Who to Network With at a Bank: From Analysts to MDs

When you start networking, every instinct tells you to aim for the top. Find the most senior person you can, the Managing Director with the biggest title and the most pull, and get them in your corner. The logic feels airtight: their word carries more weight than anyone else's, so why spend a chat on a first-year Analyst when you could go straight to the person who signs off on offers?

I've thought this way too. Most students do. The instinct usually sounds something like, "Who says 'no' to MDs? HR? Bah!" You treat the senior email like a lottery ticket. Maybe the Big Man replies and maybe he doesn't, but the upside feels so large it has to be worth a shot.

Here's the question that should stop you: why would you talk to a Managing Director first about Firm ABC if you're going to be joining them as an Analyst?

The right move is the opposite of the instinct. You start at the bottom, with the people closest to the seat you're actually trying to fill, and you work your way up. Across 300+ of my own coffee chats, 150+ of my students' chats I've listened in on, and the 50+ times I've been coffee chatted myself, the pattern holds: the students who go bottom-up consistently beat the ones who swing for the MD on day one. Let me walk you through who sits at each level of a bank, what they actually do in recruiting, and the order you should talk to them in.

First, Figure Out Who Actually Runs Recruiting

Before you decide who to email, you need to know one thing about the firm: who runs the process there. It isn't the same everywhere, and getting this wrong wastes your best outreach on the wrong people.

Broadly, firms fall into three camps. Some lean heavily on HR to arrange and carry out first-round interviews. Others hand that job to their Analysts and Associates. And some, almost always smaller shops, want you to speak with the head honcho, the Partner or the Founder. That last dynamic exists for a simple reason: a small firm doesn't have enough employees to delegate talent acquisition to, and given the size of the place, the person at the top often prefers to be involved in every part of the business, hiring included.

The contrast between the HR-led and junior-led firms is sharp, and worth seeing concretely:

Firms like Bank of America, for example, lean very heavily on HR. All their 1st-round interviews are group coffee chats conducted by an employee from HR; this is in stark contrast to Moelis, for example, whose 1st-round interviews are always carried out by Analysts & Associates.

You usually can't tell which camp a firm is in from the outside. That's the first thing a junior chat buys you. Talk to one Analyst or a past intern and you'll quickly learn how the machine works at that specific firm, including how involved HR is. For most readers, the firms you're chasing are the larger ones, and at those firms the answer is almost always the same: start all the way at the bottom, with Analysts, or even lower, with Incoming or Past Interns.

Start at the Bottom: Analysts and Interns

Analysts are your first and best targets, for three reasons.

They're closest to you in age, so these are the easiest conversations you'll have. Compared with Associates, VPs, EDs, and MDs, an Analyst is the person you can talk to most naturally. They were in your shoes very recently, and that proximity takes a lot of the pressure out of the chat.

They hand you interview ammunition. These are people who, only a year or two ago, were successful recruiting for that exact firm. Whatever they said in their interviews worked, by definition, because they got the offer. When an Analyst tells you how they answered "Why investment banking?" or "Why this firm?", you're not getting a guess, you're getting a tested answer. Copy it and adapt it to your own experiences.

They give you insider information, because to them, you're an asset. This is the part most students miss. To a senior banker, an undergraduate is nowhere near an asset, so seniors tend to try relatively less hard in coffee chats, often doing little more than answering your questions curtly. An Analyst is different. To an Analyst, you genuinely are an asset, which makes them more giving with information and more forgiving of gaps in your understanding.

And honestly, that's the right order of operations. If you want to learn about a firm as an undergraduate, the people to talk to first are the ones whose recent experience most closely matches what's in store for you. The kind of insider information juniors will share can move the needle on your whole process:

• If a particular Analyst is in charge of recruiting, a past or incoming intern can tell you that.
• If a specific person in HR is running point on undergraduate recruiting, an Analyst can share that.
• If a certain MD is the gatekeeper for first-round interviews, Analysts or interns are the ones most willing to tell you.

None of that is knowable from the outside. A student who skips networking is flying blind on exactly the information that decides outcomes.

To be clear, you should speak to senior employees. Their word holds more water than any Analyst or Associate. But you do it after the juniors, not before, and we'll get to exactly how that pays off when you reach up.

