5 General Principles for Quantitative Finance Interview

The following tips are taken from Xinfeng Zhou’s — A Practical Guide To Quantitative Finance Interviews

• Build a broad knowledge base — The key here is to “Know the basics very well”. Interviewers might be from diverse backgrounds and hence the topics one might be tested upon are likely to be broad. A basic understanding of a wide range of topics helps to better analyze the problems, explore alternative approaches and come up with efficient solutions.
• Practice your interview skills — Other than the quant interview questions a lot of resume, technical and behavioural questions can be anticipated. Remember to practice the potential questions long before you enter the interview room.
• Listen Carefully — Active Listening is one of the critical elements of an interview. If a problem has more than a couple of statements remember to jot down the keywords. This will help you remember all the information. Often interviewers give clues that help in approaching the problem.
• Speak your mind — Always interact with the interviewer and remember to think out loud. Remember to write down the important steps and clearly present your analysis. One should focus on demonstrating an understanding of the key concept being tested through that problem rather than dwelling on the less relevant details.
• Make reasonable assumptions — While solving a problem it is highly likely that all the necessary information might not be available. This is applicable in real-life corporate scenarios too. Here it is important to make reasonable assumptions and explain them to the interviewer to get immediate feedback. Apply valid frameworks to solve problems based on the assumptions.

All the best for your interviews !!!

I will keep posting actual interview questions. Hope you enjoy solving them.