How to Stand Out in a Coffee Chat

A coffee chat is the final hurdle before the interview. It is where a referral is quietly won or lost, and that referral is essentially your ticket to a first-round interview. So every student walks in wanting the same thing: to stand out. The trouble is that almost everything that decides whether you actually did happens behind closed doors, in conversations between HR, analysts, and associates that you will never sit in on.

What "Standing Out" Actually Means

That opacity used to torture me. While I was recruiting, I got interview invitations from firms whose employees were dry and painful to talk to, and I got ghosted by firms whose employees had told me I was in pole position for an interview. My read on those people was completely wrong and wholly unproductive. Trying to decode your "odds" from someone's disposition on a call is an impossible battle, and it does nothing but undermine your confidence. You cannot measure your odds of a referral, and you cannot reliably read another person's mood. Spend your energy there and you will drive yourself crazy for no payoff.

This guide is about those controllables, the in-conversation craft of standing out. Who you should chat with and in what order, when to reach out, how to write the cold email, and how often to follow up are each their own subject, covered in their own guides. Here we are focused on what happens once you are actually on the call.

Win the First Two Minutes: Small Talk and Your Introduction

There are only two stretches of a coffee chat where you have free rein to say whatever you want: the very beginning and the very end. The end comes after the referral has already been decided, so really it is the beginning that matters. Get the first couple of minutes right and you set the lens through which the other person sees everything that follows.

Start with small talk, not your questions and not your résumé. Once you are on the call, wait one to three seconds after they answer before you respond. You will be antsy at the start, and that pause keeps you from talking over them. Small talk should last about one to three minutes. Most students waste it: "It was busy, I had exams, but they're all done now, so things are looking good." That tells the other person nothing about you. The students who have mastered coffee chatting use these few seconds to show a sliver of personality:

"It was packed, but good – I've been deep in a chess phase lately, probably too deep (chuckle), and this weekend my friends finally dragged me to try bouldering, which humbled me immediately…so yeah, it was a fun week."

The activities are arbitrary; swap in your own. The point is that in fifteen seconds you have become a person instead of a résumé. Extend the small talk until you can tell the other person is starting to lose interest, usually around the 1.5 to 3 minute mark, and then take control. Taking control matters, because it puts you in the driver's seat and lets you drive the flow of the conversation:

For a fuller breakdown of how to handle these opening seconds, watch our "How To: Small Talk" video.

Because you give this introduction in every single chat, it is a constant, and any constant has to be perfect. Other students will deliver theirs flawlessly, some of them with worse résumés than yours, which makes a fumbled intro look even worse. A botched TMAY signals one of two things: either you are not doing enough chats, or you are not taking this seriously. Neither is a person anyone wants to work with.

So script it and rehearse it until the delivery is clean. No "um," no "you know," no "annnd…" Keep it to about 60 seconds on a chat. In an interview you can stretch to about 90 seconds, but on a call, especially one where they cannot see your face, time passes a lot more slowly, so 60 is the target. Your TMAY is one of the Core 3 behavioral answers (Tell Me About Yourself, Why This Role, Why This Firm) that you should have scripted before your first chat, tailored to the person's firm, group, or role, with any of their interests you can find online folded in. Then hand the conversation over:

Have a Conversation, Not a Q&A

This is the centerpiece. You have heard "make it a conversation, not an interrogation" a hundred times, and you have probably never gotten a straight definition of either. Here is one.

The talking-time test

Past the small talk and the introductions, measure who is talking. If the other person is talking more than 80% of the time, you are running a Q&A. In a real conversation, they talk 60 to 70% of the time and you talk 30 to 40%; call it roughly 60/40. That sounds simple, and it is. The hard part is not knowing the target, it is hitting it. I would wager that many students reading this are running Q&As, consistently, without realizing it. So do the uncomfortable thing: record your next chat and time both sides. You will not take action until you come face-to-face with the problem.

Summarize, then respond

Instead of jumping straight to your next question, do your best to demonstrate that you understood their last answer. If they talked for two minutes, summarize their point in under 25% of that, about thirty seconds, and then do one of two things: relate it to a past experience of your own, or raise the specific point you wanted to clarify. Here is the full flow of a strong coffee chat response:

Their (2-minute) Answer => Your (~30 second) Summary => Your Past Experience => Your Next Question

Their (2-minute) Answer => Your (~30 second) Summary => Point to Clarify => Your Thought Process / What You Expect Them To Say => Your Next Question

The exact ordering past the summary barely matters. As long as you are coherent and they can understand the question, whether you state your thought process before or after the question is of little importance. What matters is that you summarize, you connect, and then you ask.

