Common Networking Mistakes in IB Recruiting

When I started recruiting for U.S. investment banking, I made almost every mistake in this guide. The most expensive one took a single week.

It was January. I had already missed out on megafund private equity recruiting, I hadn't networked with a single U.S. bank, and the pressure was crushing. So I did what panicked students do: I started blasting every elite boutique where I'd seen fellow Canadians working. At one top boutique alone, I emailed more than 100 employees. I got zero responses. I sent follow-ups. Still nothing.

A friend of mine, with an objectively worse resume than mine, went after the same bank and got in. What did he do differently? He went slow. He sent two emails a week to their New York office, and that was it. My resume wasn't the problem. My talent wasn't the problem. The problem was that I emailed 100+ people at one firm in one week, and somewhere along the way I rubbed a person, or a group of people, the wrong way. They talk to each other. They noticed.

I've since done more than 300 coffee chats of my own, listened to over 150 of my students' chats, and been on the receiving end of these chats more than 50 times. Here's the most important thing I've learned: networking failures are almost never about charisma or being "good with people." They're a small, predictable set of self-inflicted mistakes, and they show up at every stage of the process. When you reach out. Who you reach out to. What you send. How you behave in the chat. How you follow up. And the mindset you carry through all of it.

Get these right and you've eliminated nearly everything that's actually within your control to lose. Because remember why we do this in the first place: in most processes, the referral is your ticket to the first-round interview. Everything below serves one goal, earning that referral without ever asking for it.

Let's walk through the mistakes in the order they tend to happen.

Mistake #1: Waiting too long to start

Most students play recruitment reactively. They see a posting on a job board, tweak their cover letter, fire off a few messages to people on the team, and call it networking. By then it's far too late.

Ask a student why they haven't reached out yet, eight months before a process, and you'll usually hear some version of: "Because it's too early." Sit with how empty that explanation is. "I can't network early because it's too early." That's not a reason. It's a feeling dressed up as one.

The real reason you think you can't reach out that early is that the only kind of email you can picture sending is one built around a job. You imagine writing about the SA'26 cycle, saying you're "interested in learning about potential internship opportunities," that you'd "love to learn about the firm." And you're right that that email, sent eight months early, lands badly. But the email is the problem, not the timing.

Why waiting actively hurts you

Sun Tzu wrote, "Every battle is won before it is fought." The battle here is for an offer, and you do not win it by showing up at the last minute looking like everyone else. Waiting damages you in four specific ways:

You stand out less and less over time. If two months ago there were 50 students networking a firm, today there are 200, next month 400, and by the time the posting drops there are thousands. To wait until the posting is to compete in the thickest part of the crowd at the exact moment you most need to stand out. If your resume is average, that's how you guarantee no first-round interview.

You look like every other candidate. When you reach out late, your email reads like one of hundreds, and the recipient knows the only reason you're writing is the resume push. Now, every banker you talk to already knows these chats are ultimately about referrals. But there's a scene in The Incredibles where Syndrome says, "And when everyone's super, no one will be." The same logic applies to networking. If everyone knows the game is about referrals, your job is to act as if no one does. It is everything but asking for the referral that earns you the referral.

The students who can network eight months out are exactly the ones you're competing against. You already know who they are: the most serious, most organized students at your school. Reaching out early doesn't instantly make you one of them, but adopting their mindset is the thing that eventually does.

You greatly increase the odds of rubbing people the wrong way. This is the one that cost me. The longer you delay, the more pressure builds, and the moment you finally start, you're tempted to blast as many firms as possible to make up for lost time. That's where it gets dangerous, and it's the subject of Mistake #3.

The fix: start early and make it about them

When you start early, the urgency disappears, and so does the need to blast. You have the space to be methodical and organic, and, most importantly, you can write an email that focuses purely on the recipient: their background, their deals, the parts of both you genuinely find interesting. A banker who receives an email from a student with no mention of a job is surprised, and surprised in a good way. You stand out, and they're far more likely to take the chat (assuming your resume clears the bar for that firm).

