Behaviorals Flashcards
• What other banks are you interviewing with?
o Asked by a bulge: MS, GS, Bank of America, Credit Suisse and a few other banks
o Asked by boutique: PJT, Evercore, Goldman Sachs and a few other banks
• What factors are you considering throughout this process?
o Culture / People
o Approach to professional development
o Opportunities for meaningful work
• Where do we rank?
o You’re definitely a top bank for me. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know everyone here and feel like I’ve made great connections throughout this process and I’m looking for a place where I can be for the long term and build my banking career and I would love that place to be Guggenheim.
• If we give you an offer would you accept?
o You’re a top bank for me, but I want to be respectful to all the banks and see this process through to the end before making a commitment.
• Why IB?
o When I was working on the acquisition at panther, I had exposure to the investment bank that was advising on the transaction and I was able to see how the investment bank really acted as a thought partner with the spac and the spac was led by a top bank of America executive so he had a ton of knowledge in the finance space and I thought it would be very rewarding to work in a client facing, solutions oriented position where you’re helping incredibly sophisticated clients work through their strategic and financial challenges. Beyond that I realized IB was the perfect merger of my background in terms of the analytical problem-solving work I was doing at GS and the client services work I was doing at PRM and that’s why I want to do investment banking.
• What are your three primary weaknesses? What are three more? What are three more? (the 2nd two questions are pressure tests)
o Too focused into details
I tend to focus too much on the details, which means I sometimes get curious and distracted by the finer points of a project – I can end up spending three hours reading something that’s only very slightly relevant to the project. I think one of the best ways to combat this, though, is to be aware of it in the first place – when I notice myself getting dragged away from what I should be doing, it becomes a lot easier to pull back. In a job like this, I think it’s very important to be organized and prioritize and I think that’s something I’ll be doing a lot of, so that will help with making sure I only focus on the finer points when I’m able to
o Public Speaking
I have bad public speaking anxiety and it’s something I’ve been working on, so I try to practice when I get a chance
o Too focused on binary outcomes
e.g. I won or I didn’t. For example, in swimming, I could get my best time but if I didn’t win I felt like I failed. This has kind of transitioned over into my professional career as well, so I make sure that I’m setting smaller goals and acknowledging those even if the larger goal wasn’t achieved.
o Too eager to jump into the work
When I’m working on a project sometimes I I have the urge to jump into things right a way and have learned I need to step back and make a solid plan before approaching things. Kind of a slow down to speed up or measure twice, cut once mentality
• What are your three strengths?
o Work ethic o Commitment and sense of accountability o Attitude o Adaptability o Professionalism o Team oriented o Judgement
• Tell me about a time that you failed
o Swimming failure: My Sophmore year in college I was swimming at our last meet of the season before the national championships and I hadn’t qualified for that swim meet yet so I knew this would be my last shot to qualify. During the last 50 of my race my timing was off coming into the last wall and instead of taking an extra stroke to get me there I decided to extend the stroke I was on. That decision cost me time and unfortunately I didn’t qualify for the championship. I was really upset with myself because I felt like I had let my team down by not qualifying and I acknowledged my mistake to my coach and going forward I always made sure to take that extra stroke if I needed it.
o Work failure: When I was an analyst at GS, we would peer review each other’s reconciliations before submitting them to our manager and there was a time where things were really hectic and I was supposed to review my coworkers reconciliation but she was really good at performing them and I had never found any errors with hers in the past so I submitted it without checking and it turns out there were in fact mistakes in her report that my manager caught and I was grilled for not checking so I really learned the importance of reviewing work no matter the circumstance. I was lucky enough to learn that lesson early on in my career so now I always make sure to never skip the review process.
• Tell me about a time that you had to give constructive feedback
o Lou: getting defensive with investor questions
o Touchpoints to review progress: analyst needed to work on his writing and would give him feedback. (property managers on their writing style rather than bullets)
o Analyst was contradicting managerial style
• Tell me about a time that you were given constructive feedback?
o 360 degree feedback and got feedback from both my manager and analyst. The feedback from my manager was I need to proactively communicate so I can course correct as needed and not feel like I’m bothering him by checking in. From my analyst was to spend more time going over things at the beginning, laying out a clear plan at the beginning.
• What is the single best quality about you?
o Commitment and sense of accountability
I think this is largely driven by my swimming experience. When I’m working on a team, I know that I need to give it my all and put in my best effort. I also know that if I slack off then the whole team will feel it so I really hold myself accountable.
• How would you add value to the team at XYZ bank?
o Here are the three things I can bring to the team:
My work ethic
• I swam for 18 years required putting in 4 hours a day training and also balancing that with schoolwork in college and I think my work ethic will come handy in banking when I’m staffed on multiple live deals and have to put in the hours
My commitment and sense of accountability (also talk about teamwork)
• I think this is largely driven by my swimming experience. When I’m working on a team, I know that I need to give it my all and put in my best effort. I also know that if I slack off then the whole team will feel it so I really hold myself accountable.
My organization skills
• I learned to become organized when working at panther because I was balancing a number of projects. I think that’s going to be really valuable in this role because you’ll be working on a number of projects as well
• Tell me about a challenging situation you faced.
o Swimming injury faced with decision to retire or continue competing for trials.
o Work: working on a project with a global team – navigate time zones, aware of national and religious holidays, savvy about the cultural differences among team members.
• Tell me about a project you led
o At GS our division had this innovation challenge where we could form a team and submit ideas to solve problems we were facing at work. One problem that I noticed was our team would work closely with a number of different operations teams, but we never had any formal training on what those teams actually did which made it challenging to understand their point of view at times. I mentioned this to some of my colleagues and we formed a team to come up with a solution for his problem. We had four weeks to come up with an idea and it was very challenging because some of my colleagues were in Bangalore and the New York office so we were working across different time zones so we had to figure out how to navigate those time zones and cultural differences but we were successful in getting an idea together on time and actually won the challenge. (analyst connectivity program) Analysts would meet once a month and have a guest speaker from various ops teams to go over what their team did and allow us to ask questions to learn more about the business from their perspective.
• What’s your proudest accomplishment?
o Swimming: placing second at the national championships my senior year. My team and I worked incredibly hard that year and its always great accomplishing something individually but doing it as a team was such an incredible feeling.
o Other: being awarded the alumni scholarship at Stern. Getting into stern was a huge goal that I accomplished and then getting that merit-based scholarship was something that really made me proud because I’ve been working so hard to get into school for the past couple years.
