Banking Phone Interviews Tips
Often, if you are live outside the location you are applying to, or if a banker is travelling, you may be asked to do a interviews by phone. Phone interviews are more difficult that traditional face-to-face interviews and you do not have the chance to use your body language or build a close rapport with the interviewer. Below are some tips to help you make the most of investment banking phone interviews:
The Basics: confirm all aspects of the phone interview
It sounds simple, but getting this wrong may jeopardise your chances of passing the interview. You need to make sure you have the following:
Date, time and length of the interview. For international interviews, make sure of what time you are talking about (GMT, Continental Europe, EST, etc.), and make sure that you will actually be available.
Ask who you will be talking to. If you are just told that somebody from XXX department will call you, ask for the full name and the position of that person. This will help your preparation.
As a rule of thumb: Senior person (Director and Managing Directors) = questions about your hobbies and background, Junior person (Analyst to Vice President) = technical questions, HR person = situational and personality questions such as “can you tell me about a situation when …” or “can you give me your 3 strengths and 3 weaknesses”
Prepare the logistics well
Remember that investment bankers’ time is extremely precious and they will likely be in a rush when calling you. They may call you while doing something else, from a taxi on the way to the airport, or in between two conference calls. While they will likely be unprepared for the call, they will have little tolerance if anything goes wrong from your end, including situations such as:
No battery / no signal. It would be unacceptable to run out of battery during a call. If it happens, in some instances, you may not get a call back.
Noisy background. Bankers will get in a horrible mood or even hang up if you’re calling them from the street, or in any kind of noisy environment (i.e. public places, train, etc.), or while doing something else. Make sure you are in a quiet space and undisturbed.
Flipping pages or typing on a computer. Many candidates, when they are asked technical questions, will try to flip through books or check the answer on the internet. You can ALWAYS hear people typing or flipping pages on the phone, and that’s an immediate “reject”. Don’t do it. Have some paper and a pen to take notes if needed, but as mentioned in the point above, don’t flip through books or pages or take notes on a computer.
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Answer: “do you have questions for me?”
After having gone through all the online tests, case studies, presentations and the whole investment banking application process, the last five or ten minutes of your interview will always end with “do you have any questions for me?”.
While this part of the interview is not the most critical one, many applicants still manage to destroy their chances by asking the wrong questions, or not knowing what to ask.
Our base advice is to keep the questions fairly simple. While asking a very smart question will probably not be the key factor that will get you the job, asking an overly complex or inappropriate question will definitely hurt your chances of getting hired.
Therefore, do not try to be the most original or smartest applicant by asking overly engineered questions. Here is a selection of the most appropriate questions to ask:
How is the department or the team structured?
Do you have any further hiring plan at different levels of the team?
How is the deal pipeline recently?
If you see the interviewer or the bank has closed a deal recently, you can enquire about this deal: how complex was the deal? Was there a bidding war? etc.
How much do you interact with other departments?
How much do you interact with other international offices?
Do you do many cross border transactions? IPOs? LBO? etc.
What is the culture of the team / bank like?
We strongly suggest not to go beyond those categories to limit potential damage. Questions to not ask are as follows:
Anything related to the following topics: money, compensation, bonuses, working hours, politics, religion, discrimination, scandals in the press, bad performance of the firm.
Anything negative about something. For example, talking negatively about a previous employer or internship you did, anything negative about your school, a classmate, sports, other people’s jobs (i.e. consulting is not interesting to me, or I don’t want to work for a corporate), etc. Always mention the positives, never talk negatively about anything.
Anything that could reflect negatively on the bank one way or another (example: “you haven’t closed any deals this year, what is your strategy going forward?”, or “do you think Barclays overpaid for Lehman’s acquisition?” when interviewing with Barclays!)
If the bank went through a merger or an acquisition, be careful. The only question you can ask is “what was the impact of the merger with XX?”. Do not make judgements of any sort such as “didn’t the merger cause many people to leave?” or “did the merger impact the bank’s performance?”
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To read more advice on investment banking careers, please visit www.askivy.net investment banking section!