Then you nurture. Have the chat, and stay on their radar with a short nurture email roughly every three months over the following six months or so. You never ask for a job-related favor. By the time the posting drops, you've built a genuine relationship and accumulated enough goodwill to cash in for that first-round interview, a far better position than the student who emailed the day the posting went live.

One caveat I'll give you directly: you will never feel like you have recruitment "under control," no matter how early you start. The same anxiety that makes you feel behind is the fuel that's kept you working this hard. Don't try to eliminate it. Channel it into starting sooner.

Mistake #2: Starting at the top of the hierarchy

When students do finally reach out, many aim straight for the top. They email the Managing Director or the Partner first, figuring the most senior person's word carries the most weight. I've done it too, and the honest reason is usually that we're hoping to get lucky with the Big Man. "Who says no to MDs? HR? Bah!"

For larger firms, the ones most readers of this are targeting, this is backwards. Start at the bottom, with Analysts, or even lower, with incoming or past interns. There's a logic to the hierarchy, and skipping it costs you.

Analysts are the insiders closest to you in age, which makes them the easiest conversations you'll have and the richest source of two things you can't get anywhere else. The first is interview ammunition: these are people who very recently recruited successfully for that firm, so their behavioral answers are proven to work. The second is insider information: which Analyst runs recruiting, who in HR is running point on undergrads, which MD is the gatekeeper for first-rounds. None of that is findable from the outside, and Analysts, to whom you're an asset, tend to share it freely. Senior bankers, to whom an undergrad is nowhere near an asset, often do little more than answer your questions curtly.

There's also a purely practical point: Analysts are both more likely to reply to a cold email and usually sufficient for a referral. If you're short on time, a single Analyst is your best use of it.

You should absolutely speak to senior employees eventually. Their word holds more water than any Analyst's. But do it after the juniors, for two reasons. First, it protects you from being forwarded "down" the hierarchy, which is exactly what a busy senior banker does with a cold student email. Second, it's a quiet display of work ethic. Picture an MD receiving three student emails: one mentioning no prior conversations, one mentioning a single chat, and one mentioning five. Resume aside, which student looks most deserving of a call?

Here's how to write that senior email so it does both jobs at once:

Naming those juniors won't guarantee you avoid getting forwarded down, but it maximally mitigates it. And even if the MD does forward you, the Analyst who receives it already shares his positive impression, so your odds actually improve.

The HR trap

The same "juniors first" rule applies to HR, and getting this wrong is its own mistake. Some firms lean heavily on HR. Bank of America, for example, runs its first-round interviews as group coffee chats conducted by an HR employee. That's in stark contrast to Moelis, whose first-rounds are always carried out by Analysts and Associates.

The mistake is treating an HR contact like a friendly Analyst chat. HR will drive the conversation, actively question you, and evaluate your candidacy from start to finish. It's easy to get a chat with them and hard to impress them into a referral. So, just like senior bankers, reach out to HR only after you've spoken with a handful of Analysts or Associates, and only once a junior has told you how central HR actually is to that firm's process.

The broader fix for targeting: aim to speak with two to five people per firm, where every chat after the first was secured organically, meaning the first person referred you to the second, who referred you to the third. The first person only does that if they see you as a winning horse, which is why everything in the next two mistakes matters so much.

Mistake #3: Outreach that screams "I want a referral"

This is where the timing problem becomes a written, sendable artifact. When you network late, you produce one of two bad emails.

The overtly transactional email

The first is the email that's so nakedly about the job that it works against you. The classic one gets sent during penultimate-summer networking.

It opens with a brag about a sovereign-wealth-fund summer seat, declares interest in next year's internship class at the recipient's firm, and closes by requesting a call about "potential internship opportunities." Not one word about the recipient. My cold-email walkthrough dissects that exact note sentence by sentence.

