Consulting Coffee Chats: Questions to Ask (and Avoid)

A consulting coffee chat is a short, informal call with someone who works at the firm you're targeting, usually 20 to 30 minutes, set up through a cold email, alumni network, or campus event. The goal is not information. Hours worked and case team size are on Glassdoor already. The goal is to give someone a reason to remember your name when your resume lands on their desk, and you do that by asking questions only someone who did the homework would ask.

I sat on the other side of hundreds of these calls at McKinsey, both as the person taking them and later as someone whose informal notes on a candidate got passed along informally to a staffer doing first-round screens. Coffee chats are not neutral. They are auditions with worse lighting.

What a coffee chat is actually for

Most candidates treat a coffee chat like an interview they haven't been told the rules of, so they either freeze up or over-prepare a pitch nobody asked for. Neither works. The person on the other end of the call is giving up 25 minutes of their day, unpaid, usually because they were once in your position and someone did the same for them. They are not evaluating your case skills. They are evaluating whether you are someone worth a five-minute internal referral email.

That referral is the entire point. A referral does not get you an interview by itself, but at firms doing volume hiring off a stack of a few thousand resumes, a named internal contact can be the difference between a resume getting a real read and getting triaged. Your job on the call is to earn that contact wanting to write the email, not to prove you already know everything about the firm.

In the batches I reviewed, an identical resume could get two different outcomes depending on whether a name was attached to it. A cold submission got the standard first pass. The same resume with a short internal note from someone who'd taken a coffee chat with the candidate weeks earlier tended to get a closer read, sometimes from someone senior enough to push it past the usual screen. Nothing about the resume changed. The context around it did.

Questions that make you sound prepared

Good coffee chat questions have one thing in common: they could only be asked by someone who read the person's actual background, not a generic "tell me about your experience" opener. Before every call, spend ten minutes on the person's LinkedIn. Note their undergrad, their prior job if they had one, their current office, and how long they've been at the firm.

Then ask things like these:

• You came in from a non-target school. What made your resume stand out enough to get a first look?
• You switched from industry to a consumer-goods case team. Was that something you asked for or something staffing decided for you?
• What's different about how your office staffs first-year analysts compared to what you hear from friends at other offices?
• What surprised you most in your first 90 days that nobody warned you about beforehand?
• If you were reviewing my resume cold, what's the first thing you'd want to see more of?

That last one is worth asking on almost every call. It gives you direct, specific feedback and it signals you're comfortable hearing something you didn't want to hear, which is itself a small leadership signal. I go deeper on turning that kind of feedback into resume changes in the consulting resume guide.

Questions to avoid

Some questions are technically fine to ask but waste the slot you were given. Others actively hurt you. Here's the difference.

The pay question is the single fastest way to make someone regret giving you their time. Compensation is public information, easy to find, and asking it directly turns a relationship conversation into a transaction. Asking for a referral outright in the first call is nearly as bad. Referrals get offered, not requested, once the person has decided you're worth vouching for. If you ask before you've earned it, you put them in the position of either awkwardly refusing or referring someone they don't actually believe in, and neither outcome helps you.

Generic advice questions ("any tips?", "what should I know?") are the third trap. They put the entire burden of the conversation on the other person and produce answers you could have gotten from a blog post. Specific questions produce specific, memorable answers, and specific answers are what get repeated in a hallway conversation about you later.

How to open and close the call

Open with thirty seconds on who you are, not three minutes. Name, school or background, why this firm specifically, done. Nobody wants a monologue and a long opener eats into the time you have for actual questions.

Close by asking one thing directly, but frame it as information, not a favor: "Is there anything in my background I should be thinking differently about before I apply?" This is a softer version of asking for a referral. If the conversation went well, many people will offer to pass your resume along without being asked, because you gave them an easy, low-risk way to help. If they don't offer, you haven't put them in an awkward spot, and you can follow up later once you've applied.

Networking well is a skill on its own, separate from case prep or resume writing, and it compounds across every coffee chat you do. I break down the full approach, from finding contacts to structuring outreach, in the consulting networking guide.

The follow-up almost everyone skips

A thank-you email within 24 hours is table stakes, and it should be short: one line of thanks, one specific thing you took from the call, done. What most candidates skip is the second follow-up, four to six weeks later, after you've actually applied or made a change based on their advice. Something like: "Wanted to let you know I applied this cycle and took your point about quantifying the operations project more, thanks again for the time." This is the message that turns a one-off call into someone who actually remembers you when your resume comes across their desk.

If your outreach for the first call felt clunky, the templates and structure in the consulting cold email guide will save you from the two or three most common mistakes that get emails ignored before a chat ever gets scheduled.

A quick checklist before every coffee chat

• Read the person's LinkedIn for at least ten minutes and note two specific things to ask about
• Have one question ready about their background, one about the role, one asking for direct feedback on you
• Know your own thirty-second opener cold, don't improvise it live
• Never ask about pay or ask for a referral directly in the first conversation
• Send a specific thank-you within 24 hours
• Set a calendar reminder for a follow-up four to six weeks out

If you're early in the process and still deciding where to focus your outreach, the target schools breakdown and the non-target school guide are worth reading before you start scheduling calls, since who you reach out to matters as much as what you ask them.

The bottom line

A coffee chat is not a test of what you know about the firm. It's a test of whether you did enough homework to ask something specific, whether you can take feedback without getting defensive, and whether you're worth the small risk of a referral. Ask sharp, background-specific questions, skip the ones about pay and referrals, and follow up twice, not once. If you want the fuller playbook on turning conversations like this into actual interview invites, the consulting networking guide is the next thing to read.

Go deeper

Coffee chats get you a warm resume read. What happens after that read still comes down to the resume itself and the case prep behind it, which is what the course covers end to end.

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