[Evan]

The short answer is that they're pretty much looking for two things.

1) Basic financial knowledge. What are the 4 financial statements? What is a WACC? What is enterprise value? You're not going to blow anyone away with your financial wizardry, no matter who you are. If you do get hired you will go through several weeks of pretty intense training anyway, so it doesn't make much difference to them whether you already know 1 week or 2 week's worth of material. They just want to make sure you have an understanding of the basics so they don't have to start from scratch and that you're capable of learning.

2) Someone they can stand to be around. You're going to be working super long hours and no one wants to hire someone they can't stand. The selection process, once they've weeded out the people that just have no business being there, sounds kind of like a fraternity as far as trying to establish who's compatible with who.

So obviously the interview is very important. Each company/interviewer will have a different culture and different attributes they're looking for. So it's not like you can just go in and "be funny" or "be clever" and get the job. My advice would be to spend as little time as possible talking about the actual job. Obviously you need to establish that you're qualified and able/eager to learn (that's big with them), but after that you're not going to do yourself any favors by giving a soliloquy on all the different ways you can calculate a beta. This isn't to say this part of the interview isn't important, because if they do happen to ask about different ways to calculate beta or to briefly analyze a company or whatever, and you can't answer it, you're pretty much done. But once you've gotten through the basics try to steer the discussion toward anything else that you can establish as a common interest. Sports tend to work pretty well in my experience.


I have no idea what your chances of getting a job at a "top firm" or "any firm" are. Not that it's going to make it any more likely I'll give you a numerical answer, but you might get a little more color on the subject if you lay out what you consider top tier.