Yes, all networking is transactional. But this is so overtly transactional that it broadcasts the one thing you want to leave unsaid. Compare it to an email that focuses purely on the recipient, on something specific about them that made you want to reach out in the first place.

The strong version opens with a deal the banker actually worked on and a club they founded, mentions their resources you genuinely used, bridges from their background to yours, and only then asks for a quick call – no cycle, no internship, no resume attached as a hint. The full word-for-word version sits in my investment banking networking email templates.

An email like that immediately separates you from the pack. Yes, it takes real time to write, which is exactly why most students won't do it, and exactly why it works.

The generic blast

The second bad email is the generic template, the one you send when you're blasting a list:

"Hi [First Name],

I hope you're doing well!

My name is [Your Name] and I'm currently a 2026 at [College]. Having completed multiple internships across [Role] and [Role] throughout college, I'm very interested in pursuing a career in [Position].

Given you've been at [Their Firm] for 2 years now, I'd love to learn more about you, your experiences there, and any potential internship opportunities for the Summer of 2027.

[…]"

The template runs nine lines of the same energy. The cold-email teardown takes it apart line by line.

This email isn't wrong. It's just generic, and it's what you send when you're trying to personalize twenty emails and the math feels impossible. Removing the mention of internships feels self-defeating, because if you don't express interest, why would they pick you over a student who clearly did? That discomfort is the late-networker's trap: you either look desperate and indistinguishable from a hundred others, or you look like a tire-kicker with no real interest. With an average resume, both roads lead to near-zero odds.

For ready-to-send outreach and follow-up templates, see our Email Networking Course and its Email Templates.

Emailing several people at one firm at once

The most damaging version of the blast is hitting multiple people at the same firm in a short window. My 100+ emails in one week was the extreme case, but I'm not the only data point.

A friend emailed four Analysts at one elite boutique in a single week, in November of 2023, for the SA'25 cycle. Two days later, one of those Analysts wrote back to tell him people in the office had talked and were displeased to see a student emailing four people at once with nearly identical messages. He did not get a first-round interview.

Another friend emailed five employees at a different firm during the SA'23 cycle, all in one week, and quickly got a very angry email from a Director saying he wasn't "allowed" to do that. Strangely, I did the same thing at that firm and didn't get the angry email. Even stranger, we both ended up with interviews, then never heard from the firm again. The point isn't that the outcome is perfectly predictable. The point is that you're playing with fire, and the downside is a closed door before you've said a word in a chat.

The fix is the same one from Mistake #1. Start early enough that you never need to blast. Reach the same two-to-five people per firm, but reach them organically, spaced out, ideally through referrals from one another.

Mistake #4: Mishandling the chat itself

This is the biggest bucket, because the chat is where most of your control lives. The mistakes here are subtle, and each one quietly tips the scales toward some other student.

Winging your introduction

The "tell me about yourself" exchange happens in the first two to five minutes of every chat, and it's your single best chance to prove you belong. It's also the lens through which the other person views you for the rest of the conversation. There is no excuse for delivering it at anything less than perfect, because you say it in every chat. Other students will nail it, some with worse resumes than yours, and when you can't, it reads as either not doing enough chats or not taking this seriously. Neither is someone a banker wants as a colleague.

A quick word on the small talk that precedes the intro: prepare it. The chat opens with one and a half to three minutes of small talk, and "it was busy, I had exams, but they're done now" is a wasted opportunity. Keep a relevant news item or two handy (I'd keep something like the latest Bain Private Equity Report on hand) and have a livelier, more personal answer ready. For a full walkthrough of how to do this well, see our How To: Small Talk video.

Running a Q&A instead of a conversation

You've heard "don't make it a Q&A" a hundred times and probably never gotten a concrete definition. Here's mine, measured past the small talk and intro:

• Q&A: they talk more than 80% of the time.
• Conversation: the split is more like 60–70% them, 30–40% you.

