How to get a networking call

Everything else in this library assumes somebody is already in a room with you. This is the part that gets you the room. It is also the part almost nobody teaches properly, because the honest version of it is unglamorous: it is a volume game with a low hit rate, played over weeks, and it mostly comes down to whether your message is short enough to read and specific enough to answer.

Start with the number, because it reframes everything after it. If you send a hundred messages, expect somewhere between two and ten replies. Maybe worse. That is not a sign you are doing it wrong. That is the base rate for a stranger asking a busy person for time, and knowing it up front is what stops you from quitting after the first fifteen unanswered emails.

Warm beats cold, every time

Before you write a single cold message, spend an hour mining for a warm introduction. Parents, aunts and uncles, your parents' co-workers, the parents of your friends, anyone your family knows. Go through LinkedIn and look at second and third degree connections. If you have ever been owed a favor, this is what you spend it on.

The reason is simple and it is worth hearing from the other side of the desk. When a friend asks a banker to speak to their nephew or their friend's kid, that banker will drop what they are doing and take the call. The same person will not open a cold email from a stranger.

And if you have none of those connections, you are still fine. Plenty of people who now work in banking had no family friends in the industry and networked their way in anyway. It is a genuine advantage and its absence is not a disqualification. It just means more of your outreach is cold, which means more volume.

The message

Four rules, and they are all about respecting how busy the person is.

Short and punchy. If it reads like an essay, people see the wall of text and flip to the next message. You are writing four or five sentences, not a cover letter.

Attach nothing. It is tempting to include your resume, a cover letter, a transcript. Do not do it on the first message. The moment someone sees files attached, the message stops being a quick reply and becomes a task, and tasks get postponed forever. Do not give a busy person homework.

Lead with the commonality, in the subject line and the first sentence. Go through their LinkedIn before you write. If you went to the same school, are in the same club, played the same sport, came from the same hometown, that is the first thing they read. Not the second paragraph. The subject line.

This one is worth being blunt about, because it is the difference between a reply and silence. When a banker is getting more requests than they can possibly answer, they triage. Someone from their own school, or their own club, gets read first. That is not favoritism, it is the only filter available to them.

Be flexible, and ask for fifteen minutes. End with something close to "I am free whenever you are." Then bend your schedule around whatever they say. And name a small number: ten or fifteen minutes. Someone reading "fifteen minutes" thinks I can spare that. Someone reading "a call" thinks about their calendar and stops reading. The call almost always runs longer anyway, which is a good problem.

Email or LinkedIn

Use email when you can find the address. It is more likely to be read and it does not sit behind a platform people check irregularly.

When you cannot find it, LinkedIn is a real channel and not a consolation prize. Some people live in their inbox there and some never open it, so if you can do both, do both.

For finding addresses, there are lookup services that will give you an email from a name, a title, and a company, most of them on a free trial. The efficient way to use one is to build a long list of people you have no address for, then burn the trial on the whole list in a single sitting rather than looking up one person at a time.

Who to target

Do not be precious about seniority. Analysts, associates, VPs, directors, MDs, all of them.

The instinct is to chase the most senior person who might reply, and it is half right. MDs, directors and VPs carry more weight in the process. But analysts and associates reply far more often, they sit in resume screens, and even when they do not, every conversation is ammunition later. When an interviewer asks why you want their firm, being able to say you spoke with five people there is a real answer, and it does not stop being a real answer because three of the five were analysts. If anything it shows legwork.

If you are a sophomore, or at a school the big banks do not recruit heavily, widen the target list rather than the seniority range: boutiques, regional boutiques, valuation shops, anywhere you would actually touch a model. The reply rate is better and the experience counts.

The follow-up ladder

Most students send one message and stop. The follow-up is where the replies actually come from, because the first message usually arrives on a bad day.

A workable ladder is a connection request, then the real message, then a follow-up after about a week, another after about three weeks, another around the three month mark, and a longer update after six months or so. The exact spacing matters less than the discipline of having a next one at all.

