Goldman Sachs Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – Called by HR person about a week after submitting resume. Interview was with hiring manager and managing director. Basic questions about background etc. Questions related to position and why I wanted to work with GS. Called back in about 3 days from HR person that they selected another person.

Interview Details – 1 hour on site interivew with two pair of interviewers, each is 30 minutes. One of them is the manager of the team.

Interview Details – Interview process consisted of two back to back interviews, each with two GS employees. All selections were made based on these two interviews, no further ones were necessary for those chosen. All the questions were personality based, nothing technical at all. Interviewers were kind and pleasant. None of the questions seemed designed to catch one off guard or gauge stress.

Interview Details – Phone interview with two members of the team. Pretty basic, described the position. They were most concerned with gauging interest. Goldman flew me down to NYC. Was little bit of a hassle because they flew me into JFK even though my interview was in Jersey City (but hey, they are goldman they can do that). During face to face Super Day 4 back to back interviews. I was given my offer the next day and I accepted. Questions were not all that difficult, be confident. It was a little awkward that you get to meet all other candidates before the interviews.

Negotiation Details – Goldman does not negotiate

Interview Details – First round interview was on campus, I was asked a lot of personality question, and really basic programming questions about inheritance, polymorphism, and school projects. Know everything on your resume really well, because they will ask a lot of details on it. About a week later was asked to go to New York for second round. You can get called back to 1-4 groups. Each group has 2-3 people interview for a total of 1 1/2 hours. Lots of brain teasers, and a few simple java programs. Second round had no behavioral questions really. Some of the interviewers can be really intense while others are helpful.

Interview Details – I received an email inviting me to interview with the Litigation department in New York about a week before the date. I flew out, and met directly with executives in the department, no HR people involved. There were two interviews with three people in each. It was strictly behavioral and resume-based.

Interview Details – 4 phone interview and then a in-person group interview

Interview Details – Generic questions about internships and academic experience

Interview Details – Phone Interview step:
30 mins phone interview. Let me briefly go through my resume for 5 mins or less, introduced their department (GSAM Insurance Department) for 5 mins or less, then technical questions.
Q1: The variance of a portfolio
Q2: The range of a swap rate

Superday:
5 interviewers, 30 mins each. All briefly went through my resume for 5 mins or less, then technical questions.
The questions are based on resume, they looked at my resume, and pull out some questions according to the experience they are interested in.

Interviewer 1 (a VP holding Masters degree with 16 years work experience):
Q1: Given duration, calculate portfolio value change (in a real-world setting). You'll need to identify what's the company's asset and liability, and they have different size and duration
Q2: Would the company result a profit or loss given an interest rate change
Q3: Explain the effect of interest rate's effect on option

Interviewer 2 (an Associate holding Masters degree with 5 years work experience):
Q1: What is covariance stationary in time series, use equation to explain
Q2: Calculate the premium of a limited pay term life insurance
Q3: Discussed many issues in linear regression, including auto-correlation etc

Interviewer 3 (a MD holding Ph.D in Physics at Harvard with 8 years work experience):
We discussed for about 10 mins on one of my previous TA experience, that's why he only had time to ask 1 question.
Q1: Given a random number generator that generate 1,2,3,4,5 only, produce a generator that generate 1,2,3,4,5,6,7. And expected value of the steps taken for the generator to generate a number.

Interviewer 4 (a Strategist(maybe that's how they call analyst in this dept) holding Ph.D in Physics at CalTech with 2 years work experience):
Q1: What's VaR
Q2: 1000 coins, 999 fair, 1 heads for both sides. Pick a random 1, toss for 10 times, ends up they are all heads, what's the probability that this picked one is the unfair one.
Q3: Basically this is a binomial tree discount question, but he stated that in a very-strange-to-me setting, which made me asked him to state again before finally knew what he was asking

Interviewer 5 (a don't-know-his-title holding Ph.D in FE/Math at Princeton with 7 years work experience):
Q1: Given a random generator that generate from (0,1) interval, don't use pole coordinate system, generator a point in a circle. And it's expected times to use the generator to generate one.
Q2: A P&C insurance company has Poisson Dist of claim number and Normal Dist with only positive half of claim size. What's the total claim amount.