Banking and Industry Finance: Not Must I Bank? Can I Bank?

Here's the situation on my end..

I did banking for a year at a big name firm (ML/JPM/LEH), worked on a few deals, but none closed. Got plenty of modeling in. Layoffs happened.

Now I have a job offer to work in financial planning and strategy for a corporate. My bosses are all former McKinsey consultants. I'm not sure what I'll be doing but I'm pretty sure that I'm not doing budgeting and auditing, etc.

I want to do banking, and am targeting boutiques in NY/MA/CT (not at the level of Evercore, Allen or even Moelis). But they all have decent M&A dealflow, private placements, etc.

Being the saturated market that it is with so many laid off analysts and the bulges/mm's in a hiring freeze for laterals, I'm inclined to take the offer and interview with boutiques on certain days which I know will be difficult to do since I'll be working (start in beginning of July).

What are the chances of getting back into banking (at an upper echelon of boutiques/mm firms) after doing 1 year of planning & strategy? I feel that I would rather concentrate on my job and build a good name for myself instead of taking days off every week to go interview which would probably get me fired..

I guess it depends more on a network or something, but I just wanted to see if anyone has examples of this ever being done...

Thanks.