Investment Banking “Fit” Questions: Quick Prep

[Music] [Music] welcome to another tutorial video this one is going to be more qualitative and a bit more focused on interview prep as you can tell from the title so this tutorial is in response to a very common question which we've been getting lately and over the years which is help I have no time to prepare for interviews there are so many guides courses and resources that I have no idea what to focus on I only have three days before my interview what should I do and the truth is that if you only have three days left it's going to be almost impossible to fully prepare you can certainly review what you already know but learning completely new concepts in that span of time is quite different many students and professionals spend months preparing and just learning the technical side especially at the MBA level or beyond and especially if they're making a big career change with that said you can still prepare for a good chunk of interviews more efficiently specifically you can prepare for the fit questions or the qualitative questions more efficiently and finish the most important parts in only a few hours of time which should fit your schedule even if you only have a day or two days or three days before your interviews to explain how you can do this first we have to look at what you absolutely need to do before interviews and what you need to have prepared for interviews if I were to make a checklist of everything you need for investment banking interviews these four items would probably be at the top of the list first off you need to have your story prepared in other words what to say when they ask you to walk through your resume or CV or what to say when they ask you to tell them about yourself you should create a 150 word outline and then a 200 to 300 word full version we've covered this concept elsewhere so we're not going to go into it here the second requirement is that you need answers to common fit questions about your strengths weaknesses your leadership style your past work experience how you work in a team questions like that the third requirement is deal knowledge you need to know something about what the bank or group does you need to know about a deal or market you've researched and you also need to know about your own deals if you have deal experience and then finally the technical side you need to know as much as possible especially with fundamentals in other words accounting and valuation these topics are going to come up in almost any finance interview of course the problem is that the fourth requirement here takes a very long time to teach and explain so we can't go through it and then the first requirement we've dealt with elsewhere and the third requirement we don't have specific lessons or tutorials on but we may go through it in the future and so here I'm going to focus on the second requirement the answers to the common fit questions to answer these questions you should think about the rule of three you should avoid memorizing seventy seven thousand one hundred and twenty three different questions and answers' it's a waste of time and you're not going to remember any of those instead you want to develop your story which should answer many common fit questions and advanced questions like why you're making a career change or why you want to get into banking or why you did another internship before Investment Banking and then in line with this rule of three you should develop three short stories about your work experience three strengths and three weaknesses and then three real weaknesses and discuss how to address them now the reason if the duty separately is because your main story is probably not going to have three separate short stories about your work experience you don't have very much time or space you're probably not going to mention your top strengths and weaknesses in your story and you're certainly not going to mention your real weaknesses in your story so these require some separate preparation to address once you have an outline for these questions you can use and reuse these responses to answer pretty much all the qualitative questions that could come up let's start by looking at your three short stories first you want to have one success story one failure story and then one leadership story the success and failure stories are similar you face a difficult task or challenging goal you fought against the odds and then in the success story you succeeded you won but in the failure story you did not succeed but you learn something important or you changed in the process and then the leadership story can be a success story as well ideally but it should be about a team effort so you can use individual stories for the success story and the failure story but the leadership story has to be in a team because any bank and any are going to be looking for your ability to work in a team with these stories you want to demonstrate your analytical skills your ability to communicate with clients your ability to work in or lead a team how you can work long hours how you're very attentive to detail and you want to show that you have a demonstrated interest in finance it's not enough just to say that you're really interested in deals you want to show that you've actually followed them and either worked on deals before or participating in case competitions or written stock pitches or something else that shows that you have a demonstrated interest in finance here are three examples for success stories you can talk about a corporate finance internship you complain that IBM where you analyze a lot of transactions and you streamline the most time-consuming processes and you save thousands of man-hours in the process now that was more of an individual effort which is fine for your first success story for your failure story you could talk about how you started the math tutoring business and university you succeeded at first but the trouble scaling it and you learned in the process that you have two separate roles and delegate more efficiently and have someone dedicated to scaling it hiring people doing marketing and so if you're focused on delivering the product or service the other person can focus more on the operational side and then finally for leadership story you can talk about how you worked at a biotech company in the Treasury Department there and the company was in danger of breaching a covenant on its debt so you have to coordinate with other departments work in the team to move cash around so the company can meet its covenant by doing so you helped it avoid penalty fees so those are just three simple examples you should go through your resume and come up with one example for each category and then you can use that example to answer any type of qualitative question that could come up now for your three strengths and three weaknesses strengths are pretty easy you should already know what bankers want to see attention to detail quantitative ability ability to work in a team ability to work in long hours everything we just covered you want to tie these to your success and leadership stories and then use those stories to support your strengths so if they ask you your greatest strengths state it and then to support what you say go through a quick version of your success or leaders story your weaknesses are much harder and the truth is I've never once heard a good initial answer to the what's your greatest weakness or what are your greatest weaknesses question your weaknesses have to be real but not too real they can't be overly personal and they must be problems that you could potentially fix so terrible answers to this question might be I work too hard or I'm not good at math or I don't stay in touch with my family or English is not my first language I work too hard is not a real weakness I'm not good at math is a dealbreaker weakness if you're not good at math don't go into the finance industry I don't stay in touch with my family is irrelevant and overly personal and then English is not my first language is not a problem that you can fix at age 25 or 20 or 30 or really any age past one or two a better example of a weakness is something like I sometimes take too much time to make decisions or a second-guess myself or sometimes I do feel