Hassan Akram
Founder and Principal Advisor, Elite Careers Strategy
I advise candidates and families navigating some of the world’s most selective careers.
Corporate lawInvestment bankingPrivate capitalConsulting
- Hiring-side experience that predates the advisory work
- More than 10,000 applications and candidate materials read
- Based in London, with documented outcomes in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore
The thesis
Elite selection is not a credentials contest.
Most of a selection decision is invisible from the outside. Candidates often prepare for the wrong conversation, against criteria nobody has explained. The gap is information, and it moves through networks that are not open to everyone.
Elite recruitment is not one problem either. Getting in is positioning: what an application signals before anyone has met you. Progressing tests technical work, commercial judgement and how somebody behaves while being watched for a day. Converting is a partner or managing director deciding whether they would put you in front of a client. Most candidates are failing at one of the three and preparing for all of them.
The first work is therefore finding where a candidate is losing probability, the step most often skipped.
What employers select for is moving too. As the junior work that trained people becomes automated, the apprenticeship ladder shortens and what marks out an exceptional junior arrives earlier: judgement, verification, being trusted with a client. That is my reading, not a measurement.
Background
I learned this from the other side of the table.
I read History at University College London, then spent several years on the hiring side of investment banking, private equity, venture capital and corporate law, reading applications and deciding who went forward.
Seeing those decisions repeatedly from the hiring side is different from encountering them once as a candidate. Across that work and the advisory since, I have read more than 10,000 applications and candidate materials. The method came out of that accumulation: the same failures recur, at identifiable points.
Selected institutional work
Where the work has been presented.
2022
Harvard Business School
An address to the MBA class on 18 November 2022, invited by the school’s student-run Venture Capital and Private Equity Club.
2023
Yale School of Management
An invited session for an MBA student community, on how selective firms read candidates.
2023
MIT Sloan
An invited student-led session on routes into venture capital.
2023
Festival of Education, Wellington College
A talk at the Festival of Education, Wellington College, on pathways into corporate law and investment banking.
Speaking is by invitation. No university or school employs, endorses or is affiliated with Elite Careers Strategy.
Selected outcomes
What the work has produced.
ECS has documented 106 outcomes and selection progressions across 53 candidate journeys. The four below name the relationship in each case.
White & Case, London Training Contract
Won from ABB A-levels and four years of rejection cycles with no assessment-centre invitations.
Paid engagement. Anonymised at the client’s request.
Read the case study
HSBC and Blackstone, Karam Kahlon
First contact in November 2022, aged 17 and in sixth form; four years before either landed.
Paid engagement. Named with consent.
Read the case studyClifford Chance, London Training Contract
The candidate reported using ECS’s published frameworks and free resources before securing the offer. No paid ECS engagement.
No paid engagement. Public frameworks only.
Read the case studyGibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Training Contract
The redacted offer email is published on the ECS homepage.
Paid engagement. Complete anonymity requested.
Read the case study
The offers are documented. The evidence does not establish how much ECS contributed to each outcome.
Where it started
A different starting point.
I grew up in my city’s most deprived neighbourhood, which ranks among the most deprived 1% in England.
Derby 016A is ranked 74th out of 33,755 neighbourhoods in England in the 2025 English Indices of Deprivation. No other neighbourhood in Derby is more deprived overall. I went to state school, achieved A*A*A at A-level, played cricket for Derbyshire as a teenager, and later studied History at UCL.
Source: Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Local Deprivation Explorer 2025, neighbourhood E01013480.
Nobody I knew growing up worked in law or finance, so there was no obvious route into understanding how these professions worked or how people entered them. I learned by going through these systems myself, and later by seeing how those decisions were actually made.
None of this information is secret. It is just unevenly distributed. That experience is part of why I became interested in how selective institutions make decisions, and why ECS was built around making those decisions easier to understand.
Recruitment, from the inside.
Why ECS exists
What the work became.
Eventually I stopped explaining the gap one person at a time and built ECS around closing it. It works with a small number of candidates and families in those fields.
Every engagement starts with a diagnostic, which I lead myself: until you know where a candidate is losing probability, you are guessing at the remedy.
Much of the work runs longer than a recruitment cycle. Families often come years before an application, and the useful thing then is not to pick a career for a teenager but to keep options open, build real interests and accumulate evidence worth having by the time the direction is theirs.
Explore Elite Careers Strategy
Ideas and writing
A body of thinking.
The Times of India
- How to join the 1%: a practical guide to entering KKR, McKinsey or Goldman Sachs
What each process assesses, and where candidates lose them.
- How the BDC Framework enables interview success
The written-application method, set out in full.
Original research
- Seven patterns from 10,000 elite-firm applications
The recurring failure and conversion patterns, from the review record.
- Why strong candidates fail: five patterns from 80+ written case records
With the sample, method and limits stated alongside.
"The strongest career strategist I have encountered - anywhere in the world."
Kristin Irish
Former Head of Campus Recruiting, UBS Investment Bank New York
Former Deputy Director of Career Development, Yale School of Management
Independent endorser - not a client of ECS.
Public record
Sources for the principal public claims on this page.
- Registered company
Trading name of City Careers Coach Online Limited, registered in England and Wales, company number 15883448.
Companies House record- Published writing
The full author archive, without selection by me.
Times of India author archive- Endorsement of record
Quoted verbatim.
Kristin Irish on LinkedIn
Some claims cannot be independently checked. Student-club invitations are held on file because those sessions are rarely published. Client outcomes are documented, but most families ask to remain anonymous. The figure of more than 10,000 applications is my own count of my own work and is not independently verifiable.
Contact
For private advisory enquiries
Applications are reviewed for fit before an engagement is offered.
Elite Careers Strategy