How to Get a Referral From a Coffee Chat

A coffee chat has one job above all others: it is how you earn a referral, and that referral is essentially your ticket to the 1st-round interview. The best chats kill two birds with one stone, earning you the referral and handing you raw material for your interview answers at the same time. Our focus here is squarely on the first bird.

So here is the strange part. If you walk into a coffee chat trying to get a referral, you will almost certainly hurt your odds of getting one. The referral is real, it matters more than anything else, and you must never ask for it. The way I put it to my students: it's everything but asking for the referral that'll get you it.

I know how that sounds. By the time I'm done explaining what to actually aim for, you might be tempted to throw your hands up the way one of my students once did:

Okay Matt, hold on. You were talking about referrals this whole time and then just told me that the aim of coffee chats isn't actually referrals. Then you told me that that new aim was wrong, and that a referral is still the aim but just a different kind of referral. And now you're telling me that, even if I don't get a referral, that doesn't necessarily mean I didn't make the cut? Where are you going with this?

He's right. It sounds confusing, and honestly, it is. What follows are the insights I've gathered from over 300+ of my own coffee chats, from listening to more than 150+ of my students' chats, and from sitting on the other side of the table, coffee-chatted 50+ times myself. Let me untangle it, because once the logic clicks, the entire chat (including the part where you "ask" without asking) gets much simpler.

What you're actually aiming for

The aim of any coffee chat is to improve your odds of receiving a 1st-round interview invitation. Notice I didn't say "to get a referral." That is deliberate. Ninety-nine percent of the time you won't know whether you got one until the very day invitations go out. If you make the referral itself the explicit goal of the chat, you're holding yourself to a standard you can't see and can't measure.

Worse, you'll spend the call trying to decode your odds from the other person's tone, and that is an impossible, confidence-destroying game. When I was recruiting, I got invitations from firms whose people were dry and painful to talk to, and got ghosted by firms whose people had told me I was in pole position. My read on them was completely wrong and totally unproductive.

The flip side matters too. If they won't connect you with anyone, you're probably not getting that 1st-round interview. Either something in the chat told them you weren't ready, or they've already shortlisted candidates and see another introduction as wasted time.

That said, don't over-read it. Putting on a smile for a student is nowhere near the top of anyone's priority list. Not getting an introduction is generally a bad sign, but what if they're so slammed they simply forgot? We all have off days. The proxy is a signal, not a verdict.

The deeper reason all of this feels slippery is that coffee chats are opaque. You can't see what happens behind closed doors between HR, the analysts, and the associates. There is no silver bullet, no one-size-fits-all script that reliably converts chats into referrals. What works on one person flops with the next. This year's process involves different people than last year's. Maybe you're genuinely not the right behavioral fit. If I've learned anything, it's that consistency is king. A handful of things sit fully inside your control, and nailing them in every chat is what lets a student with less experience beat one with more. Let's walk through them, and how they build toward the close.

The two conditions every referral requires

Before any in-chat tactic matters, understand that a referral sits on top of two non-negotiable conditions. They are necessary but not sufficient: meet both and you're in the running; miss either and the best conversation in the world won't save you.

First, your resume has to clear the bar. Networking alone will not get you a 1st-round interview. Your resume needs a certain threshold of relevant experience before any amount of rapport will move the needle. A great chat amplifies a qualified candidate; it doesn't manufacture one. This is also why your outreach lands in the first place: people take chats with students whose resumes look commensurate with the firm.

Second, you have to express genuine interest in the firm. This is partly implicit, since you reached out in the first place, but you cannot leave it implicit. Late in the chat you make it explicit, in words, and I'll give you the exact line in the close. A professional has no reason to spend their referral on someone who never actually said they want the job.

Hold both of these in mind, because everything that follows assumes they're true.

Where a referral can actually come from

You can't earn a referral from someone who isn't in a position to give one, so it helps to know where they originate. The full "who to target, and in what order" strategy is a subject of its own. Here's the part you need for the referral itself.

Analysts are the group you're most likely to get a referral from. They're closest to you in age, they're the most likely to reply to a cold email, and for most firms a good word from an analyst (sometimes even a past or incoming intern) is enough to back you for a 1st-round interview. If you're short on time, a single strong analyst chat is your highest-value move.

Referrals also flow up and down a hierarchy. Have a great chat with an associate and they may refer you up to a VP or down to an analyst. When they send you down, the associate is trusting that the analyst's recency and proximity in age make for the most accurate read on you. When there's a VP running point, that VP often uses analysts and associates as a first line of defense, taking calls only with students his juniors have already vetted. At firms built like that, getting to the "gatekeeper" is essential.

HR is a different animal. Some firms lean heavily on HR for first rounds. Bank of America, for example, runs all of its 1st-round interviews as group coffee chats conducted by an HR employee, in stark contrast to a firm like Moelis, whose first rounds are always carried out by analysts and associates. The thing to know is that HR tends to evaluate you rather than refer you. They'll drive the conversation, actively ask the questions, and assess your candidacy from start to finish. It's easy to get an HR chat and much harder to turn one into a referral, so reach HR only after you've spoken with a handful of analysts or associates.

