About Investment banking recruiters

Investment banking recruiters tend to explore relatively consistent themes from
one interview to the next, although the interviewer’s particular style can vary
considerably—conversational versus confrontational, technically intense versus
personality focused, and so on. Generally speaking, however, insiders have
observed an unmistakable trend toward the behavioral interview, in which
candidates are asked to cite experiences—professional, academic, and personal—
in which they’ve actively demonstrated specific attributes. Behavioral
interviewing is based on the premise that patterns of past behavior most
accurately predict future performance. Advocates of behavioral interviewing
report that the technique enables interviewers to most accurately assess whether
a candidate possesses the requisite skills and personality for on-the-job success.
The logic is appealing: Anyone can rattle off a list of attributes commonly
sought by investment banks, but successful candidates can readily substantiate
these claims with examples that demonstrate competency in a given area. For
example, it’s fairly easy for a candidate to claim exceptional quantitative skills,
knowing that investment bankers assign a great deal of importance to analytical
abilities. In a behavioral interview, however, the interviewer might ask the
candidate to describe a particular project—completed during a summer job,
perhaps, or in an academic context—that required a great deal of quantitative
or analytical rigor.
What does all of this mean for you, the job seeker? It means that knowing the job
for which you are applying—and knowing exactly how your experiences and achievements
relate to that job—is the single most important thing you can do to prepare for investment
banking interviews. You may be accustomed to preparing for interviews through a
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Interview Roadmap
line-item audit of each individual bullet point on your resume. In some
interviews, this is a sound approach. An interviewer may very well ask, “I see
you worked at XYZ Corporation over the summer. What were your responsibilities
there?” Questions like this will certainly arise in banking interviews, but
perhaps more prevalent are the questions like, “Tell me about a time that you
took on a responsibility that perhaps wasn’t part of your official job description.”
You could choose to point out that at your previous job you designed a
comprehensive training program for new employees, organized guest speakers,
and designed metrics to track the program’s efficacy. Alternatively, you might
choose to highlight your involvement in a particular B-school study group, in
which you took up the flag for an ailing team member and wrote a presentation
that technically fell outside the scope of your assigned duties. Either example
works, as long as it shows that you’ve taken initiative in the past.
With this in mind, don’t compartmentalize your achievements into “work
experiences,” “educational background,” “extracurricular activities,” and
“personal traits” as you’re preparing for investment banking interviews. Instead,
think about each of your endeavors in terms of the skills, abilities, and attributes
it enables you to demonstrate. To make this process even easier for you,
we’ve already grouped the qualities you should seek to emphasize with the
questions most frequently used to assess them. We describe the categories,
questions, and selection criteria in detail in the following pages.
To put your anxious mind more at ease, we’ll let you in on some candidatefriendly
news: Some insiders have noticed that their firms now place greater
emphasis on effective interviewing than they have in years past. As we’ve
learned from our insider interviews, several investment banking powerhouses
now require all of their employees to participate in standardized interview
training, designed to help bankers-turned-recruiters become more effective
talent scouts. Why such a renewed focus on interviewing aptitude? To a greater
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Interview Roadmap
extent than ever, Wall Street firms now realize that candidates’ experiences with
the recruiting process—either positive or negative—effectively shape their (and
their classmates’) perceptions of the company. At long last, many interviewers
now recognize that staring silently at a Super Saturday candidate for the first 15
minutes of the interview, or bombarding unsuspecting candidates with incessant
rounds of long multiplication, is more likely to create a negative impression of
the firm than it is to assess whether the candidate will succeed in a given role.
This is good news for you, the job seeker, particularly if you’ve been agonizing
over how much time you should spend preparing for the famous “brainteaser”
questions known to have occasionally flummoxed even the most die-hard
investment banking prospect. There are fewer wildcards in investment banking
than there once were and fewer than you’ll find in management consulting
interviews (where the infamous case interview may account for more than 50
percent of your evaluation). In fact, there’s little mystery surrounding the
content of investment banking interviews, and the format lends itself well to
rehearsing your pitch so that you will know it cold before the interview process
even begins. Plus, because interviews are relatively consistent, you’ll have the
opportunity to refine and perfect your spiel as you progress from one firm’s
process to the next, and—with your solid preparation and research—from one
round to the next as well.