eFinancialCareers

I am the finance diarist who completed a summer internship in the finance division at a leading investment bank. In case you haven’t read my diary, I’ll cut to the chase. I, like many other interns last summer, wasn’t offered a full-time position on the graduate programme.

As a result, I’ve been applying to banks and filling in my GCSE, A-Level and degree marks all over again! One US bank invited me to take a numerical test (SHL). After what I guess was successful completion of the test, I attended a first-round interview last week.

The ‘interview’ in fact consisted of two separate interviews which were each 30 minutes long, one with HR and another with two assistant vice-presidents (AVPs) from the division. They were both competency based, so I had to draw upon examples from work, academia and extra-curricular activities.

Line manager questions

The AVPs asked me the following generic questions:

Q: What qualities do you think a leader should have?

Q: Do you think the qualities for managers and leaders are similar?

Q: Tell me a time when you have been a leader in a team.

Q: Tell me a time when you have seen something through from formulation to implementation.

Q: Give me an example where you have made a mistake and tell me what you learnt from it.

There were then follow-up questions from my specific answers. The tip I can give to students facing graduate or internship competency interviews is to make sure you have plenty of examples up your sleeve.

You do not want to be drawing upon the same example time and time again, as it will be like listening to the same song repeatedly for the interviewers. Hence, you should use examples from a wide variety of sources, kind of like doing an essay!

HR questions

The interview with HR was very similar, and was also not technical in nature. Here, the questions were based more on the bank, as follows:

Q: Why finance?

Q Why this investment bank?

Q: Why do you want to study the CIMA?

Q: follow-up: Studying for the CIMA would mean evening classes and weekends, etc… Give me an example where you have managed your time efficiently?

Q: What surprised you about this bank specifically?

Q: When have you taught another person a new skill?

Overall, I feel they went pretty well. Both the AVPs and the HR representative were really pleasant and not intimidating at all. Thankfully, the next day I received an invite to their second and final round, an assessment centre.

I never had to do an assessment centre when I was applying for internships, so this will definitely be a new experience for me.

Be sure, as soon as I have completed the final round, I’ll send my thoughts to the website!

Let us know if you can share information about your interview experiences at investment banks. We’re asking readers to send us details of the questions they were asked in order to have a chance of winning an iPod nano.