Associates: The Same Tier, Two Ways to Route You

From your perspective, an Associate is about as useful as an Analyst. They may even have the final say on which students make the first-round cut, though more often they work alongside Analysts to decide together.

A single chat with an Associate can produce a referral outright. The more common outcome, if the chat goes well, is that they pass you in one of two directions: up to a Vice President, or down to an Analyst.

When they send you up, that VP is usually running point on recruitment and uses Analysts and Associates as a first line of defense, taking calls only with students his juniors have already vetted. At a firm that operates this way, speaking to the gatekeeper is non-negotiable. Here's what that looked like for me:

I'd never have found that ED from the outside. A string of junior chats surfaced him, and sheer persistence got me the meeting.

When an Associate sends you down to an Analyst, the firm is likely using its Analysts to sniff out the candidates most deserving of a first-round interview. The Associate who referred you will usually discuss your candidacy with that Analyst, trusting that the Analyst's recency in recruiting and closeness in age make for the most accurate read on a student.

A useful rule of thumb sits underneath all of this: aim to speak with 2 to 5 people per firm. The strongest version of that path is when each chat hands you the next, the first person referring you to the second, who refers you to the third, and so on, rather than five cold emails fired off in parallel.

Working Up to the Seniors: VPs, Directors, and MDs

I think of a conversation with a senior employee as a levered-up version of a conversation with a junior. The way leverage amplifies returns in both directions, the impression a senior forms of you has an outsized effect on your candidacy, good or bad. That's exactly why preparation matters so much here, and the best preparation, as I said, is simply talking to the junior employees first.

In fact, before you reach up at all, ask those juniors whether a senior chat is even needed. If it isn't, why volunteer for the risk of a bad impression?

When a senior chat is worth having, the juniors you've already spoken to become your way in. When you email an Executive Director, you can name the people you've already talked to, and that does two things for you.

The first is protection against being forwarded down. For reasons of time, convenience, and priorities, senior bankers routinely forward student cold emails to Analysts and Associates. If you've already spoken to those levels, that's the last thing you want. Naming the juniors you've met, and saying you're reaching out for a different, more senior perspective, justifies why you came to this person specifically.

The second is a display of work ethic. Picture an MD with three student emails in front of him: one that mentions no other employees, one that mentions a single interaction, and one that mentions five. Resumes aside, which is he most likely to reply to? The answer is obvious, and it's the same student who most deserves the call. I can't promise this stops him from forwarding you down, but it maximally mitigates it. Even if he does pass you along, the junior who receives your email inherits the same strong impression, which only improves your odds of a referral.

Here's the email that puts the strategy to work:

Everything before "Would you be open to a phone call" is doing the work. The four names are proof you've done the rounds, the "more junior perspective" line explains why you're now writing someone senior, and not a word of it reads as entitled.

There's one more reason to value senior chats, and it has nothing to do with the referral itself: they're the best training ground you have. Think about how distance runners train at altitude. Their bodies acclimate to lower oxygen, so when they come back down to race conditions they outperform. Coffee chatting works the same way. Train against the hardest employee group, and every later chat with an Analyst, an intern, or HR feels easy by comparison, and you'll improve faster than your peers. Just make sure those practice reps happen in low-risk settings, with people in roles outside your actual targets. First impressions last, so you don't want to be "practicing" on the gatekeeper.

HR: The Wildcard Evaluator

HR deserves its own mention, because at some firms it's the most important node of all, and it behaves differently from everyone else.

For that reason, treat HR like the senior bankers: reach out only after you've spoken to a handful of Analysts or Associates, so you walk in informed and warmed up rather than cold.

And don't get too bogged down trying to map all of this out in advance. As long as you're actively networking, much of "what to do next" reveals itself at the end of your chats, when the other person volunteers recruitment advice and firm-specific background you couldn't have found anywhere else.

A Quick Note on Tailoring by Level

One last thing that makes all of this easier in practice. People at different levels enjoy talking about different things, and steering toward what someone's proud of is the fastest way to build rapport. As a loose guide:

• An analyst might like talking about their recruitment journey and how they got to where they are today.
• An associate might like talking about their first big deal or project, or what allowed them to receive a promotion.
• A VP might like talking about the first deal or project they ran point on.
• A Director might like talking about the first big client they landed.

The seat changes the story. Match your questions to it, and the person on the other end does most of the talking, which is exactly what you want.