How to Research Someone Before a Coffee Chat

When I was recruiting, I brought two laptops to school with me every day. To most people that looked like overkill, and honestly, they weren't wrong. But to me it was simply doing my due diligence. Before every chat I wanted every detail about the person I was speaking to right there at my fingertips, no Alt+Tabbing required, so I could speak to them as an individual rather than as a job title.

That is the whole idea behind researching someone before a coffee chat: you are doing due diligence on a human being. You wouldn't pitch an investment without understanding the asset. You shouldn't walk into a conversation with a banker without understanding the banker.

This article is about how to get there. Not the full pre-chat ritual of documents and dashboards, that's a separate piece, but the narrower, higher-leverage skill of investigating one specific person so thoroughly that your small talk, your questions, and even your introduction could only have been written for them.

Why You Research the Person, Not the Role

Most students prepare for the firm. They read about the bank, memorize a few recent deals, maybe skim the league tables, and walk in armed with facts that any of the other hundred students reaching out that month could also recite. That preparation isn't worthless, but it doesn't separate you, because it isn't yours. It's generic by design.

There's a reason this works. To a senior banker, a student is nowhere near an asset, so they often do nothing more than answer your questions curtly. The thing that changes that dynamic is rapport, and rapport is built on specificity. You cannot build rapport with someone you've treated as interchangeable. The name-swap test is your guardrail against exactly that.

Start With Their LinkedIn

Almost everything you need begins on one page: their LinkedIn profile. But don't read it the way most people do, scanning for a job title and a school name. Read it as a timeline. Read it as a story with chapters.

When someone introduces themselves, their background tends to fall into a handful of natural chapters, and you can map most of these straight off their profile before the chat even starts:

• Pre-college — often a sport or an activity they did at a high level. This is rapport gold and almost nobody digs for it.
• College — the finance catalyst, the clubs they joined, their recruitment story, their internships.
• Post-college — the full-time analyst years, the "figuring it out" phase, how they landed at their current firm.
• Their 20s (for more senior bankers) — switching careers, a notable professional accomplishment, moving cities or countries.

Mapping these chapters does two things. First, it tells you what's actually interesting and unique about this person, which is where your personalized questions will come from. Second, it gives you the implicit chronology you'll want to follow once you're in the conversation, so your questions feel organized rather than scattered. The person probably won't be able to tell you're following a structure. What they will feel is the absence of confusion, and that clarity rubs off on how they perceive you.

Read the profile closely enough and the "chapters" practically hand you your material. A two-year stint at a boutique before a move to a larger shop is a chapter. A pivot from equity research into banking is a chapter. A college spent rowing at a varsity level is a chapter. Each one is a door you can knock on later.

What to Actually Research

Once you've read their LinkedIn and mapped their timeline, you go digging. There are four buckets worth your time, and the first two flow directly out of what their profile told you.

Their Coverage or Product Group

This is the richest vein. Depending on what they'd disclosed on LinkedIn, I'd do research on market trends and M&A activity relating to their coverage or product group. If they're in Technology, I want to know what's happening in tech M&A right now. If they're in Energy, I'm reading up on the sector's recent deal activity and where valuations are moving.

The point isn't to memorize headlines so you can recite them. It's to understand their world well enough that, when they mention a deal or a trend, you can respond intelligently instead of just nodding. Your questions become anchored in the reality of their job, not in a generic notion of "investment banking."

Their City

This one is underrated and easy. I'd search for any notable headlines in the cities the people I spoke with were from, namely Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco. A local headline is a perfect, low-stakes small-talk hook. It signals you paid attention to where they actually are, and it gives the opening minutes of the chat somewhere natural to go.

Their Personal Interests and Background

This is where the chapters pay off. An activity they played in high school, a club they led in college, a cause they're involved in. These are the rapport hooks that most students walk straight past. You're not researching these to interrogate someone about their hobbies. You're researching them so that, if the moment arises, you have something genuine to connect on. People like talking about themselves, and the more you let them, the more they'll like you.

