The Process

Banks fill most of their interview seats through referrals, so the application and resume screen is less about the resume convincing anyone cold and more about whether someone has already flagged it. Grades and a clean resume get you considered, but on their own they rarely get you the interview. A referral or a networking relationship is usually what pushes an application through to a first round.

Many of the largest banks now run the first round as a recorded video interview rather than a live conversation. You get a set of questions one at a time, a short window to think, and you record your answer on camera with no interviewer present. Some setups give a single take per question, others let you re-record, so check the instructions before you start. The questions are often situational and firm-specific rather than pure rehearsed stories: expect a mix of why-this-firm, a tell-me-about-a-time prompt, a scenario asking how you'd handle a given situation, and occasionally a light technical question.

Because the prompts won't all match a rehearsed story, prepare flexible answers you can adapt on the spot, along with a solid why-this-firm and why-banking answer, and keep each one tight enough to fit the time limit. Test your microphone and camera ahead of time and run a few practice takes so the format feels routine. Treat it as a graded interview even though no one is on the other end, since it gets screened the same way a live round would. Some firms add an online assessment alongside or before the video round: numerical and logical reasoning tests, situational judgment questions, and sometimes a game-based assessment. Time yourself on a few practice sets so the pace doesn't surprise you, and do it in one focused sitting.

The superday is the final round: a few rounds of behavioral and technical questions with different bankers, and it's what decides the offer. Once applications open, the whole loop moves quickly. A first round often follows within a week or two of applying, the result comes back within another week or two, and a superday can turn into an offer the same day or the next. For many candidates, the whole stretch from applications opening to an offer fits inside about a month.

Several banks grade interviews on a written rubric: the interviewer scores categories like accuracy and presentation from one to five and submits the sheet to HR, and that score is what decides who moves forward. That's worth knowing because it means a superday isn't just a set of conversations you either click in or don't, it's several independent scorecards that get compared afterward, so a strong answer needs to hold up on paper as well as in the room.

A HireVue rewards a rehearsed, camera-ready answer since there's no interviewer to read your delivery or follow up on something you said. A superday rewards depth and consistency: the same well-prepared answer has to hold up across several separate conversations with different bankers, each one scoring you independently on their own sheet. The same why-banking answer gets delivered differently at each stage, polished and tight for a recorded HireVue, more conversational across a full day of superday interviews.

Most interview seats get filled through referrals rather than a cold application, and a good finance or investment banking club gives you a direct line to alumni already working at target banks, turning a cold outreach into a warm one. Upperclassmen who just went through recruiting can run mock interviews, share the actual questions they were asked, and tell you which analysts run the process at each firm. How much this helps depends on your school: at schools with active, established finance clubs, often the ones considered targets and semi-targets, this referral effect is large, since an alum screening resumes gives your application a closer look, and a member with an existing relationship at a firm can introduce you further. Where clubs are weak or absent, none of that infrastructure exists for you automatically.

Recruiting from a school without an on-campus process puts more of the work on you. You have to start earlier and reach out to far more people, since you don't have the same alumni base to lean on, and interviews can run harder too, because a bank that doesn't already know your school will test you more before it takes the risk on you.

That doesn't mean the door is closed. Plenty of people recruit straight into a large bank from a non-target school if they start early enough. Starting at a smaller or regional bank is another route in: two years of deal experience there opens either a lateral move to a larger bank or a direct path into many buy-side seats, so a non-target background doesn't have to mean a permanently narrower outcome, just a longer or different first step.