comfortable speaking up even when I'm sure someone else has made a mistake or I'm not always good about following up on tasks and seeing what I need to change or improve these are all real weaknesses and they could affect your performance on the job but they're not universal weaknesses it depends on the situation sometimes if you notice mistake for example you don't want to speak up because it's going to embarrass senior bankers or your client or someone else also none of these is a real deal breaker weakness no one is going to listen to one of these and say oh well you take too long to make decisions therefore we can't hire you they want you to make the right decisions and get them done quickly but unbalanced bankers would rather see that you make the right decisions rather than finishing too quickly and making the wrong decisions and with all these you can use your failure story to support them and to show what you've learned in the process from making some of these mistakes finally we get to the last category your three real weaknesses and the reason this is important is because banks are risk-averse if you show a bank two candidates one candidate who is competent in all areas and has no major flaws and then another candidate who's even better who's exceptional in almost all areas but who has one big problem the bank is almost always going to want the first candidate who's competent and has no major problems because banks are very risk-averse so these weaknesses are not your responses to questions about weaknesses they're your real weaknesses what bankers are going to press you on and question you about even if they're not part of a formal question about your weaknesses to figure out what these might be you should compare yourself with the ideal candidate for Investment Banking roles that ideal candidate in terms of Education probably went to a top private school for a high school or secondary school and then went to a university like Princeton Harvard Oxford or Cambridge he or she has perfect grades and test scores majored in something you're really into accounting or finance and then also speaks two to three languages fluently which is especially important if you're applying to roles in Europe for example in terms of work experience he or she has had a corporate finance internship a boutique investment banking internship and then an internship at a bulge bracket or lead boutique bank he or she has studied abroad in Asia or South America plays sports and has won international recognition and then he or she is also sociable charismatic and makes friends very easily and puts people at ease whenever they meet new people now of course this type of person is very rare and in real life you will almost never see someone like this which is why it's the ideal candidate not the most common candidate to find your weaknesses think about how you're different from the profile of this person for example do you have low grades your test scores did you go to a non-target University do you not know other languages if you're applying to roles in London do you not have prior investment banking experience do you not have internships are you too old in other words have you worked for over ten years for example can you work long hours do you know about accounting and Finance with your hobbies and interests are you boring a lot of accountants and lawyers come in and bankers have that stereotype about them for example have you not played sports or their team activities do not have real hobbies could you pass the airport test if you're stuck in an airport with someone for hours or half a day can you entertain the person or will the other person want to poke their eyes out and jump off a cliff after spending that much time with you and then there are other categories as well so if you're an international student do you speak English well enough to work here if you're in the US or UK or Canada or Australia or other countries like that do you know the culture are you willing to take a pay cut do a work experience gap those are just a few of the ideas you want to think about with this question your goal is to find and address your top three real weaknesses in other words the top three ways in which you differ from this ideal candidate for Investment Banking roles if you want to a non-target university you could say that your family didn't have enough money to send you to an Ivy League school if you're in the u.s. if you're in another country this approach doesn't work as well because universities are much cheaper but you could make it about a specific program that you want to complete or scholarship in school or give some reason why you had to be in the area maybe to take our family members or something like that or maybe just say that you weren't focused on Investment Banking when you first apply to universities so you didn't know how significant it would be if you have a perceived lack of accounting or finance knowledge you can say that you did self-study you took the CFA or you're studying for it you're doing courses on the side and you could even offer to prove your skills by taking some type of test or exam to showcase your knowledge if you got started very late and you're older than other candidates you can say that it was your plan all along you have certainly but ever since your interest developed you've been moving closer through a series of internships or full-time roles so it's not as if you just became interested in banking yesterday you became interested a few years ago it was too late by that point to get the sequence of internships you need to start and banking right out of university but you've been doing everything you can to move closer such as by working at a big four firm or an evaluation firm or a business consulting firm and trying to gain relevant experience like that let's do a recap in summary now with fit questions the first step is to develop your story because that's going to answer a lot of the common questions in advance the second step is what I call the rule of three develop three short stories about your work experience three strengths and three weaknesses and then three real weaknesses you have one success story one failure story and one leadership story and then for your weaknesses they should be real but not too real they should not be deal-breakers and they should be fixable for your real weaknesses think about the ideal banking candidate and how you're different from that person and then make a plan for how to address your top three real weaknesses if you spend 30 minutes or 60 minutes or even two hours coming up with these answers you will be able to answer almost any qualitative question in interviews now there are some exceptions you have to prepare for deal and company discussions separately you need to learn about the industry separately you need to follow recent market activity and of course you could get questions on all those but here we are dealing with questions about you personally your work experience what you've done in the past and how your personality matches the requirements for banking roles if you do this you can handle questions about those topics your ability to work in teams your leadership style your biggest challenges your failures your successes how well you can work under pressure and so on and and that bonus you won't have to memorize 77,000 123 questions and answers and there's going to see you considerable time with your interview prep so that's about it for this tutorial I want to give you more of an outline for how to efficiently prepare for fit and qualitative questions in investment banking interviews [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Mergers & Inquisitions / Breaking Into Wall Street

Views: 81,313

Keywords: investment banking fit questions, investment banking qualitative questions, fit questions, mergers and inquisitions, investment banking interview questions and answers, ib interview questions, wall street prep, investment banking interview questions, investment banking interviews, investment banking interview, ib interview, why investment banking, investment banking, failure interview questions, finance interview questions, breaking into wall street

Id: yVWr0frbtd8

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 11 2017