The exploratory call

Best practice

Three things decide this call: whether you are the level they are hiring, whether you have a real reason to move, and whether the work you have sold would come with you. Very little else you say carries the same weight.

• Be clear about what you want and what you don’t. A candidate who is "open to the right thing" reads as someone shopping. A candidate who says "I want a sector I can own, I don’t want a delivery seat, and I won’t do four nights a week" is easy to sell internally, because the partner can picture where you sit.
• Have a one-line answer to why you would leave. No push is the most common reason a good candidate gets parked rather than rejected. If the honest answer is "nothing is wrong, I’m curious", say so — and expect to be revisited in six months rather than progressed now.
• Say "I originated" or "I delivered", and mean it. Senior interviewers listen for this precise distinction. Blurring it once is the fastest way to lose credibility for the rest of the process, because everything you say afterwards gets re-weighted.
• Name three relationships that are live today. Not the logos you worked with — the people, and the seat they sit in. "CFO at a mid-cap industrial, spoke last month" is worth more than a page of client names from a firm you left three years ago.
• Let them lead. A first call you run yourself, question by question, is remembered as pushy. Ask your questions in the last third, after they have covered theirs.
• Settle the level in this call. Level mismatch ends more processes than capability ever does — and it ends them late, after four meetings, when it costs everyone something. Ask what the seat is on paper and what it is in the comp structure. They are not always the same.

Market insight

A partner process runs five to eight conversations over two to three months, and the market is currently stricter about level than about capability.

What the market currently looks like from our side of it.

• A partner process is five to eight touchpoints over two to three months. Anyone who tells you it will be quick is describing an exception. Build that into what you tell your current firm, and into any competing timeline.
• Firms reject for "too senior" as often as "too junior". A partner with a very large package is frequently passed over for a seat that wants someone with a decade of runway. This is not a judgement on you; it is a budget and a succession plan.
• Some firms place real weight on their own published frameworks. Where a firm has a signature approach, expect to be asked to engage with it early rather than late. Twenty minutes on the firm’s own materials before you dial is the cheapest insurance in this whole process.
• August and late December are dead. In some markets processes freeze entirely. A gap in the summer is almost never a signal about you.
• The transferability test comes up almost every time. Expect some version of "is the book yours, or the logo’s?" Expect it, and answer it before you are asked.

What to ask, and what to leave

Ask about level, sponsorship, and how sales credit is counted. Those three answers tell you more about the seat than anything published about the firm. Do not open on money, do not test the interviewer, and do not ask anything the firm's own website already answers.