Elite Careers Strategy

ABOUT ELITE CAREERS STRATEGY

Elite Careers Strategy (ECS) is led by Hassan Akram, a former City of London investment banking and corporate law recruiter. He read History at University College London (UCL) and has spent his career engineering outcomes for candidates targeting the most competitive roles in global finance and law.

WHAT DO WE DO?

We design intensive one-to-one advisory programmes for students and young professionals aiming for top-tier careers in:

• Investment banking

• Corporate and international law

• Private equity and venture capital

• Strategy and management consulting

ECS focuses on “offer-engineering”, not generic careers advice. We work with you to build the exact answers, documents, and interview performance needed to clear the bar at leading institutions.

Our clients have come from universities including the London School of Economics, Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Warwick, and Harvard Business School. Hassan has been invited to speak to MBA student clubs at Harvard, MIT, and Yale on how elite firms actually select candidates.

OUR TRACK RECORD

We benchmark everything against outcomes.

• In our flagship under-30, 1-to-1 advisory programmes for corporate law, clients have secured Training Contract offers at firms including White & Case, Ropes & Gray, Sidley Austin, and Baker McKenzie.

• In finance, clients have secured investment banking offers and reached advanced interview stages with bulge-bracket and elite-boutique firms, as well as interviews at institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

• Many of these journeys began from “non-traditional” starting points: non-target universities, international backgrounds, or previous rejections.

These benchmarks are historical, based on a deliberately small and highly selective client group. They are not guarantees, but they shape how we design every programme: backwards from the offer letter.

OUR EXPERIENCE AND FRAMEWORKS

As former investment banking, private equity, and law-firm recruiters, we have:

• Sat in front-office hiring meetings

• Screened thousands of CVs

• Interviewed hundreds of candidates across multiple cycles

From this we built proprietary frameworks such as VTMR™ for CVs, STAR-3™ for competency answers, and PEAL-X™ for firm-specific motivation. Every line you write and every answer you give is structured through these tools, so your profile reads the way decision-makers think.

This combination of front-line recruitment experience and rigorous frameworks allows us to give you precise, practical guidance on how to stand out in ultra-competitive selection processes.

IMPORTANT NOTE

All companies and universities mentioned are referenced for context only; no affiliation or endorsement is implied. Sessions at Harvard, MIT, and Yale were delivered to independent MBA student clubs. Most clients choose to remain anonymous; full evidence of outcomes is held on file.