The engagement
What the engagement contains
A private advisory built around one candidacy, led personally by Hassan Akram, with the preparation infrastructure of a firm behind it.
Led by Hassan Akram. Parent or sponsor welcome. Applications are reviewed for fit before a Diagnostic is offered.
After the diagnosis
The Private Diagnostic exists to name the failed stage. Strong candidates rarely fail for lack of ability. They fail because nobody has worked out which part of the process they are losing. And the reason one candidacy stalls is usually not the reason the next one does: a candidate losing at the written application, a candidate losing at the screening tests and a candidate losing in the room after a strong paper record are three different problems, and treating them as one is how a year gets spent.
What is included
What the family receives
- One-to-one sessions with Hassan Akram, not a coordinator or an associate.
- A written advisory plan setting out the diagnosis, the sequence of work and the firms in scope.
- Application and written-evidence work firm by firm, reviewed line by line.
- Interview, assessment-centre and written-test rehearsal against the real format.
- A record of every session, with assigned actions tracked to completion.
- Access to the ECS frameworks, drills and preparation materials used inside the engagement.
- Parent or sponsor involvement at whatever level the candidate has agreed.
The rest of this page is what those seven lines look like in practice: the plan, the preparation, the rehearsal, and the written work that comes out of a live session.
One place to see what matters now
The plan panel narrows the week to three pieces of work. Not a reading list and not a backlog: the three things that move the constraint the Diagnostic named, in the order they should be done. When the situation changes, and it does change, a rejection lands or an assessment centre gets brought forward, the plan is re-run against the new position rather than manually patched.
Work is resumable to the exact document. A candidate who stopped halfway through a written exercise on Tuesday opens on Thursday at the place they stopped, not at the top of a library. That sounds small. It is the difference between preparation that survives a busy term and preparation that restarts every time.
Preparation built around the route
Six suites, mapped to route rather than to subject. A Magic Circle training contract process and a bulge bracket markets process reward different evidence and are assessed by different people, so preparation organised by academic subject sends a candidate to the wrong material with the right label on it.
Corporate law
Training contract and vacation scheme routes into the Magic Circle and the US firms in London: written applications, Watson Glaser, case and commercial exercises, partner interviews and the assessment centre.
Investment banking
Spring weeks, summer internships and full-time analyst routes into the bulge bracket and the elite boutiques, including the technical rounds and the superday.
Buy-side and markets
Private equity, secondaries and markets processes, including the modelling and the investment judgement a sponsor interview actually tests.
Venture capital
The sourcing, diligence and thesis work a venture interview is built on, which rewards a different kind of evidence from a banking process.
Strategy consulting
Case interviews, written cases and the structured problem solving the MBB and tier-two processes assess, including the sponsor summary a firm reads before the final round.
Commercial fluency
The cross-route work: converting the news cycle into commercial articulation that holds up under follow-up questions, in any of the five routes above.
The candidate is not handed all six. They are pointed at the part that moves their constraint, which is the difference between a library and a plan.
Rehearsal under the real conditions
More than 88 simulators, 22 best practice guides and 4 mock vacation schemes. An answer that sounds right in a candidate’s head sounds materially worse the first time it is said out loud, and the point of rehearsal is to close that gap before the assessment day rather than during it.
The detail worth reading in the screen above is the marking correction of 5 August 2026. An item in the hardest Watson Glaser mock had been keyed to an option that did not exist, so it marked wrong whichever answer was given. It was found, corrected, and published to clients with the effect on previously recorded scores stated plainly: if you sat that mock before 5 August, your overall score and your Interpretations section score are each one mark lower than they should be.
A practice that never publishes a correction is not a practice without errors. It is a practice that does not check, or does not tell you. The correction notice is the part of this we would most want a family to read.
Between the sessions
An engagement is not a number of conversations
A session is where the judgement is applied. It is not where the work happens. Each one ends by producing something written, and the next one starts from what came back. That loop is the engagement:
- 01DiagnosisWhich stage the candidacy is losing, named before any work is scoped, and revisited when the evidence changes.
- 02Founder judgementA live session with Hassan against that constraint. This is the part that does not scale and is not delegated.
- 03Written intelligenceA note after the session: where the candidacy now stands, what moved, and what the candidate is being told not to do.
- 04Assigned workSpecific work with a stated standard, so what counts as finished is agreed before the candidate starts rather than after.
- 05FeedbackThe work comes back and is read. An answer that reads well and collapses under a follow-up question is caught here, not at the assessment centre.
- 06IterationThe plan is re-run against the new position. A rejection or a brought-forward assessment centre changes the order of the work, not the diagnosis.
- 07The next interventionThe following session is set against what the last one produced, which is why session six is not a fresh conversation.
Nothing in that sequence depends on anybody remembering it. The plan, the record of the session, the assigned work and the feedback all sit in the same place the candidate works in, which is why a rejection in November can be read against what was actually said in September rather than against an impression of it.
