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Each year, I speak with undergraduate and MBA students who are thoughtful, motivated, and ready to refine their approach to the investment banking recruiting process. This practical guide is meant to help students effectively navigate the recruiting process with curiosity, confidence, and professionalism.
When to Start and What “Early” Really Means
One of the most common questions candidates have is when to start preparing. The short answer is earlier than you think, but not too early that you can’t do it well.
Recruiting doesn’t begin when applications open. It begins when candidates start building a working understanding of the industry, evaluating what kinds of firms and roles actually fit them and developing the skills needed to contribute on day one. Joining organizations like Toigo, Forte, and Consortium provide a great opportunity for MBAs to explore paths. For undergraduate students, in addition to attending career fairs, we highly recommend joining organizations geared toward finance and networking with upperclassmen who’ve already completed internships.
Starting early isn’t about perfecting every answer but giving yourself enough time to craft and refine your story as your understanding of the industry deepens (more on what makes a good story below).
Research Firms Beyond Surface-Level Prep
When targeting firms during the recruiting process, strong candidates consistently go beyond rankings and websites. They spend time understanding the types of deals their target firms work on, the clients they serve, and what sets them apart. Two tips for this. First, set alerts to follow recent firm news, thought leadership articles, and deal closings. Second, set up phone calls with early-career professionals at the firms. Alumni from your school will be especially likely to take a call. It’s worth the hunt to find them on LinkedIn.
Rather than collecting facts, the goal of these calls should be building context. This will allow you during the recruiting process to clearly explain why the work, platform, and environment appeal to you. Candidates who do this well come into conversations with informed questions and a point of view.
Look for Client Interaction and Meaningful Deal Exposure
Many candidates rightly ask how much deal exposure they will get early in their careers.
At Harris Williams, we operate in a segment of the market where steady deal volume creates frequent opportunities to work on live client engagements from start to finish. That repetition matters. You want to find a place where you can build judgment, confidence, and an understanding of how decisions play out in real market conditions.
Make this a priority in your early conversations. Push for specificity when you speak with other early-career bankers: How many deals have you seen through from start to finish? How are you beginning to build relationships with clients? These questions will tell you a lot about a firm.
Prioritize Mentorship and an Apprenticeship Model
Candidates also want to know who’s invested in their growth and how development actually happens. It’s helpful to look for places where senior team members stay put.
At firms where senior leaders built their own careers internally, mentorship tends to be embedded rather than programmatic. At Harris Williams, more than 80 percent of our managing directors were promoted from within, including our Co‑CEOs, Bob and John, who both started their careers here.
For early career bankers, mentorship is one of the most important drivers of development. Technical skills can be taught, but judgment is built through close exposure to senior leaders and consistent feedback. An apprenticeship model accelerates that process by making learning part of the day-to-day work, not something that happens separately.
How to Evaluate Culture
Culture fit is not about fitting into a mold. It is about alignment.
The strongest teams are made up of individuals who bring different backgrounds, viewpoints, and ways of thinking, while sharing a commitment to excellence, integrity, and collaboration. We‘re interested in candidates who add to the culture and raise the standard for those around them.
Culture is also one of the hardest things to evaluate from the outside. The most reliable insights come from conversations, showing up to firm events, and spending time with people across levels to understand how teams work together day to day. We encourage candidates to take advantage of both on‑campus and virtual opportunities to ask questions, observe dynamics, and assess whether the environment feels like the right place to build their career.
You can learn more about Harris Williams opportunities here.
Bringing It All Together
Candidates who differentiate themselves can clearly explain what they’ve learned from their experiences and how those lessons shaped where they want to focus. This ultimately becomes your story, which you ideally have fully thought through.
One way to think about this is through both skillset and mindset.
On the skillset side, strong candidates demonstrate a foundation in technical concepts and a track record of execution. They can point to moments where they’ve worked through complex problems or delivered results under pressure, particularly in situations that require analyzing data or making decisions with incomplete information. The key is not just what you did, but how you approached it and what you took away from it.
On the mindset side, we look for qualities that signal long-term potential. Curiosity shows up in how deeply you’ve explored your experiences and the questions you ask. Coachability appears in how you talk about feedback. Adaptability comes through in how you’ve navigated ambiguity or learned something new quickly.
The most effective candidates bring these elements together. Rather than walking through a resume chronologically, they focus on a few defining experiences and answer three questions clearly:
- What did I do?
- What did I learn?
- How does that shape why I’m here?
When candidates can connect those answers to the demands of the role—analytical rigor, teamwork, adaptability, resourcefulness, and good judgement—their story becomes memorable.
Final Thought
Recruiting for investment banking is demanding, but it doesn’t need to be opaque. Candidates who approach the process with curiosity and preparation tend to perform best and find roles where they can grow quickly. It’s important to use recruiting as an opportunity to learn about what you want from your career—not just how to interview well.
This post was sponsored by Harris Williams.
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