Most students, honestly, are running consistent Q&As without realizing it. Next chat, record the talking times. You won't fix the problem until you see it.

The reason "have a conversation" isn't as simple as "talk more" is that you have to stay on-topic and you have little control over the topic. If they describe their live deals and you respond with your take on Jerome Powell's latest speech, you might hit a 50/50 split, but that's not a conversation you want. The fix is to stop jumping straight to your next question. Instead, demonstrate that you understood their point. If they talked for two minutes, summarize it in under 25% of that time, roughly 30 seconds, then either relate it to a past experience of yours or raise the point you wanted to clarify, and then ask your next question. Here is the flow, in both forms:

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

Here's what the mistake looks like in practice. One of my students was chatting with an Associate on Bank of America's NYC tech team, someone who had trained as a professional concert pianist before banking. The weak, Q&A-style response would have been:

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

It's not disqualifying, but it skips the summary and offers nothing of himself, so it falls behind any student who does more. Here's what he actually did.

Instead of jumping to his next question, he played her story back so she felt heard, connected it to his own years of piano training, and made his first question about the concert-pianist chapter – the job could wait. The whole exchange, word for word, is in the stand-out coffee chat playbook.

He summarized so she felt heard, related a genuine piece of his own background, and only then asked his question. The moment he paused to double-click on the piano detail, that Associate knew she wasn't talking to an average student. You don't need to say anything revolutionary to clear the conversation threshold. You need to be polite, show you understood, and ask something relevant. The hard part is doing all of it at once: listening, forming a response, finding a past experience, and organizing your thoughts in real time. One tip that helps: the instant a good question pops into your head, jot it in your notetaker before it's lost in the whirlwind. Don't judge it in the moment; evaluate it as they finish their answer.

A related trap worth naming: don't try to sound smart with live, mid-chat research before you can even hold a conversation. If you can't yet sustain a 60/40 split, making your answers seem more intelligent is pointless, because you're not getting the referral anyway. Preparedness and personality, in that order.

No structure, or worse, announcing an agenda

Capital markets interviews follow a structure (behaviorals, then technicals from easy to hard) for one simple reason: it's easier to follow. Structure is respected in the professional world, and your chats should have it too. But it must be invisible.

The clumsy attempt at structure is announcing an agenda at the top of the call. Beyond turning the chat into an instant Q&A, think about what you're really doing: telling someone in a position of authority, who carved time out of a far busier day than yours, exactly how they should spend it. Imagine a high schooler asked you how you got into your college program, you agreed, and they sent over a list dictating where to meet, when, what to wear, and the precise topics to cover. They'd look prepared and also completely lacking in self-awareness, like their objectives matter more than yours.

The structure you actually want is dynamic, not static, and you should borrow it from the person you're talking to. Listen to the chronology implicit in their own introduction and note the "chapters": pre-college, college, post-college, and, for senior bankers, their twenties. Use those chapters to bucket your questions. It's subtle enough that they can't tell you're following a structure, but what isn't subtle is the absence of confusion when your questions flow in an organized way. That clarity rubs off on how they see you: organized, with a plan they're using as an outline, not a bible. Most students treat their prepared list as a bible, and that's a one-way ticket to Q&A-land.

Asking yes/no questions

A yes/no question instantly converts a chat into a Q&A. It interrupts the flow, makes you look lazy, and frustrates the other person, because these are exactly the questions you could have answered yourself online, or, given where AI is today, with ChatGPT. If you can find it online, why are you asking a busy professional?

There are two reasons students do it. One, they were lazy and didn't look. Two, and more common, the answer genuinely isn't fully online, but they fail to show the research they did, so the banker assumes they did none. The fix for the second case is to walk them through your thought process, or state what you expect their answer to be, before you ask. That way they understand where you're coming from and you look well-researched. Put simply: your coffee chat questions should always be looking for an opinion. The only acceptable yes/no is a quick clarification you use to frame a much larger question before passing the mic back.

