Private Careers Advisory
Hassan Akram
Founder and Principal Advisor
A recruiter's view of selection, applied to one candidate at a time.
Hassan leads ECS’s advisory for students and families, from school to first role in investment banking, private capital and corporate law.
- More than 10,000 applications and candidate materials reviewed
- 100+ documented outcomes and selection progressions
- Limited intake each year
Parent or sponsor welcome. Applications are reviewed before booking.
Background
From recruitment and search to private advisory.
Hassan Akram founded Elite Careers Strategy and its research arm, Who Gets In?, which studies how selective employers choose early-career talent.
He read History at University College London, then worked in London recruitment and search: at Kea Consultants on private-equity and venture-capital fund mandates, then at Barclay Simpson and Heriot Brown in legal recruitment, screening and putting forward candidates from leading US and Magic Circle law firms, investment banks, consultancies and investment firms.
He began advising candidates one-to-one in 2019 and formalised the work as Elite Careers Strategy in 2022. He has reviewed more than 10,000 applications and candidate materials. ECS has a record of 106 documented outcomes and selection progressions across 53 candidate journeys at firms in London, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore.
He has spoken to audiences associated with Harvard Business School, Yale School of Management and MIT Sloan, and at the Festival of Education at Wellington College. He has been featured in the Financial Times, quoted as an expert by The Independent, and has written for The Times of India.
On elite selection
Strong credentials do not automatically become an offer.
Elite firms do not hire a CV. They make a sequence of decisions.
Different people assess different evidence at each stage. In ECS's experience, strong candidates are often rejected when the signals do not form one credible case.
That is the problem ECS diagnoses, and how we help is the method.
ECS moves forward only where the profile is strong enough, the objective is serious and the decision-maker is aligned.
Endorsement
"The strongest career strategist I have encountered - anywhere in the world."
Kristin Irish
- Former Head of IB Campus Recruiting, UBS Investment Bank, New York
- Former Early Career Program Manager, Jane Street
- Former Deputy Director of Career Development, Yale School of Management
Independent professional endorsement. Former roles shown; no institutional endorsement implied.
Speaking
Speaking to audiences associated with Harvard Business School, Yale School of Management and MIT Sloan.
MBA student-club sessions at Harvard Business School, at the invitation of its Venture Capital and Private Equity Club, MIT Sloan and Yale School of Management, and the Festival of Education at Wellington College.
Where it started
A different starting point.
Hassan grew up in a Derby neighbourhood ranked 74th most deprived of the 33,755 neighbourhoods in England on the 2025 English Indices of Deprivation. He attended a state school and, as a teenager, played cricket for Derbyshire.
Source: Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Local Deprivation Explorer, neighbourhood E01013480.
Growing up outside professional networks is where his interest in information asymmetry began. Which firms run which processes, what each stage assesses and what a credible application looks like are not secrets. They travel through networks, and those networks are not open to everyone.
That is the problem ECS was built for: how selective recruitment works, stage by stage, not careers in general.
Why ECS exists
The gap the firm was built to close.
Two things led to the same conclusion. From the recruitment side, Hassan saw across thousands of applications which candidates were rejected, and at which stage. From his own starting point, he knew how much of that was never explained to anyone outside a network.
ECS was built to close that gap for a small number of candidates a year, not to publish more general advice. We deliberately limit the number of families we work with each year.
The firm
- Founder-led advisory. Every engagement is founder-led by Hassan Akram, with the client team and the firm’s research behind it.
- The client team. Catrina Mira, Head of Client Services, keeps scheduling, documents and follow-up moving between sessions.
- Research. Who Gets In?, the firm’s research arm, studies how selective employers choose early-career talent.
- The evidence register. Every outcome we cite is held as a dated record, graded by the evidence behind it.
- The private client portal. Each client works from one private portal: assignments, written feedback, session notes and the plan.
The firm also runs the ECS Scholars Programme and works with trusted advisers who introduce families.
Who we advise
Families and candidates based in London, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai, among them families with backgrounds in senior business leadership, finance, law and family offices.
ECS works across an unusually broad range of backgrounds, from state-school and non-traditional routes to leading British and international schools and universities.
Where our clients have studied. ECS clients have come from Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, UCL, Imperial, King's College London, Warwick, Bocconi, London Business School, Harvard Business School, Yale, MIT, Exeter, Glasgow, Queen Mary and Westminster.
Specialist recruitment judgement.
Hassan leads every Private Diagnostic and stays closely involved in each engagement, supported by the ECS client team.
The advice fits the candidate.
The record, the target firms and the stage being lost are assessed together.
The proof is kept.
Every outcome ECS cites is recorded in its evidence register, and a client is named only where the family has agreed.
To begin
Apply when the decision is serious.
Every engagement begins with a Private Diagnostic, led by Hassan. Applications are reviewed for fit first; a parent or sponsor normally joins.
Request a Private Diagnostic