1st interview very casual - Hardly Star questions 30 min interview
The Talent Acquisition Specialist is super lovely and prioritised more on asking about who you are and how you see yourself in the firm. Genuinely invoking on insightful conversation about values and aspirations. Basic touch-ups on knowledge about the firm (come up with a solid explanation) but also really highlight yourself in a achievement, personality or an experience that really brings you value and purpose that you think the firm can also expose you to or enhance. Focus on values and motivations here. The TA will also give very great detail on career progression plans and overall culture making it super engaging, insightful and a comfortable discussion.
The 2nd interview - excel test + demo 1.5 hours
This part you will instruct the interviewer, senior consultant, through their shared screen how to answer the excel questions so bear in mind the quality may not be super clear to see every detail.
Familiarise yourself with the syntax - you will have 20 mins to answer 8 questions and can use excel on your end to verify how to do something first however it’s not a lot of time to experiment. Be familiar of locking cells (F4) and understanding how to rectify mistakes in your explanation like missing a ‘comma’ ‘bracket/parentheses’ . Even though your instructions might have not been perfect initially showing that you can quickly rectify problems will add to your overall quick thinking and problem solving skills. Bonus points if you can find unconventional ways or multiple ways to do an answer like for a question that you may use V-Lookup show them you can use another function like Index-Match as well/instead. [Other functions may include If function V lookup Ranking
Concatenate Financial formula (simple multiplications) or sum-product,Sum, Upper, If Average - pivot table.
Third Interview, with two seniors [Associate Director/Manager] you will have to present a 10 min presentation from any topic like AI, ESG. You will get asked more Motivation/Technical/Competency - research more into FactSet products/news, learn financial terms and definitions e.g: bonds, buy-side, sell-side, Name a time where you have worked through a problem. This is more STAR professional questions about your career experience. [Refer to other financial terms in other reviews for better preparation].