The procedure will definitely vary from school to school, but here at Darden most of the larger firms have similar procedures.

First, the firm will come for a briefing. This is the typical powerpoint or movie and presentation, followed by some Q&A and then perhaps a little informal networking afterwards. The firm will then come back a few weeks later for an open event, usually a cocktail or maybe an 'anatomy of a case' type thing. The event is open to everyone. Around this time, the school hosts a career discovery forum for each of the typical job tracks; for consulting, the dozen or so biggest firms will be on campus for the forum.

The firm will then return for a closed list event; this might be dinner, golf, poker or whatever. It seems like they invite 2-3x the people compared with the number of interview slots they will have. They might ask you to send in a resume in advance, but it will mostly be based on their impression of you from prior events. They will be weeding people out, but they will also be judging student interest. Most firms don't want to fill their interview slots with people that will get sucked up by other firms (MBB don't worry about this of course). They want to court and interview students they have a chance of landing.

We're pretty much at this stage right now. From this point forward, there might be additional closed events. It really depends on the recruiting relationship the firm has with the school, and of course what their hiring needs are for that year. If the firm is only planning to take 1 or 2 people, they might not be back (they may only come once or twice total). If the firm expects to hire more people, they will be on campus more often. This might be the time to work any contacts you may have with the firm (personal, school alumni, etc.) However you do it, it will be good to have someone at the firm speaking up for you when they set their closed interview list. This last paragraph is conjecture based on conversations with 2nd years, as we haven't reached this stage yet this year. It applies to consulting as well as banking, but probably not to general management, marketing or other types of recruiters.