Here is what it looks like in a real chat one of my students had with an associate from BofA's Investment Banking team in NYC. The associate had just walked through her own background:

BofA Associate: "…have a background in piano performance and was professionally trained as a concert pianist. I'm a 1st-year associate and did my 2 years as an analyst, I'm coming up on the end of my 1st-year as an Associate and am part of the Technology team here in NYC. I would tell you that when I started as an intern, you know, I was exposed to the culture at BofA – it's a great culture that provided a great learning experience… – and then as a full-timer I came in and had a ton more responsibility and wanted to make sure I was learning & growing. The more reps I got on deals the better I got, so when I joined I was lucky that the market was crazy and the tech market in particular was booming…so there were quite a few deals I was on. In a nutshell, it's been great – the people are amazing & very generous with their time, especially when you want to learn something or have questions. So yeah, I'll pause there in case you have any questions."

And here is how the student answered:

Student: "Got it, thank you again for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate the personal background as well and I think it's really cool how you ended up in Investment Banking. Funnily enough, when I was growing up I played piano as well but, of course, never was good enough to go professional – I think I made it to the Certificate of Merit advanced level before stopping but really enjoyed that experience. Before getting into the more job-related questions, I was curious to hear what it was like to be a professional pianist and how that journey was?"

Look at what he did. He summarized so she felt heard, related her background to his own, and only then asked his question. That detail about her being a professional pianist was integral to maximizing the rapport on that call, and the moment he paused to "double-click" on it, I am sure she realized she was not talking to an average student. Most students would have blown right past it, straight to the job questions, and lost the one opening for "personality" points the conversation was going to give them. Compare it with the version most students would have delivered:

"Got it, thank you for the background. What was it like to be a professional pianist?"

That would not have eliminated his chances. But by dropping the summary and saying nothing about his own piano background, he would have put himself behind every student who did.

Turn simple questions into complex ones

Another way to see the same mechanic: you are converting "simple" questions into "complex" ones. A simple question is generic and untargeted. These three are perfectly fine, and perfectly forgettable:

• What was the biggest challenge you faced going full-time in Investment Banking?

• What's your team structure like?

• What's the culture like at your firm?

There are two ways to make a question like this complex. You can craft a story (a past experience of yours, which is exactly what the piano response did), or you can create a statement (walk through your thinking, or say what you expect their answer to be, before you ask). Here is that first simple question, rebuilt as a statement:

"Most of what I've read about going full-time focuses on the learning curve, but a few analysts I've spoken with say the real adjustment is pace – how quickly a 'final' version becomes the next draft once a deal heats up. I've been redoing my internship work with a clock running, partly as a joke with myself, partly because speed under pressure seems like the actual skill. When you made the transition, was keeping up with that pace the biggest challenge, or did something else prove harder?"

Same underlying question. But now it gives the listener boundaries to answer within, which lets them be more specific and nuanced, and it signals that you have put yourself in their shoes and are genuinely listening. That is the whole game: not saying anything revolutionary, just being polite, demonstrating understanding, and asking something relevant right after. The hard part is doing all of it at once: listening, summarizing, finding a past experience, and organizing your thoughts on the fly. One tip helps enormously: the instant a question pops into your head, write it down in your notes. Do not stop to judge whether it is any good. There is a whirlwind of thoughts running through your head while they talk, and a sharp question will vanish into it if you are not quick enough. Evaluate it later, when they are wrapping up their answer and you can afford to think ahead.

Follow the Invisible Structure

Capital markets interviews follow a fixed structure: behaviorals, then technicals, each in a predictable sequence. Firms do this for one simple reason: it is easier to follow. Structure is appreciated in the professional world, and the easier it is to follow, the better. A table of contents, the tab order in a financial model, the agenda at the top of any meeting: all the same instinct.

Your coffee chat should have structure too, but here it is unspoken. And there is a trap. The one thing guaranteed to turn your call into a Q&A, short of literally prefacing every question with "my next question is…", is announcing an agenda at the very start. Think about how that lands. You are telling someone with more authority than you, who carved time out of a far busier day to help you, exactly how they should run the conversation. Picture a high schooler asking how you got into your college, and then sending you a list of where to meet, when to meet, what to wear, and the exact topics you want covered. Prepared, sure. Also entitled, and completely lacking in self-awareness.

So the structure has to be invisible. It is dynamic, not static: it depends on who you are talking to and what they want to talk about. Done right, they probably cannot tell you are following anything at all. What they can feel is the absence of confusion when your questions come in an organized order, and that clarity quietly raises their read on you.

