very bottom of their list of priorities. They communicate primarily through email, and you would be amazed at how many emails these people get daily. A student chat does not even register.

That asymmetry is not a reason to feel small. It is the lens that makes every rule of conduct in this guide obvious. Once you accept that you are a guest asking a favor of someone who owes you nothing, the etiquette takes care of itself: you behave like a respectful, self-aware guest, and the banker comes away thinking you are easy to help. Get the conduct wrong, and it does not matter how strong your resume is or how clever your questions are. You will have eliminated your chances before you ever got to the part you prepared for.

This piece is about that conduct code. Not the mechanics of what to say, but how to carry yourself so a busy, senior person finishes the call thinking you were respectful rather than entitled, polished rather than robotic. Four things do most of the work: humility, the right formality balance, genuine respect for their time, and a kind of persistence that reads as diligence rather than pestering.

Lead With Humility

The simplest way to say this is: don't be an a**hole on these calls. The people you're talking to are ahead of you, and you should treat them that way. This may not always be true forever, but it is true right now, so be humble and don't say anything that could be construed as arrogant.

Arrogance usually sneaks in through two doors. The first is the absolute statement — describing the banker's own world back to them as if you understand it better than they do. Picture a student saying something like, "Once you've done your two analyst years, the move to private equity is really the only logical step, and I'm sure the modeling work feels pretty routine by now." That sentence leaves no room for an alternative, frames anything other than the assumed path as abnormal, and is prescriptive when it should be inquisitive. You're telling a professional how their career works. Compare the same curiosity phrased humbly: "You did this — here's why I think you did it, but I'd love to hear your perspective." One sounds like a know-it-all who lacks self-awareness. The other sounds like a colleague.

The second door is the show-off question — the convoluted, name-dropping question about markets or a deal that's engineered to display your "knowledge" rather than to learn anything. Trust me, it's obvious. When a student stacks five macro headlines and three regulatory developments into a single breathless question, the banker doesn't think "impressive." They think "this person is performing for me," and whatever rapport you'd built quietly erodes.

The frustrating part is that a sharp, well-informed question is one of the best things you can bring to a chat. The problem is rarely the question itself. It's the placement. Like the old line about restaurants — "location, location, location" — the quality of your question only lands if the timing is right, meaning it actually connects to what they just said. A brilliant question dropped on top of an unrelated answer reads as showing off. The same question, asked in response to something they raised, reads as engagement. You'll only develop a feel for this after ten or twenty chats, so pay down that "ignorance debt" early.

Be Polite, But Not Too Polite

Politeness is where well-meaning students overcorrect. Our instinct, talking to a professional we've never met, is to be as formal and deferential as possible. We don't want to risk saying anything rude or damaging our credibility. That instinct is understandable, but taken too far it works against you, because you are also trying to position yourself as a colleague, and colleagues don't talk to each other in stiff, formal registers.

The most common version of over-politeness is thanking them after every single answer. A student gets nervous and turns into a thank-you machine: "thank you so much for that," after every point, then a profuse round of thanks again at the end. Besides sounding disingenuous, which hurts your rapport, it makes the conversation more formal than it needs to be. Think about where reflexive thank-yous after every answer actually belong: Q&A settings, the exact format you're trying to avoid.

A few other courtesies sit in this same register. Offer to call them rather than making them come to you — it's simple common courtesy, and remember that for all the eggshells you feel like you're walking on, they're normal people too. And in the window after the chat, send a thank-you email. The timing that works is three to twelve hours later, depending on whether your chat was in the morning, afternoon, or evening: long enough to not seem automated, soon enough to still be top of mind.

Respect Their Time and Their Seniority

Everything above flows from respecting their time. A few situations deserve special attention, because students routinely misread them.

Honor hard stops without flinching. If a banker tells you up front they have a hard stop, or they cut the call earlier than you'd scheduled, that is not an insult and not a sign you've done something wrong. Professionals receive last-minute requests that force them to wrap early all the time. You are low on their list of priorities, and that's simply the math of their day, not a verdict on you.

Don't try to read their mood. This is one of the most freeing things to internalize. Trying to decode your "odds" from the banker's demeanor on the call is an impossible battle that serves only to undermine your confidence. Some of the driest, hardest-to-talk-to bankers turn into interview invitations. Some of the warmest, most encouraging ones ghost you completely. A first read on someone's disposition is unreliable and unproductive. Putting on a smile for a student is nowhere near the top of anyone's priority list, so a flat tone might just mean they've had a long day. Take the chat at face value and move on.

