How to do freshman interviews for finance club?
Hey guys, am in charge of my school's finance club's syllabus programming for the incoming freshman class this year. This also means I will be interviewing the new kids who are applying to our club. I am curious to see how other finance clubs at different schools like to conduct their interviews. Our club's belief is that we would always prefer raw smarts/fit over someone who has learned about finance before coming into university, so we purposefully always made interviews behavioral and brainteaser-focused.
I would take the opposite approach. I think if you take kids who know finance (not that this should be a prereq if it’s fall of frosh year) it will definitely improve placement as you get someone who knows what they want to do and have spent time learning about it. I’d much rather have the kid with average intelligence that has a plan then a genius who doesn’t know wtf he wants to do. This is coming from a kid who knew he wanted to do IB senior year tho so YMMV
My school definitely does more behavioral/brainteasers for freshmen. It feels weird to expect freshmen to know technicals, and also really heavily gives an advantage to students who have parents/older siblings working in finance.
We have a business undergrad school though, so by sophomore year there are some technicals thrown in, as people should know basic accounting. Still more emphasis on behaviorals I would say. Technicals can be taught and grinded out over winter break, behavior and personality are harder to change
I would say that it is important to test their innate thinking ability. Critical thinking skills are usually a good reflection if someone is able to pick up content fast and whether they have analytical skills. However, the best method would be to have a combination of technical (basic economic/market/accounting), behavioral, and critical thinking/brainteasers, and rate them on a scale of 1-10 and associate each category with a percent weightage based on your perception of importance. You will then have a good quantitative method to comparing the candidates.
Think it is important to measure both fit + knowledge of/interest in finance. Mix of technicals and behavioral questions basically.
What does your dad do?
I run interviewing for a finance club at a target that also focuses on raw smarts over actual finance knowledge, if you're interested I'm happy to swap materials to compare
Quite late, but I interviewed for a freshman finance club and was asked about put-call parity, how a market maker makes a spread on interest rate derivatives, how a DCF is made and how to calculate WACC, and what not.
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