The work itself
What a session actually produces
Below is a real one, with the client removed. It was written after a live advisory session and sent to the candidate: the read on where the candidacy now stands, what moved in the session, what the candidate is being told not to do, the work assigned before the next session, and what that session will test. This is the part of an ECS engagement a family would otherwise have to take on trust.
Hassan’s judgement
You have enough material for a convincing Why Corporate Law answer. The issue is no longer finding more reasons. It is making the existing reasoning easier to retrieve, easier to trust and easier to use under pressure.
The chronology is also much clearer. The FIA report gives you a credible starting point. Fox and IndyCar develop the commercial logic. What is still missing is a genuine Confirm experience. We should not write one into the story before it exists.
Current priorityFinish the evidence we already have, verify the factual claims, then turn the live reasoning into writing that is shorter and easier to deploy.
What changed
The session narrowed the problem.
Confirm
We should not invent a neat third stage simply because the framework would look more complete.
At the moment, Begin and Develop are real. Confirm is not. That is fine. The contract-review exercise is designed to create legitimate exposure and test the motivation rather than manufacture evidence after the fact.
Before the next session
What I want you to do.
- 1Complete the contract reviewArrange around 30 minutes with a legal contact and review a public or mock SPA. Focus on two or three clauses.Done looks like You can explain what each side wants, how the clause allocates risk, what you initially missed and whether the work genuinely strengthened your motivation.Send ECS A short note with the clauses and your reflections.
- 2Write the full Why Corporate Law answerBuild the complete chronology using Begin, Develop and Confirm.Done looks like Confirm only appears if the contract review has actually happened and earned its place.Send ECS The full written answer.
- 3Write the short versionCompress the strongest reasoning into 150 to 200 words.Done looks like It still sounds like you and the chronology survives the cut.Send ECS The short written answer.
What we will do next
- 1Decide whether the contract review genuinely earns the Confirm slot.
- 2Finalise the full Why Corporate Law story and cut it into application-ready versions.
- 3Audit the work experience section against your stronger live reasoning.
- 4Pressure-test retrieval and commercial judgement under tighter conditions.
Measure of progressOne accurate, personal and chronologically coherent Why Corporate Law story that works naturally in an interview and can be shortened without losing its logic.
The instruction worth noticing is the one telling the candidate not to manufacture evidence to complete a framework. Preparation that optimises for a tidy answer is how a candidate gets caught in a follow-up question, and it is the reason nothing goes into an application that the candidate cannot defend.
For the parent or sponsor
What the payer can see
The person paying is usually not the person being advised. That is a governance problem before it is an emotional one, and it is settled at the start rather than negotiated later.
You are in the room for the diagnosis
The Private Diagnostic is attended by the parent or sponsor as a matter of course. The read on what is going wrong is given to the family, not relayed to them.
The scope is written down before the work starts
The diagnosis, the sequence of work and the firms in scope are agreed in writing. Progress is measured against that document rather than against a feeling about how it is going.
The work is visible as work
Assigned work carries a stated standard and is tracked to completion, so "is this progressing" has an answer that does not depend on asking a nineteen-year-old how it is going.
The candidate keeps the room
What a candidate says in a session stays in the session. The parent role is agreed with the candidate at the start: what is shared, what is not, and who is told what. It is governance, not supervision.
What a parent is buying, and what their role is in it, is set out for families on the briefing for families and sponsors.
Where Hassan’s judgement goes
None of the above is the product. It is what makes the product deliverable at a standard that does not depend on how a particular week went.
The infrastructure carries continuity and repetition, so founder time is spent on the decisions that change the outcome: which firms are genuinely in reach this cycle, which application to hold back, what a rejection actually indicates, and when a candidate is ready. That is the work a family is buying, and it does not scale, which is why ECS takes on around thirty families a year.
Over several years
Some engagements do not end with the cycle
An engagement is scoped against the selection problem in front of the candidate, and for most families that is one recruitment cycle. For some it is not. A candidate advised in their second year through a spring week, a summer internship and a conversion is being advised across three cycles and two years, and the value of that is continuity: the person making the call in the third year was in the room for the first.
Where the brief is genuinely that long, covering university positioning, early internships, applications and conversion, it is scoped as multi-year family advisory rather than renewed a cycle at a time. Karam Kahlon’s engagement, from the University of Exeter to an HSBC investment banking internship and the Blackstone Spring Insight Programme, ran four years on that basis.
A private advisory built around one candidacy, led personally by Hassan Akram, with the preparation infrastructure of a firm behind it.
Led by Hassan Akram. Parent or sponsor welcome. Applications are reviewed for fit before a Diagnostic is offered.
Related reading: how the one-to-one advisory works, the Private Client Advisory decision page, inside the ECS Private Client Vault and the documented track record.