What matters is that each follow-up carries a reason to exist. "Just bumping this up your inbox" is the version that annoys people. A follow-up that says you got a second round at another firm and would value ten minutes on how to prepare is a different message with a different ask, and it gives someone who ignored you twice a natural way back in.

Templates, and why you A/B them

You are going to write the same five or six messages over and over: the cold alum, the alum from your club, the warm introduction, the follow-up, the thank you, the note after an info session. Writing each one from scratch is how the effort dies in week two.

So keep templates. But two things have to stay true about them, and they pull against each other.

They have to sound like you, not like a form letter. A stilted message under your own name is worse than no message, because it makes you sound like a robot to the exact person you were trying to impress. Contractions, plain words, the way you would actually talk.

And you should test them. Since you are sending the same message many times, you can find out which wording works instead of guessing. Keep an A and a B, change one thing between them, and watch which gets answered.

That last part is the piece almost nobody does, because doing it by hand means keeping a spreadsheet of every send and every reply.

Running the whole thing in the Recruiting Hub

This is exactly what the Recruiting Hub is for, and the outreach side of it was built around the workflow above.

Open any contact and the composer is already filled in from their record. You pick where the message is going, Email, LinkedIn message, or the note attached to a connection request, then which of the six situations you are in.

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Two details there matter more than they look.

Every A/B pair differs on exactly one thing, and the composer tells you what it is. In the screenshot, option A makes a bounded ask and option B makes an open one, and nothing else between them changes. That is deliberate. Two versions that differ in five ways produce a result you cannot act on: B won, but was it the shorter ask, the warmer opening, or naming the group? Change one thing and the answer means something.

The message merges from the contact record, so the firm and the group are already in the text and only the parts about you are left to fill in.

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Notice how short it is, and that the ask is fifteen minutes with three questions. That is the shape from the rules above, not a coincidence.

The part no spreadsheet gives you

Because the message is sent from the contact record, the Hub already knows it went out. So when a reply lands, it can attribute it, and the templates report their own reply rates.

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Two rules are baked into that panel and both are there to stop you fooling yourself. A reply only counts if it arrives within two weeks of the message and before you wrote again, so a banker answering on day forty does not get credited to wording he had forgotten. And no percentage is shown until you have sent a template at least eight times. One reply out of two sends is not a fifty percent reply rate, it is two sends, and rewriting your outreach around that is how you optimise for noise.

Tracking, which is the boring half that decides everything

You are going to have a lot of these conversations. Keeping who you contacted, when, through which channel, and what you said, is not optional at volume, and the Hub's Networking tab is a place to put it that also does something with it.

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Note the statuses. No response and Declined are in there on purpose. A tracker that only models forward motion teaches you nothing about what is actually working, and the twenty-one days sitting next to a silent contact is the useful part of that row.

From there it does the chasing you would otherwise forget: it works out who has gone quiet against the right cadence for their seniority, and it tells you which firms you are tracking with nobody at them and which contacts you have never written to at all. Those two numbers are the gaps no other view shows you, because every other list is organised around what you have done rather than what you have not.

What good actually looks like

Some concrete targets, which are more useful than "network more":

• Block twenty minutes a day. Every day, not in bursts.
• Fifteen connection requests a day is roughly seven minutes of work. LinkedIn caps you at around a hundred requests a week, and you can free up room by withdrawing requests that have sat unanswered for over a month.
• Fifteen to twenty-five new connections a week.
• Two to five calls a week once it is running, and three informational interviews a week is a reasonable target to reach within about six weeks of starting.

Set against a hit rate of two to ten percent, those numbers stop looking aggressive and start looking like arithmetic.

The point of all of it

None of this is the goal. The goal is a fifteen minute conversation with somebody who does the job you want, and what happens on that call is a separate skill with its own failure modes, starting with the fact that wanting a referral is the thing most likely to ruin it.

That is the next article: the informational interview.