Common Interview Questions for Financial Analysts
Congratulations!! You just got a phone call telling you that you have been selected for a job interview for a position as a Financial Analyst. You starting thinking about what kinds of questions you will have to answer during the interview and you start to worry a bit. So what are common interview questions for financial analysts?
One thing you need to remember is that interviewing for a financial analyst position is going to be very similar to interviewing for any type of position. Possibly only 10% of the interview questions will be related specifically to financial analysis. 90% of the questions will possibly be education-oriented questions, goal-related questions, employer-related questions, experience-related questions, character-related questions, and behavioral questions.
Possible Education-Related Interview Questions
- Why did you choose the University that you are attending or attended?
- Why did you choose your major?
- What is your favorite class and why?
- What is your Grade Point Average (GPA)?
- Tell me about your extracurricular school participation.
Possible Goal-Related Interview Questions
- What are your short and long term goals?
- Where do you see yourself in 5 years? 10 Years?
- How much money do you expect to be earning in 5 years? 10 years?
- How will your career enhance your ability to achieve your goals?
- What would you do if money was no object?
Possible Employer-Related Interview Questions
- What do you know about our company?
- What profits did our company declare last year?
- What do you think it takes to be successful in our organization?
- What do you see as the greatest challenges in our industry?
- Why should we hire you versus someone else?
- Why do you want to work for our company?
Possible Experience-Related Interview Questions
- Why did you leave your last position or why are you looking to make a move from your current position?
- What can you offer us?
- What was your greatest frustration at your last or current position?
- What is the toughest problem that you had to solve at your last or current position?
- Guide me through your resume, explaining your experience and background.
- Give me an example of work experience you had to perform under time pressure.
- Describe a mistake or failure at work and explain to me how it impacted the organization.
Possible Character-Related Interview Questions
- What are your strengths?
- What are your weaknesses?
- How would you describe yourself?
- How would others describe you?
- What motivates you?
- How do you evaluate success?
- How do you manage your time?
- What attributes make you believe you will be successful in business?
- How do you deal with criticism?
- What types of outside activities do you enjoy? Why?
- What is the biggest risk you have ever taken and what was the outcome?
- Who has been your most important role model? Why?
- What makes you angry?
- How would you deal with a rude co-worker?
- By providing examples, convince me that you can adapt to a wide variety of people, situations, and environments.
- Describe a situation where you were able to use persuasion to successfully convince others to see things your way.
- What steps do you take when you have to make an immediate decision but you do not have access to all the relevant data?
Possible Behavioral Interview Questions
- If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?
- If you were a cereal, what kind of cereal would you be?
Possible Financial Analyst Interview Questions
- How has your degree prepared you for a career in Financial Analysis?
- Tell me about a financial analysis you completed on a case in one of your classes?
- Describe a previous situation where you have demonstrated your analytical skills.
- What interests you most about a financial analyst position?
- What quantitative courses have you completed? What were your grades in each of them?
- How will you be able to handle working long hours and studying for the CPA exams at the same time?
- How can the United States improve its competitiveness?
- What stocks do you follow? Why?
- What is a cash flow?
- What is a present value analysis?
- Describe at least three methods of valuing a company.
- If you had a $1,000 investment that went down 40 percent and then up 20 percent, what would your investment be worth?
- What is your opinion of derivative statements?
- Describe EVA and how it can be used to determine the attractiveness of potential projects.
- Describe the advantages and disadvantages of using EVA, NPV, discounted cash flows, and payback period as methods of determining the attractiveness of potential projects.
- Explain activity-based costing. What are its pros and cons?
- Explain marginal costing and standard costing.
- Explain ratio analysis.
- How does A/R and inventory fluctuations affect the income statement?
- Walk me through a DCF analysis.
- How do you get to EBITDA from revenues?
- When you are given a large financial analysis project to do, what are the first things you do?
- Describe a decision you had to make on your own regarding the credit risk of a new client. What was the outcome?
- Tell me about a financial analysis decision you got wrong. What was the outcome? What did you learn from the experience?
- Describe your level of experience with the software used in your position as a financial analyst.
- What steps have you taken to improve your technical writing ability?
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 at 5:11 am and is filed under Career. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