Arrogance: absolutes and show-off questions

Don't be arrogant. The people you're talking to are ahead of you, and you should treat them that way. Arrogance usually shows up in one of two forms.

The first is speaking in absolutes about something they know far better than you:

"I noticed you went from a boutique to a bulge bracket, and I'm sure you'd been gunning for that move from day one like every boutique analyst does, and it must be nice to finally work on deals that actually close. Was Private Equity ever on your radar?"

The problem is that it leaves no room for an alternative, and it's prescriptive ("you should have done this") rather than inquisitive ("you did this, here's why I think you did, but I'd love your perspective"). It makes you sound like a know-it-all with no self-awareness.

The second is the question engineered to show off:

"Given you're in the Metals & Mining group at the Bank of Mongolia, I'm curious what you make of the recent slide in copper prices following the export quotas announced by the 4 largest South American producers – Chile, Peru, Brazil & Ecuador – especially with the LME hinting at new warehousing rules after that Financial Times piece on the global grid build-out – did you catch that piece?"

That's deliberately exaggerated, but I'd bet you can see traces of your own convoluted questions in it. There's a saying in restaurants: "location, location, location," meaning where you are matters more than what you serve. Coffee chats work the same way. A genuinely impressive question (the "food") only lands if its "location" is right, and in a chat, location means timing: how related is your question to what they just said? A brilliant question dropped in the wrong place reads as showing off. You'll only get this right after 10 to 20 chats, so pay down that "ignorance debt" as fast as you can.

Being too polite

Politeness has a ceiling, and students blow right past it. Thanking the person once at the start and once at the end, for their time, is correct. Thanking them after every single answer is not. It sounds disingenuous, it hurts your rapport, and it makes the chat far more formal than it needs to be. In fact, the only setting where you thank someone after every answer is a Q&A, which is the one thing you're trying to avoid. Our instinct as students is to over-formalize so we never risk sounding rude, but you're supposed to be positioning yourself as a colleague, and colleagues don't thank each other for every sentence. If they share something genuinely insightful, thank them for that. Otherwise, hold it.

Going through the motions

Closely related: vary your acknowledgements. It's a tiny thing and shockingly noticeable when you don't do it. If every response is "got it… got it… okay… got it," you sound like you've zoned out, even when you're fully engaged and simply forgot to change the word. That third case, genuine interest plus a robotic delivery, is the one most students fall into. The fix is low-effort: keep a few acknowledgements in mind ("that makes sense," "thank you for that," "sounds good," "okay") and rotate through them so you never sound like you're on autopilot.

Treating your question list as a script

Preparing five to ten personalized questions before a chat is essential. It frees up the mental bandwidth you'd otherwise burn forming questions on the spot, which is exactly the bandwidth you need for thoughtful responses. Expect to ask only one or two of them. But sticking to that list is its own mistake. If you can't adapt when the conversation goes somewhere you didn't plan, which is about 90% of chats, the other person won't feel heard, and the internal monologue becomes: "Was this student even listening? He keeps saying 'okay' and then jumps to something totally unrelated to what I just said. Does he even understand me?" Treat the list as an outline that lowers your cognitive load, never as a track you're locked onto. And if you find yourself running out of prepared questions before the 15-minute mark, take it as a diagnostic: either you can't yet hold a conversation, or the other person checked out early. Both are worth knowing.

Getting caught flat-footed in an evaluative chat

These are rare. Across all my recruiting, I had exactly three. One was with UBS, where I was grilled on LBOs for the 15 minutes right after the introduction. One was with Bank of America, where an employee asked me about the three deals on my resume. And one was with KKR, where I was networking for their Reinsurance Private Equity group and walked through a resume deal with an Associate for about 10 minutes. There's no separate way to prepare for these versus a real interview, so the answer is the same as everywhere else: prepare early. Have your behavioral answers, your scripted deal walkthroughs and stock pitches, and your technicals ready before any chat. I'd keep a technicals resource open and searchable, whether that's ibvine.io in list view or your BIWS guides, so a surprise question doesn't catch you cold. And if a chat does turn technical, take it as a good sign. They only evaluate students who already look like they deserve a first-round.