Never announce an agenda. There's a temptation, in the name of looking prepared, to open the call by laying out exactly how you'd like it to go. Resist it completely. You are telling someone in a position of relative authority, who just gave up part of a day far busier than yours, how they should run the conversation. How entitled is that? Imagine a high schooler asking how you got into your college, and then sending you a list of logistics — where to meet, what to wear, the exact topics to cover. They may look prepared, but they also look like they have no self-awareness and like their objectives matter more than yours. The structure you follow should be invisible to them, a quiet outline in your head, never an itinerary you hand over.

Ask permission before the "selfish" turn. Late in the chat, you'll pivot to the recruiting questions — timelines, connections, staying in touch. Those are the questions that benefit you rather than them, and the courteous move is to ask before you impose them. A simple time-check that confirms they still have a few minutes for a couple more questions does the work. It signals that you know this part is an ask, and it removes any chance they read your recruiting questions as a sense of entitlement. For exactly how to script that transition and close, see How to End a Coffee Chat and Follow Up.

One more respect signal worth naming, because it's easy to underrate. The introduction you give in the first few minutes — your "Tell Me About Yourself" — is something you do in every chat. If you wing it and stumble through it, you're not just delivering a weak intro. You're signaling that you don't take the other person's time seriously enough to have prepared the one thing you say on every call. A polished delivery, by contrast, tells them you respect the favor they're doing you. The mechanics of building that intro belong elsewhere; for those, see How to Introduce Yourself in a Coffee Chat. The etiquette point is narrower: an unprepared intro is a small act of disrespect, and professionals notice.

Don't Sound Like You've Checked Out

Here is a tiny thing that does outsized damage: failing to vary your acknowledgements. You answer everything they say with "got it," "got it," "got it." You almost certainly are paying attention — very rarely does a student actually zone out on a coffee chat — but it does not sound that way to the banker on the other end. It sounds like you're going through the motions, like you're not actually interested in what they have to say.

The good news is that this is low-hanging fruit. It costs almost nothing to fix. Keep a short list of acknowledgements visible while you talk, and reach for a different one whenever you feel yourself repeating:

"got it," "that makes sense," "thank you for that," "okay," "sounds good"

Having five of these in front of you means that any time you sense you're falling into a rut, you can glance up and swap in another without spending real mental effort on it. Trying to consciously cycle through all of them in order tends to eat more brainpower than it's worth, so don't over-engineer it. The goal is just to never sound like a student who's emotionally left the room.

The same "are you actually listening" principle is why lazy, yes/no questions land so badly. A question you could have answered yourself online — or with thirty seconds in ChatGPT — frustrates the other person, interrupts the flow, and paints you as someone who didn't do their research. Always make your questions look for an opinion rather than a fact. The craft of building those questions belongs to Coffee Chat Questions to Ask in Investment Banking Interviews; the etiquette read is simply that a yes/no question signals you didn't bother, even when you did.

Persist Without Pestering

This is the rule students get most wrong, because the common wisdom — "following up more than X times is rude" — is only half true. Following up is rude when you don't know how to ask for help properly: politely, professionally, and pleasantly. Done well, persistence is one of the strongest signals you can send.

The reason a follow-up feels rude to send is that you're imagining it as a demand. The fix is to phrase it so it removes any blame for not replying and any obligation to have replied, while shrinking the ask to something tiny:

Notice what these lines do. The first hands them an easy, face-saving reason for the silence (your email got buried, which is usually the literal truth) and then minimizes the commitment to five or ten minutes. By shrinking the ask, you make it easier to say yes — it's human nature to feel more inclined to agree to something small. The second simply acknowledges the imbalance: their time is more valuable than yours, and you know it. When a banker doesn't reply, your first instinct is to assume they judged you unworthy. Far more often, they're just slammed, or you slipped their mind. A well-phrased reminder reads as diligence, not desperation.

The Through-Line

Every rule here collapses back into the same idea. You are asking a busy, senior person for a favor they don't owe you, so you behave like a respectful guest: humble about what you don't know, warm without being stiff, careful with their time, attentive on the call, and persistent in a way that reads as effort rather than entitlement. None of it requires you to be impressive. It requires you to be considerate, which is rarer and, frankly, more memorable.

If you want to go deeper on the adjacent pieces — the errors to avoid, the questions that build rapport, the polished intro, the close and the thank-you — see Common Coffee Chat Mistakes in IB Recruiting, Coffee Chat Questions to Ask in Investment Banking Interviews, How to Introduce Yourself in a Coffee Chat, and How to End a Coffee Chat and Follow Up. Carry the guest mindset into all of them, and the etiquette will never be the thing that costs you the referral.