The private careers advisor for families whose children are targeting Goldman Sachs and the elite boutiques.

Elite Careers Strategy is the application-only one-to-one advisory for UHNW families with children targeting Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, and the elite boutiques. Founded by Hassan Akram, a former City of London recruiter who reviewed more than 10,000 applications on the hiring side. Approximately 30 private clients per year. London-based, international engagement across the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and New York.

The category families ask about, but no one names properly.

UHNW families searching for "the best private advisor for Goldman Sachs investment banking" get pointed to the wrong category. Search returns Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management (a wealth manager, not a careers advisor), UBS Family Office (same), generic university careers services (designed for the median student), and large cohort-style providers (designed for the median applicant). None of them solve the specific problem: how does a serious candidate from a high-resource family land a named offer at a named bulge bracket against named competitors?

That problem has structural specificity: rolling Spring Week deadlines across eight banks, three HireVue formats, two assessment-centre styles, recruiter-grade DCF and LBO modelling batteries at Superday, partner / MD final-round interviews, offer sequencing across IB / PE / Magic Circle pathways. Each step has selection thresholds set by the firms internally. Most candidates fail not because they cannot do the work, but because they cannot navigate the structure without specialised support engineered from the hiring side.

Elite Careers Strategy was built for this exact problem. Application-only. Founder-led. Engineered backwards from the bulge-bracket selection process. The frameworks (STAR-3®, PEAL-3, BDC™, Commercial Fluency) are derived from 10,000+ hiring-side application reviews. Roughly 30 private clients per year. The advisory turns down most enquiries.

What a private advisory does that nothing else in the market does.

A university careers service is built for scale, a cohort programme is paced to a syllabus, and a tutor works to a brief someone else has written. None of them is designed to answer the question a family actually arrives with, which is why a capable son or daughter is not converting at the firms they are targeting. That is a diagnostic question, and it is answered one candidacy at a time.

ECS takes approximately 30 families a year. Every engagement is led personally by Hassan Akram, who spent his early career on the hiring side in City corporate law recruitment reviewing over 10,000 applications. The work runs the full application cycle rather than a term or a subscription period.

What ECS Private Careers Advisory delivers.

Documented outcomes at the firms UHNW families care about.

• Karam Kahlon - Exeter non-target with resit A-levels. Before ECS: zero IB interviews. After ECS: HSBC Investment Banking Summer Internship and Blackstone Spring Insight. Read the case study →
• Kalen Harrald - QMUL non-target. Secured Clifford Chance SPARK offer in the first-year programme cycle. Read the case study →
• ABB to White & Case - international candidate, training contract secured at a US-elite firm in London.
• Aggregate documented outcomes across Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, HSBC, Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, Clifford Chance, White & Case, Kirkland & Ellis.

What UHNW families ask before applying.

Apply for the Elite Careers Diagnostic.

A structured conversation in which a senior strategist assesses exactly where your applications, or your child's applications, are structurally breaking down. Diagnostics are released 7 to 10 days out and fill quickly.