Has anyone who received offer for BB nailed every technical question?
For technical interviews, have people who end up receiving offers for bulges gotten every technical correct? What are your experiences all like?
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If they like you enough, it doesn't matter about getting every technical right.
The BB banks I got offers from I missed a few technicals while the BB banks I didn't get an offer from I didn't miss any technicals so YMMV.
That said, I nailed every technical at Moelis and still got dinged even though they place a bigger emphasis on technicals so it really just depends. The BB i'm going to (BAML/Citi/Barclays/CS) focuses a lot on behavioral questions which I feel i'm not the best at but I still got the offer so a lot of it still comes down to luck.
grats on BarCap boss
From my experience and from friends, Barclays is typically more technical than the others they listed.
BarCap is wrong and I have no idea why you came to that conclusion but good work "analyst 1." lmao
During my superday, I got every technical correct, but it was with a guy from my school who was tossing me softballs (I also networked with him —he’s the homie). I missed one (maybe 2 still not totally sure) during the OCR interview tho.
Incoming summer at an American BB in London. I answered every technical question right through all interview stages except for one question in their superday where I had to do some pro forma balance sheet estimations from a merger.
Admittedly, I do believe that they take into account previous IB/PE work experiences when asking technical questions and I was the only one at my superday who didn’t have any aha. It’s defo not a hard rule that you’ve got to answer everything flawlessly.
As someone on the other side of interviews now, I'd say that it depends on the specific questions. Expectation is that candidates should have standard questions from the guides down pat. Those are more of a pass/fail to see if you bothered to put in the effort to study.
Getting the more advanced or "trick" questions correct isn't as important. They're more to test how a candidate thinks/approaches a problem or situation they haven't seen before. For example sometimes we give people a question with missing information: i.e. Your EBITDA is 100, Capex is 50, tax rate is 20%, what's your uFCF? And it's up to you to recognize you need things like working capital and D&A to split out from EBITDA to get EBIT. Being able to workout what you're missing and having the confidence to ask a question is important, and we care more about that than whether or not someone has memorized IRR to MoIC conversions.
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