Analyst, Equity Research

I got scheduled for a telephonic interview with the Equity Research hiring committee through a senior university friend (he used to work with the US IT Equity Research Team at JPM). During the telephonic interview, I was first asked a lot of "fit questions": whether I will be able to manage the hectic hours required for the job and what was my understanding of the role (later, I came to know that this was something very specific to my team as they are workaholics). I was then asked a few general valuation related questions which gradually evolved into more industry specific discussions (I could see that the interviewing manager knew quite a bit about the sector). Overall, the interview was pretty relaxed and interactive.

After a couple of weeks, I was called again by the same manager to inform that they have scheduled a face to face interview with a couple of associates representing my sector. This interview, was also quite similar to the first one, albeit with a much greater focus on industry related questions (I have mentioned the questions below). Right at the end, I was told that another interview will be scheduled with the two analysts in my prospective team.

In this final round, I was just asked a very specific question related to the pharmaceuticals sector (related to some projects I had worked on during my first job). The ensuing discussion transpired into a number of questions from their end which led them to believe that I knew about the sector in great detail and also knew how to use a couple of difficult industry databases which could be quite useful for the team as only one guy used to work on research requests from clients related to such data and these requests were becoming frequent.

After another couple of weeks, I got the offer (though I was given a strong hint by the analyst towards the end of the final interview when he asked if I could join sooner!).