I was offered an interview after I sent my CV to a contact who approached me saying they were looking for someone with a strong background in quantitative analysis and a general knowledge of finance to join their Risk and Quant team within the Funds of Hedge Funds division at AXA Investment Managers. I sent my CV in on a Friday morning and a few hours later I had organised an interview for the following Tuesday. The interview itself lasted about 45 minutes with all three members of the Risk and Quant Team present, with the head of the team asking most of the questions. I had brought some slides of previous work I had done and they seemed keen to learn about what I was doing. The discussion was quite open ended, and I was asked what I knew about hedge funds, any strategies I had come across and this opened up some more finance-related questions which the manager fired at me randomly during the discussion, such as what is the theta of an option? I was also asked to write out the Excel Vlookup formula for a pre-defined set of data and explain the syntax ie: Vlookup(lookup_value, lookup_range, column_index, true/false) they also asked me what the formula would be in vba, and continued to ask me to reproduce one of the graphs i had showed them earlier on the spot. By downloading data from bloomberg and plotting a surface graph of the forward curves of futures contracts for crude oil through time - I had done this the morning of the interview, so managed to re-do it for my interviewer (/current manager) to check.