5 Financial Analyst Behavioral Interview Questions & Answers!

hey guys welcome to another video with the financial controller my name is bill hannah and in today's video i'm gonna walk you through five financial analyst job interview questions that are behavioral and what i mean by behavioral questions is that these are the questions that the hiring manager would ask you to gauge your willingness and readiness to work within a team uh work well under pressure uh navigate social situations at work and resolve conflict and if you've been following this channel you'd know that i spent the last 15 years working in finance and that i set up both sides of the table both as the job seeker and also as the hiring manager and in this video i want to give you the things and the signals that i look for when i have a candidate for a financial analyst role the things that when i hear as far as these behavioral questions uh immediately clicks and i realize that this is somebody who's ready to work in this job so let's go through these behavioral questions again these are five questions we'll go through each of these questions and the answers one by one so let's dive right in [Music] all right guys so question number one the question goes what is the biggest mistake you've made in your job what the interviewer is gauging by this question is your willingness to admit to a mistake that you've made because basically we're all humans and if you're not willing to admit to a mistake this will give a bad signal to the interviewer so what i want you to do before the interview is to think of an example of a mistake and just remember this example so that you can say it during the interview because if you start saying that you didn't make any mistakes and or you can't remember a mistake this might give a bad signal to the interviewer that you're not someone who's willing to admit to a mistake because at the end of the day you would want to work with someone who's willing to actually say that they made a mistake rather than hiding their tracks and not admitting to the mistake so this is what the interviewer is trying to do and your chance here is an opportunity so rather than this being a challenge or a curveball for you this should be an opportunity for you to mention a mistake and then mention how you were able to correct it and even avoid it in the future so the example i'm going to share with you is actually a mistake that i've done early on in my career and this kind of mistake is the kind of thing that i would say as an answer to this kind of question and basically what happened is that early on in my career i was in charge of creating a financial model that was part of a presentation that was then given to an investor and basically on the morning of the presentation i've discovered that one of my excel files had an error in it that was producing the wrong number because i was linking uh to a cell rather than using an actual formula like a vlookup formula i was linking to a cell and i shouldn't have done that but basically i discovered the mistakes so i alerted my manager and even though it wasn't pleasant it wasn't great but the manager was able to then avoid uh the mistake with the investor and corrected the number last minute and then what i learned from it is that instead of linking to a cell i discovered that if i use a vlookup or an index match formula in the excel file i would avoid this kind of situation so basically what i learned from my mistake is that i'm using now a vlookup or an index match instead of linking to a cell in a different tab in the file so you see what i've done here i basically was able to admit to a mistake which is what the hiring manager wants he wants to hear somebody who's willing to admit to a mistake and i highlighted what i've done to remedy my mistake is that i rush to my manager and let them know of the mistake and then on top of that what i learned from this and that's why i write here the word opportunity because this is an opportunity for you uh to shine and to show that you've learned from your mistake and you've done other things to avoid falling in the same mistake in the future so this will be the first question that comes to mind when it comes to behavioral questions all right so question number two and the question goes describe a situation when you were under pressure and basically what the hiring manager is doing here is that not only the gauging that you could work under pressure is that you would thrive under pressure and to me the idea of thriving under pressure has to do with staying focused and staying focused when you work under pressure has to do with being organized and using checklists and creating milestones if you're managing a bigger project and also relying on other team members to work toward a bigger goal so let me give you an example of the kind of answer that i would give to this kind of question because basically for me one of the things that i have to do each year is deliver the financial statements to the board of directors at the end of the audit engagement and it's usually a big project of compiling all of the financial information going through the audit and then coming out with a financial package that i would then deliver to the board of directors and this for me requires a lot of focus and there's a lot of pressure of meeting a deadline and so the way to stay focused for me is to create a checklist of all the things that need to happen to get to the final destination of having the financial package and then i manage that by team member and work with each team member to accomplish their own deadline to finish their piece of the project and then bring everything together at the end so basically the way for me to stay focused is to create a checklist uh to stay organized on milestones of things that need to happen for me to get to the final goal and then manage each team member's deadline to get to the final deadline of delivering the financial statements so this would be the kind of answer that will be given to this kind of question so you need to think for yourself what what will be the answer for yourself so come up with an example before the interview don't come up with it on the fly during the interview so come up with this before and then so you can be ready during the interview and this will be question number two [Music] all right so question number three and the question goes describe a situation when you had a tight deadline and what the interviewer is gauging here is your willingness to go above and beyond to meet a certain deadline and this usually entails a few different