Final Round Interviews: The Wall Street Rain Dance

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I was cleaning out my office a few months ago, when I came across some sheets of paper with microscopic handwriting that looked like a cheat sheet from some class I had taken in business school. I was wrong. It was interview notes back from the year 2000, when I was looking for jobs on Wall Street. Pages and pages of tiny handwriting, with rehearsed answers to interview questions, an overview of the banking industry and its competitive landscape, my opinions on the financial markets, and more. I must have spent hours putting this together. And you know what?

It was a great use of my time.

In general, a lot of those generic interview questions tend to end up in interviews because they are pretty useful in sizing people up. And there’s nothing wrong with a rehearsed answer if it’s well-thought out. Preparation is good. A lack of preparation is bad. Level 10 of the video game is rehearsing it and then getting it to sound spontaneous.

It’s also good to spend all that time learning about the lay of the land in the banking industry. Wall Street Oasis would have been helpful back then. The internet was still pretty young, and while I did plenty of online research, there weren’t any useful forums like there are today. Firms want to know that you’ve gathered some kind of intelligence and you know what the culture is like. If you’re interviewing at 10 different places, it’s hard to keep it all separate in your head, but I have to tell you, back then I was largely ignorant of why Lehman was different from Merrill was different from Solly/Citi.

I think ultimately, what people are trying to figure out in interviews is a) can this person make money for the firm, making me richer directly, or indirectly, as a shareholder, and b) is this person going to fit in and be fun to work with. If you are sitting in the interview, you have already made it quite far. Everyone who has made it to this point is smart. Everyone who has made it to this point is talented. When I was interviewing people, in these final rounds, everyone was super-qualified. But it got down to a) and b). Can this person produce, and are they cool? This is where the boring people and the bullshit artists get tossed.

When I was going to final round interviews, I didn’t realize that. I didn’t realize that being put on a plane and flown first class across the country (they don’t do that anymore) meant that the firm was as interested in me as I was in them. I still felt like I was fighting for my life, and I still felt like the job was mine to lose. In retrospect, it wasn’t. I still had tough interviews, though. In one, a VP rates vol trader had gotten a hold of a Word doc of my resume and inserted typographical errors in it, then berated me, just to see if I could handle the stress. Then he learned that I was a clerk on an options floor, he grilled me on options for 10 minutes straight (I did great).

It literally has taken me 15 years to get perspective on this. What you know about the banking industry—no matter what you learned on WSO or elsewhere—is utterly dwarfed by the years, sometimes decades of work experience these people have. It is a tough job that has gotten tougher, and less remunerative. More than ever, people do it because they love it. Sometimes, I think the amount of interview prep that is available to job candidates today actually does a disservice—makes people think they know more than they do. There is no better teacher than handling risk. They are trying to find the best athlete—a person who cares just as much about this business as he does.

So I finished the interview, and I thought I did pretty well, but who knows? So I go back across the street to check out of the hotel they had put me up in. I remember being mightily impressed by the room, and also putting in a wake-up call for the first time in my life. It felt very big-boy.

But now I’m checked out of my hotel and my flight doesn’t leave for several hours, so instead of dicking around at the airport all day, I decide to catch a movie. There was a theater down the block. This was back in the day when I used to overpack, so I had a garment bag and a huge suitcase, and this was also back in the day before people started putting wheels on suitcases.

So I am humping my luggage down the street to the theater, I get to the theater, and it hits me, kablammo, what movie I should see? Charlie’s Angels. Mindless entertainment, now that should get my mind off of things. I buy a jumbo 64oz Diet Pepsi and somehow I manage to get the Diet Pepsi and all my shit into the movie theater and I plop down and start watching the movie. I was the only one there, naturally, it was one o’clock on a weekday. Just what the doctor ordered. I distinctly remember sitting in that chair in the movie theater, and feeling all the tension just ease out of my back. I didn’t realize how stressed out I was.

Suddenly I have a problem—I polished off the 64oz jumbo Diet Pepsi some time ago and I have to go to the bathroom. Really bad. I’m starting to do the pee-pee dance. But I can’t see myself carrying both my garment bag and my absurdly full suitcase out to the bathroom and back again, and I don’t want to leave my shit in the theater. I’m trapped. So I double and triple check that I’m alone, and, well, fill the 64oz cup back to the top again. On the way out, I drop the steaming warm cup in the trash can. It makes a terrific crash.

And that is the story of how I got a job on Wall Street.