Here is the structure to follow: the same one the person uses when they introduce themselves. They have reached colleague status, which means they have refined their own introduction down to the most salient points, in an order that makes sense. Listen closely to the timeline implicit in that introduction and note the important "chapters." Common ones are pre-college (often a sport or instrument they played at a high level), college (the finance catalyst, clubs, recruiting, internships), and post-college (the first full-time analyst stint, "figuring it out," their current firm). For senior bankers there is often a chapter for their twenties: a career switch, a move abroad, a notable accomplishment. Use those chapters as buckets for your questions. Bucketing is what makes it easy to turn a simple question into a complex one, and it keeps you from hopping around between unrelated topics, which is the fastest way to make someone feel like you were only half-listening.

You can absolutely "go with the flow" and riff off what they say; in fact you should. But riffing on top of a structure beats riffing with none. If you have done 50 chats and I have done 200, and I follow this same quiet structure in every one, whose conversation do you think flows more smoothly?

Ask Questions That Stand Out

Now the questions themselves. Three principles separate a standout question from a generic one: prepare them, make them personal, and always fish for an opinion.

Prepare more than you will use

Imagine you have ten units of mental processing power. In a chat, that capacity gets split between two jobs: crafting your next question and actually responding to what they just said. If forming the question eats all ten units, you have nothing left to respond with, and you default to acknowledging their answer and moving on. That is a Q&A, and it is exactly what happens in most chats, because most students have not done enough reps to do both jobs at once.

A prepared list of personalized questions buys back that processing power. Before every chat, I would spend time researching the person's industry, firm, asset class, and geography off their LinkedIn, then write 5 to 10 questions specific enough that swapping in someone else's name would break them. Expect to ask only 1 or 2. That is not wasted effort: the act of preparing frees your mind to respond well in the moment, the research compounds (many students who landed amazing offers built entire interview industry pitches out of their pre-chat research alone), and the 1 or 2 personalized questions you do ask can genuinely tip the scales. Keep that list, your notes, and your scripts open in front of you during the call so none of it is competing for memory.

Never ask a yes/no question

A yes/no question turns a chat into a Q&A instantly. Worse, most yes/no questions are things you could have answered yourself with a quick search or with ChatGPT, which makes you look lazy and unprepared, and it tends to frustrate the person you are talking to. If the answer is online and you are asking anyway, either you did not look, or you wanted a perspective you failed to show you had earned. The fix is the same mechanic from before: walk them through your thinking or state what you expect their answer to be, so they can see the research behind the question. Put another way, your coffee chat questions should always be looking for an opinion. A small yes/no question is fine when you genuinely need to frame a larger one before passing the microphone back.

And if a yes/no question does slip out and the line goes quiet, do not freeze. Circle back to something they said earlier:

"[awkward pause]...So, circling back to something from earlier – you said most of your team sits in a different city, what's that like day-to-day? I assume working remotely from the rest of the group forces you to be a lot more deliberate about face time?"

Two kinds of questions: ammunition and rapport

Every question you ask is doing one of two jobs.

Interview ammunition questions are the "selfish" ones, aimed at improving your own behavioral answers. The people who broke into your target firm answered these behavioral questions correctly, and their answers are even better now that they have actually worked the job, so borrow their exact reasons, phrases, and framing. You cannot ask them the way an interviewer would, so use the simple-to-complex trick to bridge the gap:

• "Why banking?" becomes "Why did you end up choosing banking over consulting?"

• "Why this team / firm?" becomes "What drew you to the team you're currently on?"

• "Why should we pick you?" becomes "What traits are common among the top analysts?"

• "Where do you see yourself in 5 / 10 / 15 years?" becomes "Have you thought about what you want to do after banking?"

Rapport-building questions are the "selfless" ones, the questions the other person actually enjoys answering. An analyst may love retelling their recruiting journey; an associate, their first big deal or what earned them a promotion; a VP, the first deal they ran point on; a director, the first big client they landed. These should be the bulk of your conversation, because the primary aim of the chat is a referral, and a referral runs on rapport. The more you get someone talking about themselves, the more they like you. Do that, sound like a colleague, and convey that you are ready for the job, and the referral tends to follow. (One caveat worth stating plainly: networking alone will not get you the interview. Your résumé still has to clear a threshold of relevant experience; rapport cannot manufacture experience you do not have.)

A quick gut-check on whether it is working: the length of their answers. The longer they talk, the more engaged they are. That is a far better signal than trying to read their mood, though it is still just a signal, not gospel. You never know what kind of day they are having.

The Small Tells That Separate You

The last layer is the small stuff, the tells that quietly mark you as a colleague or quietly give you away.

