In your experiences, which banks has the most technical / challenging interviews?
Based off personal experience, I found PWP, Moelis, Greenhill, and JPM (was pretty hard for a BB) the most challenging technically (ie digging into conceptual questions that truly gauge your understanding). What were your experiences like?
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Counter-intuitively, my hardest technical interview (in banking at least) wasn’t an EB or a BB, it was a no-name boutique.
Because the team was so small, you needed to hit the ground running and there was no place for mistakes even as an An1.
I didn’t end up taking the offer cause Evercore. But it was a pretty good insight.
What was the question?
what q were you asked?
Saw a post while back where someone mentioned two different interviewers had two different answers to the same question at GS lol
no way
If I had to rank (based on my / others experience):
1. Centerview
2. PJT
3. Moelis
4. Greenhill
5. Evercore
6. Perella
7. JPMorgan (they felt more technical than GS or MS)
8. Guggenheim
I’m sure that the more specialized boutiques (think Qatalyst, Raine, LionTree) have very tough technicals as well, but personally haven’t encountered those or heard other folks experiencing them
Evercore should be first or second imo. They thew a ton of random numbers at me like market cap and COD and asked to calculate the effective tax rate, way more miserable experience than moelis
Seems about right. I mainly experienced really challenging technicals from EBs (specifically interviewed with CVP/EVR/MOE/GHL/GUGG).
BBs seemed much more random and cared mostly about fit, whatever that means
MTS - life science / biotech technicals can get a bit tricky. Know your BIWS 400 cold but know how to apply relevant questions in that specific industry.
Got advice from some bankers that have told me in coffee chats that the Superday (if I made it that far) will be intense in terms of technical questions from associate / VP interviewers.
Heard some details about some complicated transactions they've done for clients so I guess vetting strong technical candidates is important for the firm.
Raine techs r ez. They grill you on industry knowledge tho
x
Moelis asked me how to factor in in NOL carry forwards in a FT interview.
I got the answer right but thought it was in unnecessary question to ask. /:
Wow, that's a little extreme. What was your background?
Typical Moelis, SMH
I would agree that EB interviews were a few notches harder than BBs. Personally, I had challenging first round interviews with 4 of them (EVR, PJT, CVP, GHL) as the technical aspects went a little deeper than what you would find in the guides. So it wasn't sufficient to simply "memorize" typical interview questions.
Most BBs (except maybe MS, which was surprisingly technical) were much more chill and focused on behavioral or fit. Also, it seemed to me at least that BBs pretty much knew in advance who is their "type" and who is not, so there was less focus on pure technical evaluation.
MS had a pretty technical interview.
pretty much all EBs (CVP/EVR/PJT/PWP/MOE/GHL/GUGG) are known to have pretty tough technicals, when compared to most BBs.
I'd argue that some specialist firms (eg Q, Allen, LionTree etc) are probably even harder on the technicals (interviewed with one of them and it wasn't a "nice" experience lol)
Congrats on greenhill
Is GHL less of an EB than Gugg? I just read a thread that said they had good exits...
Guggenheim is not an EB. But congrats on Guggenheim.
Chill, GUGG is definitely an EB. Sure, it's not EVR/CVP but it's still considered an EB
I did PWP, MOE, CVP, PJT and LAZ interviews. Would say PWP and MOE were the hardest. CVP, pjt and laz all recycle their questions so it wasn’t hard
for those of you who aced the technicals, what interview prep guides did you find to be helpful?
most of my peers said biws platinum, wsp premium, tts, restructuringinterviews, and tmtbanking, among others, but would appreciate any additional suggestions.
That’s not enough for you?
had a superday recently for gugg and got grilled lol. some questions were flat easy, some were easy but phrased to come off tricky, and some were just so obscure. got grilled on time value of money concepts and had to calculate break even point given some numbers, and also they expected us to know the actual formula for beta. not levering/relevering beta, but the actual covariance(stockr, indexr) / var(indexr). Made it past tech round regardless but i thought that was annoying
Holy shit I’ve never heard of that happening before
Yea so im honestly not too sure why people are ranking Gugg as easy in terms of techs they ask. Questions weren't analyst specific either i think, they had a paper that they read off of. Every question in some way made you think, none straight off the guide. Pretty heavy emphasis on merger/lbo concepts as well. All around just not a very easy interview
what group? I did a gugg superday recently too and techs were very easy.
generalist nyc, what group did u apply?
Houlihan RX senior analyst role was pretty rough
Blackstone investment teams have some really tough interviews, especially for non-targets
Why especially for non targets?
Generally there's a higher standard as their school doesn't do them any favors.
My Gugg analyst full time interview a couple years back was more technically challenging than CVP for FT. However, CVP asked more challenging abstract questions that I wouldn’t have expected in an IB interview.
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