Recruiting guide

How to find investment bankers to network with

The right banker to reach out to isn't whoever shows up first in a LinkedIn search — it's a specific, narrow list of people you actually have a reason to contact. Here's how to build that list.

Finding investment bankers to network with comes down to three filters applied in order: shared background (school, hometown, prior employer), seniority (analysts and associates respond more than MDs), and recency (people who posted or moved roles in the last few months are more likely to engage). Most students skip straight to a generic LinkedIn search and end up with a list of names they have nothing to say to — which is why the response rate matters more than the list size. If you'd rather have ChatGPT help build and structure this list, see the full ChatGPT-assisted workflow.

1. Start with alumni, not cold names

Search LinkedIn using "[Your School]" AND "Investment Banking" with the location and current company filters set to your target bank. Alumni respond at a meaningfully higher rate than cold contacts — you already have one concrete thing to reference in the first line of an email.

  • Filter by graduation year within 1–5 years of yours — recent grads remember recruiting and are more willing to help.
  • Prioritize analysts and first-year associates — they're closer to the recruiting process and have more time than a VP or MD.
  • Note their group (industry coverage or product group) if listed — it gives you a real reason to reach out beyond "I saw you went to my school."

LinkedIn's own Alumni tool does most of this filtering for you automatically — see how to find alumni from your university for the exact tool and three other sources most students never check.

Example: a junior at a state school targeting bulge brackets might search "University of Michigan" AND "Analyst" AND "Investment Banking", filter to 2023–2025 graduation years, and end up with 15–25 names across 5–6 banks — a realistic, workable starting list, not hundreds of unfiltered results.

2. Widen past pure alumni once you've exhausted the list

After alumni, the next-best pool is people with a second-degree shared background: same hometown, same prior internship, same fraternity/sorority or student organization, or a shared connection who can make a warm introduction. These convert lower than direct alumni but higher than a fully cold outreach. Once even that's exhausted, here's how to source a list with no connection at all.

3. Resolve their email — don't guess and hope

Most banks follow a predictable email pattern (e.g. firstname.lastname@bank.com or flastname@bank.com), but guessing wrong wastes a send and sometimes bounces in a way that flags your domain. A faster path: use a contact-enrichment tool that resolves the format from the bank's known pattern and confirms deliverability before you send, rather than trying two variants and hoping one lands. Goldman-specific guidance is in the Goldman Sachs version of this method, and once you have an email, see templates for the first message.

4. Keep a running list — the list is worth more than any single contact

The actual bottleneck in networking isn't finding one banker — it's finding enough of them, consistently, without losing track of who you've already found. Most students keep this in a spreadsheet that gets abandoned by week three because updating it by hand is tedious. The list only stays useful if updating it costs you seconds, not minutes, per contact — more on what that requires in how to track investment banking networking.

  1. Name, firm, group, and how you're connected (alumni, referral, cold)
  2. Email or LinkedIn URL
  3. Outreach status: not yet contacted / drafted / sent / replied
  4. Next action and date it's due

ChatGPT found the bankers.

Import the list into MarketIQ to get verified contact details, draft personalized outreach for each one, and track who you've reached out to.

Track these contacts in MarketIQ

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