Mistake #5: The follow-up, doing too little or too much

Following up is where two opposite mistakes live, and most students commit one or the other.

The first mistake is not following up at all, usually out of a fear that more than one email is "rude." Here's the reality behind that fear: in a group of 100 finance students, about 80 will say they want to do investment banking, and only 50 will actually start networking. Of those 50, only 30 are diligent enough to keep going for at least two semesters, roughly eight months. The 20 who drop out can't withstand the steady rejection that's baked into recruiting, because on any given day, for any given role, sending 100 messages never yields 100 replies. And of the 30 who keep going, only about 15 track their outreach methodically. That last group is the one that tends to reach the first-round interview.

That funnel is the whole argument for following up. Tracking your outreach is the only way to know who needs a nudge and when, which means it's only the disciplined minority who ever send a second email. So every follow-up you send literally separates you from the pack. When your email goes unanswered, your first instinct is to assume you were deemed unworthy, but far more often the person is simply slammed or forgot you, because you sit near the bottom of their priority list. A reminder is not an imposition.

The second mistake is the opposite: pestering, or carrying yourself like you're entitled to their time. That instantly kills any chance of a referral. The difference between a welcome follow-up and an annoying one is entirely in how you ask. Strip out any blame for not replying and any implied obligation that they should have. A few phrasings that do this well:

Notice that last line also minimizes the ask. When you shrink the time commitment, it's human nature to feel more inclined to say yes. Two more:

Two things take the emotion out of all this: start early (worth repeating), and follow a rules-based cadence so you're not deciding from anxiety. For ready-to-send follow-up templates, see the Email Networking Course. And if you're unsure of the right follow-up cadence, work through our Networking Journey Miro mind map.

Mistake #6: The mindset mistakes that sabotage you quietly

The last two mistakes don't happen in an email or a sentence. They happen in your head, and they're the hardest to see.

Making "the referral" your explicit aim

It's tempting to define a chat's success as "did I get a referral?" Don't. Ninety-nine percent of the time you won't even know whether you got one until invitations go out, so making the referral your explicit aim holds you to an invisible, unachievable standard. Instead, aim for something you can actually observe: a referral to another employee. Almost any banker can connect you with a colleague, even one who isn't in a position to push you for an interview, so their willingness to do it is a reasonable proxy for their impression of you. If they won't, it's generally a bad sign, though not a certain one.

This is also the cleanest way to ask for what you want without ever asking for a referral, which is exactly the line you're walking. Toward the end of a chat, around the 20-minute mark (and never before 15 minutes), once you've confirmed they still have time, ask the three recruitment questions every chat should include:

Reading into their disposition

The flip side of the referral obsession is trying to decode your odds from the other person's mood on the call. It's an impossible battle that only undermines your confidence. I know because I got interview invitations from firms whose employees were dry and hard to talk to, and got ghosted by firms whose employees told me I was in pole position. My read on people was completely wrong and totally unproductive.

And if a chat clearly went badly, where they dodge or give curt answers to all of your closing questions, don't spend energy triangulating odds that are probably already zero. Instead, immediately reflect on how you introduced yourself, how you responded, and how you framed your questions. That reflection, alongside listening to your peers' chats or having someone review yours, is the single best way to find concrete fixes for the next one.

That's the whole arc. The mistakes compound, but so do the fixes. Start early, work up from the juniors, write emails about them, hold a real conversation, follow up like a professional, and stop reading tea leaves. None of it requires charisma you don't have. It requires doing the unglamorous things most students won't.