things so usually that entails working overtime or putting in more time to get the work done so they're trying to gauge your potential there as well as being organized mentioning things like a schedule or a checklist would help and also your willingness to work within a team because most often when you have a deadline at work or a tight deadline you're working within a team that is trying to accomplish and meet the same deadline and so these are the things that the interviewer would typically be looking for so to give you an example of the kind of answer that i'll be giving to this kind of question and in my answer i try to incorporate all of the aspects so i'm going to incorporate being a team player and being organized and working overtime is an example of fundraising for any of the companies that i worked for because basically whenever there's a fundraising there's usually a very tight deadline with the external investors but also there is an internal deadline usually a way ahead of the external deadline so that we can get the work done and review it before we can submit it to outside investors so basically to meet the deadline we usually divide the task among ourselves for the team so each team member we get a set of tasks to accomplish so that we can work toward the bigger goal and basically we had to create a checklist of the things that need to happen for each team member to get their work done and create milestones and basically when we create checklists and milestones we're able to organize all of the things that need to happen for the bigger project to get accomplished and so you see in my example i stress you know working within a team and creating a checklist of milestones to be organized and these are the things you need to be talking about so that you can give signals to the hiring manager that you're someone that they can rely on to meet uh deadlines in the future if you or anyone you know is preparing for a job interview and accounting be sure to download my accounting interview checklist it's 100 free and an amazing summary of the most common accounting interview questions i'll leave a link in the description [Music] below [Music] all right so question number four and the question goes what motivates you at work and if we have to be honest here for a minute is that what motivates anyone to do any kind of work is usually money but in the interview it will be highly inappropriate for you to talk about money so instead for me what i would talk about is the things that will lead to making more money so instead of talking about the actual money you can talk about the things like learning and growth and so what motivates me is to learn and to grow in my career because i know that the more i learn the more i will earn so learning and growth motivates me to work more and to get exposed to new things the other thing is creating a reputation or a personal brand because we've all seen these folks on linkedin who have like a testimonial from a colleague or a former boss basically praising them for being highly efficient highly organized and all of these good things and we all secretly wish that we we are one of those people who have this kind of testimonials so basically this is something that pushes me to work harder and make me want to do more is to create a personal brand and a reputation and also learning and growth pushes me to work harder because i know that i can grow in my career when i know more things so you can talk about learning and growth and creating a brand or reputation and this will be a good answer to what motivates you to work [Music] all right guys so question number five and the question goes give me an example of a time when you faced a conflict while working on a team and so the interviewer by just asking you this question is gauging your social skills and also your maturity or wisdom and so basically because this is a frequently asked questions and interviews in general you should be coming with the example of this the answer of this question before the interview so you need to come up with the example play it in your head and even say it out loud practice it because this is a very frequently asked questions and interviews in general not only finance but in general this is a frequently asked question so come up with the answer before the interview for this question so let me give you an example from my own career of an answer that i would give to this kind of question and hopefully this answer will be an inspiration for you to think of a conflict or things that happened in your own career early on in my career i worked as a manager of a team of three people and one of them had little to no confidence in me or my ability to lead the team so she was highly defiant she would she wouldn't do the things that i would ask her to do and basically just didn't want to work with me at all so instead of escalating because i could have escalated the question to hr and make it a big deal i took a different route which is i work with her in doing her own work so basically i would come to work i would sit with her and take whatever she's doing that day and do her work for her because for me that was part of it learning what she was doing so it's kind of hitting two birds with one stone i was learning what she was doing so that i can be a more effective manager but at the same time i showed her that i'm humble that i'm willing to to actually work for her and so basically at the end that worked out so she then realized that it's some that i'm someone she can trust um and ultimately we worked really well together so the this is a good example that you can give that i can give in my situation and so by giving you this story i want to inspire you to think of a conflict of a thing that happened in your past that you can bring here and show in a positive light show a good outcome of it and show what you've done to get there and rise above the conflict and that's basically question number five all right guys that's it for this video if you liked it and you learned something new from it please smash that like button and if you haven't subscribed to the channel go ahead and subscribe down below and let me know in the comment section below what do you think of the content of this video and if there's any other content you want to see in the future i'd love to hear from you and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: The Financial Controller

Views: 39,556

Keywords: financial analyst interview questions, fp&a interview questions, finance interview

Id: aPIboJu6lpQ

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020