One practical knock-on effect: when you eventually email a senior person, naming the colleagues you've already spoken with helps prevent being quietly forwarded back "down" the hierarchy, and it signals real work ethic. For ready-to-send outreach wording, see the Email Networking Course.

The three controllables that earn it

Once the two conditions are met, the chat itself comes down to three things you fully control. Each is worth a deep dive in its own right. Here's the principle for each and how it feeds the referral.

Step 1: Ace your introduction. The "tell me about yourself" exchange in the first two to five minutes is the lens through which the other person views you for the rest of the call. It happens in every chat, which makes it a constant, and any constant has to be perfect, because other students (some with weaker resumes than yours) will deliver theirs flawlessly. Your TMAY should contain the most important, most impressive professional facts about you, and your delivery should be clean: no "um," no "you know," no trailing "annddd." Perfecting your introduction is the single highest-ROI thing you can do in recruiting, because everyone who can give you an interview is, right now, a stranger. Acing the intro is Step 1 to securing a referral.

Step 2: Have a conversation, not a Q&A. Here's the simplest test I know. Past the small talk and the intros, if the other person is talking more than 80% of the time, you're running a Q&A. If the split is closer to 60/40, you're having a conversation. A Q&A never produces a referral. The fix isn't "talk more," it's talking about the right things: summarize what they just said to prove you understood it, connect it to a relevant experience of your own or a point you want to clarify, then ask your next question. That turns a flat, simple question into a richer, targeted one and shows you were genuinely listening. The full mechanics of doing this well are a topic of their own; the principle is what matters here.

Step 3: Build rapport. Most of your questions should be the "selfless" kind, the ones the other person actually enjoys answering. Analysts often like talking about how they broke in; associates about their first big deal; a VP about the first deal they ran point on. The more you get someone talking about themselves, the more they like you, and the more inclined they are to vouch for you. Layer in small, specific "one-uppers" pulled from their background, and over time those moments compound. For me, they were a big part of what led to referrals at elite-boutique banks like Perella Weinberg Partners, Moelis, and Evercore. For how to open a chat well, watch the "How To: Small Talk" video, which covers small-talk best practices in depth.

The close: how to "ask" without asking

This is the part that's unique to earning a referral, and it's where most students either fumble or chicken out. The good news: because you're not actually asking for the referral, there's nothing to be nervous about.

Timing first. You want to transition to your closing questions at around the 20-minute mark, and at the very latest by the 15-minute mark. By now the other person has been assessing you since "hello," so the outcome is largely decided. Your job is to extract a few specific things without ever sounding entitled.

Start with a polite transition that asks permission. This one move eliminates any chance they read your upcoming "selfish" questions as entitlement:

Then, before the questions, make your interest explicit. Remember the second condition: you have to say, out loud, that you want this. Here is the line:

Now the three essential recruitment questions. There are three you ask every time: [1] Interview Timelines, [2] Teammate Connections, and [3] Staying in Touch. In the call itself, I put the connection request first, right after expressing interest.

Teammate Connection (this is the actual referral ask):

Interview (Application) Timelines:

Staying In Touch:

Ask all three, every time, regardless of how the call felt. It never hurts. And because you're not asking for a referral outright, you never put someone in the awkward position of saying "no." The most you'll typically get is "let me get back to you on that," followed by silence. If that happens, don't spiral. You are very low on their priority list and they may simply have forgotten. You'll re-surface the request in your thank-you email.

After the chat

End the call the way you started it, warmly and briefly. Thank them for their time and ask to stay in touch:

If it feels natural, repeat back one or two things they said and why you found them interesting or useful.

Then, in the 3 to 12 hours after the chat (sooner for a morning or afternoon call, later for an evening one), send a thank-you email. This note does double duty: it thanks them, and it gently reminds them of anything they said they'd "get back to you" on, alongside the most memorable points from your conversation. This is where that stalled teammate-connection request gets a second life. For ready-to-use follow-up wording, see the Email Networking Course, and if you're unsure how often to follow up afterward, the Networking Journey Miro Mind Map lays out the appropriate cadence.

Finally, learn to read the chat correctly. Resist the urge to triangulate your exact odds, but do form a rough sense of whether the person was engaged. I use the word "engaged" deliberately, because it's neutral as to their impression of you: someone can be unimpressed by one thing you said and still engaged enough to keep evaluating you. The simplest gauge is the length of their answers. The longer they talk, the more engaged they likely are.

And if they declined to connect you with anyone, that's generally a bad sign for your 1st-round odds, but it is not a verdict. People get busy, forget, and have bad days. Where you should actually worry is if they dodged or gave curt answers to all of your closing questions. At that point your odds are probably zero, and the most useful thing you can do is reflect, right after the chat, on how you introduced yourself, how you framed your questions, and how you responded. That honest post-mortem, along with listening to peers' chats or having someone review yours, is the single best way to make your next chat better.

The whole system rests on one idea. You can't control the referral, so you stop chasing it. Instead you control your resume bar, a clean introduction, a real conversation, genuine rapport, and a polite close that asks to be connected with other people while saying, plainly, that you'd like to replicate what they have. Do those consistently, in every single chat, and the referral takes care of itself. Because in the end, it's everything but asking for the referral that'll get you it.