We all know the most dreaded part of an investment banking interview is the technical questions. Sure, you might be terrified of faking your way through the cultural fit stuff when you secretly hate the place, and yeah, you might be afraid of getting a question with no good answer, like, "If this is your dream job, then what happens if another firm gives you a better offer in five years?" Those are rough. But if you don't know what to say when some hard competency questions come your way, then you're dead in the water.
Certain technical questions are relatively easy to prepare for, like "Walk me through a DCF" or "Explain the three types of financial statements." You can study for those in a pretty straightforward manner and practice demonstrating your competency until you're blue in the face. Basically, if you actually get it, and you know how to talk, then you can do it.
What's harder is coming up with answers on the spot to interview questions about more specific modeling examples. At it's core, it's the same thing, but you have to attune your mind to applying your knowledge to particular cases on the fly. Part of it comes back to competency, but a lot of it is nerves, or calming down and trusting yourself to work through the problem.
We figured one of the best ways to practice is in a rapid-fire format, so we put together this quiz. In order to make it as close to the real thing as possible, we used questions that have actually come up in IB job interviews before, as reported by personal contacts and participants in forums like WSO, Glassdoor, and Reddit.
Take a look and see how you do.
The format means you'll spend a short time on each question, but there's plenty of room to discuss individual problems below, and post technical questions you've heard in interviews that we didn't include.
As a virtual data room company, Firmex is in the middle of deals all the time, and this was one of the resources that our contacts said they wish they would've had when they were applying for jobs. We hope it's helpful!
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Great questions. +1
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