Originally I planned to share this once I had the result — as either a success story or a rejection story. But now that the final round has wrapped and I'm sitting in that anxious waiting period for the decision, this might actually be a more relatable post to write. I really want to share a lot of the internal info I picked up during this application process, since it gives people a rare inside view of a company, but forgive me — I can't disclose which company it is.
On 3/6 I got into the pipeline for that FA position through a referral, but by then it was already a bit late — the job listing showed over 100 applicants and had been posted a month earlier. So I wasn't holding out much hope. I later found out that maybe only a dozen or so people actually made it into the formal interview process. That same afternoon I got an email from the recruiter inviting me to a phone screen, which was kind of a vindication for a company that's known for being slow with its process. The next day, Friday, we locked in a time: phone screen the following Tuesday.
3/11, the call came right on time. Turns out I had way over-prepared — the whole thing was only ten minutes, mostly the recruiter introducing the company, the position, and the team, then asking whether I was interested, whether I had data experience, and my salary expectations.
3/14, Friday, I got the invite for the first round with the hiring manager, scheduled for the following Tuesday. I also learned that by that point more than 5 people were already at the first-round stage, though I don't know if more candidates got added after that.
3/18, Zoom interview, right on time. All behavioral questions — the hiring manager was really friendly, and no technical skills test showed up at all. The appointment was booked for an hour but only took 30 minutes, even after I tried hard to stretch out the Q&A.
The next day I got the invite for the second round — they asked when I was free the following week and said I'd be interviewing with another colleague from the same team. A day later, when the calendar invite finally came through confirming the meeting, I realized it was actually three management interviews back to back. Well then... At that point I started to panic a bit, since I'd never had a second round like this before and had no idea how to prepare for it — there's barely any info about it online either. Based on that, I figured the second round was very likely going to be the final round. Word internally was that a few other candidates had already talked to at least two of the interviewers, and the feedback on them was that their data skills were weak — my guess is they probably had a finance background (I'll share my own background at the end). But so far nobody had interviewed with all 4 interviewers.
3/24, Monday, after a week of cramming interview skills, the second round arrived. Still on Zoom. First up was a senior person from an affiliated team — pretty classic behavioral questions, but tougher than the hiring manager's, more like questioning whether my background even matched this finance-adjacent role, why I thought I could do this job. Overall it went pleasantly and quickly. Second was the department's senior leader. They asked some tricky behavioral questions, then had me actually work in Excel — build a pivot table, use VLOOKUP, and other finance-related stuff. Since I don't actually have a finance background, I struggled to answer, and I think that was the one weak spot in the whole process — my lack of experience showed the second I had to actually do it. Afterward I obviously scrambled to recover, saying my past work used a lot of SQL, since the JD did mention needing SQL plus Excel. The third interviewer was kind of the department leader's direct report — a very kind older woman who also didn't stick to a script and mostly just chatted. She seemed really happy with my background, and along the way told me a lot about the department's current and upcoming project timeline for the next two months, what the role actually does, the whole department's org structure, and that they'd finally gotten budget approved to hire, hoping I'd stay at least 2-3 years if I joined. That got my hopes back up.
Then came a pretty long wait... Until Friday, when I was starting to think I'd been ghosted again, word internally was that the department leader just hadn't given feedback yet (my biggest worry), and that it wasn't anything on my end. Hoping to hear back from them next week. Oh, one more fun thing I want to share — based on some background research I did on the department (mainly just looking up their professional profiles, lol), it looks like everyone there has been at the company for over a decade. Not sure if that says good things about the benefits or just how hard it is to get promoted there, lol.
Okay, thanks for sticking with me this far — you just followed along with the interview I cared about most this month. One thing I can clearly feel is that the hiring market in March has warmed up quite a bit compared to January and February. Hope everyone's interviews go smoothly!
Lastly, here's my background: bachelor's and master's both in a data-related field, 3 internships, 2 of them in North America. The internships were only tangentially related to finance. When I was revising my resume, I put a lot of effort into digging up the parts of my past internship experience that connected to this finance-related position. The reason the hiring manager pulled my resume was probably because I put real effort into improving the work-experience section of my CV. No sponsorship needed.
If anyone's interested, I'm happy to share the specific behavioral questions that came up during this interview process later — that'll probably be a new post.
Discussion
Loading comments…