News to Seed Your Small Talk

I'd keep a few news articles handy. In my case it was Bain's annual Private Equity Report, and I'd use those to inform the small talk I'd have at the beginning of every coffee chat. The article was a starting point, not a script. It gave me something current and credible to open with, tuned to the kind of person I was about to speak with.

Notice how all four buckets feed each other. Their LinkedIn tells you their group; their group tells you which market trends to read; their city tells you which headlines to check; their chapters tell you which interests to look for. The research isn't four separate chores. It's one investigation with the person at the center.

Turn Your Research Into 5–10 Personalized Questions

Research is only useful if it becomes something you can say. The deliverable is a short list of questions built specifically around this person.

Before every chat, spend time researching the industries, asset classes, markets, firms, or geographies relevant to the professional after looking through their LinkedIn profile, and then write your questions down.

Create at least 5 questions specific to this person (i.e., if we replaced this person's name with someone else's the question would no longer make sense).

That parenthetical is the whole game. Read each question you've written and run the name-swap test on it. If it survives being pointed at a stranger, cut it or sharpen it until it doesn't.

Let me show you what the pipeline looks like end to end, with a hypothetical banker so you can see the moving parts.

The research: Suppose I'm chatting with an analyst in the Industrials group at a bank's Chicago office. Her LinkedIn shows two years at a boutique before she lateraled to her current firm, and a college spent rowing on the varsity team. So I read up on recent industrials M&A and where deal activity in the sector has been heading. I check the Chicago headlines from the past week. And I note the boutique-to-larger-firm move and the rowing background as personal chapters.

The question it produces: "I saw you spent your first couple of years at a boutique before moving over to your current group, and I imagine the Industrials deal flow looks pretty different at the two. From the work I've been reading about where industrials M&A has been heading recently, I'd have guessed the move gave you a wider range of deals to work on, but I'd love to hear how the day-to-day actually changed for you, and whether the boutique experience prepared you for it the way you expected."

Now run the test. Swap her out for an analyst in a different group at a different firm with a different path, and the question falls apart. It only works for her. That's a researched question.

A few expectations to set. The first time you do this, plan for it to take a while. I spent about 30 minutes preparing for the first couple of chats of my penultimate recruitment cycle, and that was already after doing 100+ coffee chats in the past 6 months. By the end of the cycle I had that down to about 5 minutes. The speed comes with reps, the same way crafting questions and responses on the spot does. It's a skill, and it compounds.

The second expectation is counterintuitive: prepare 5 to 10 of these, and expect to ask only 1 or 2. Most of the conversation will go where the other person takes it, which is exactly what you want, because making them feel heard matters more than getting through your list. The questions you don't ask are not wasted. The act of building them forces you to understand the person, and that understanding is what powers your responses in real time. Plenty of students have built entire interview industry pitches out of nothing more than their pre-chat research. As tedious as it feels, this work pays off long after the chat ends.

The Payoff: Research You Surface Live

Here's where all of it comes together. I'd keep their LinkedIn open during the chat, not staring at it, but glancing at it periodically, especially as they answered my questions, to see if I could pick anything out from their background that connected to what I was about to say. Pulling a detail from someone's history into the live conversation at exactly the right moment is the move.

You cannot do this if you walked in cold. The whole reason you can connect a thing they just said to a thing on their profile is that you did the research beforehand. The live moment is just the research cashing in.

Where to Go From Here

Researching the person is one slice of the larger machine. A few natural next steps:

For the full pre-chat setup, the document dashboard, the screen arrangement, the notetaker, and how to actually deliver your small talk once you've got the material, see How to Prepare for an Investment Banking Coffee Chat.

The same "research the person, not the role" principle is what powers a great cold email, and it's arguably even more important before outreach than before the chat itself. For how to investigate someone well enough that they reply to a stranger, see How to Cold Email a Banker for a Coffee Chat.

And for ready-to-send follow-up and outreach templates, see the Email Networking Course.

Do the due diligence. Most students won't, and that gap is exactly where your edge lives.