Vary your acknowledgements

It is astonishing how much damage a repeated "got it… got it… got it" does. It makes you sound like you have checked out or are just going through the motions, even when you are genuinely interested and have simply forgotten to change the word. That third case, interested but on autopilot, is the one most students fall into. The fix is low-hanging fruit: keep a few acknowledgements visible and rotate through them. Mine were:

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

Having them on-screen meant that any time I felt myself repeating, I could glance up and grab another without spending real mental effort on it.

Be polite, but not too polite

Politeness has a ceiling, and students routinely blow past it. Thank them when you get on the call and when you get off, and thank them for any genuinely insightful point or useful piece of information along the way. Do not thank them after every single answer. The only setting where you thank someone after every response is a Q&A, the one thing you are trying to avoid, and the over-thanking reads as disingenuous while making the whole call more formal than it needs to be. Your instinct as a student talking to a professional you have never met will be to over-formalize, to avoid any risk of sounding rude. Resist it. You are supposed to position yourself as a colleague, and colleagues are not that formal with each other. The same calibration applies when you express interest in the firm: "I'd love to replicate that experience" lands better than "I'd love to join your team," which can feel premature and forward.

Show humility

Simply put, do not be arrogant on these chats. The people you are talking to are ahead of you, so treat them that way. Arrogance usually shows up in one of two forms. The first is the absolute statement, describing someone's own role back to them as if you know it better than they do. Say "you obviously planned that from the start, like most bankers do" and you sound like a know-it-all with no self-awareness; the tone is prescriptive ("you should have done this") when it should be inquisitive ("you did this, here is why I think you did, but I would love your take"). It leaves no room for an alternative, or frames any alternative as abnormal.

The second is the show-off question, the one transparently engineered to display how much you know. Trust me, it is always obvious, and it erodes whatever rapport you had built. Here is a deliberately exaggerated version so the shape is unmistakable:

"Given you're in the Power & Utilities group at the National Bank of Greenland, how are you thinking about the surge in uranium prices after the production caps set by the 4 leading producers – Kazakhstan, Canada, Namibia & Australia – came into force, especially with the IEA now floating revised demand forecasts after the Wall Street Journal ran that feature on small modular reactors – did you happen to see it?"

No one reading this is showing off quite that egregiously. But you can probably hear a faint echo of your own convoluted questions in it. There is an old saying: "location, location, location." The food matters less than where the restaurant sits. In a coffee chat, your impressive question is the food, and its location is the timing: how closely it connects to what they just said. A brilliant question asked at the wrong moment becomes a show-off question. The same question, dropped right where it belongs in the conversation, is the thing that makes you look like a colleague. Getting that timing right takes 10 to 20 chats. A game is only fun once you have learned its rules, so pay down that "ignorance debt" as fast as you can.

When the Chat Turns Into an Interview

A quick word on a curveball. In ultra-competitive processes, where more students are networking than there are first-round slots, some firms run "evaluative" coffee chats that double as interviews. You cannot tell in advance which ones these are. If it happens to you, do not panic: it is actually a good sign, because firms only bother evaluating candidates who already look like they deserve a first round. These chats are rare. In all my recruiting I had exactly three: one with UBS, where I was grilled on LBOs for the fifteen minutes after the TMAY exchange; one with BofA, where I was asked about the three deals on my résumé; and one with KKR, where I was networking for their Reinsurance Private Equity group and walked an associate through a deal for about ten minutes. The same standout behaviors win these chats, plus one rule: have your behavioral answers, deal walkthroughs, and technicals prepared early so you are never caught flat-footed. If you get a question you need a second on, take it. Pausing one to three seconds before answering reads as thoughtful; it only feels awkward past about four seconds.

Putting It Together

None of these behaviors is complicated on its own. Acing your introduction is Step 1. Turning the Q&A into a genuine conversation, by summarizing, relating, and then asking, is Step 2. Following the invisible structure, asking personalized and opinion-seeking questions weighted toward rapport, and minding the small tells are what compound the rest. What makes them hard is doing them consistently, in every chat, while the clock runs and your nerves spike. That only comes with reps. I was extremely introverted and genuinely bad at this when I started, with fifteen-second awkward silences and all, and I got better only because I kept going. If I could do it, you can too.

Everything here is the in-conversation craft. Who to talk to and in what order, when to reach out, how to write a cold email that earns the chat, how often to follow up, and how to close the chat to extract timelines and connections are each their own subject, with their own guides. Master the conversation first. It is the part that, résumé for résumé, lets a student with less experience beat one who looks better on paper.