How do discipline-specific job interviews work?

At this point, you have started to generate stories from your prior experience that address the various competency/skill areas that are most widely sought by graduate hiring companies.

Continue this effort, as it will build your confidence, make you better prepared to navigate the uncertainty that is tied to any interview, and increase your odds of success when opportunity knocks. As you progress through an interview process with a company you should be prepared for the interviews to get more challenging—with far greater emphasis placed on assessing your technical skills and functional expertise.

The “technical interview” as it is often referenced, seeks to understand if you have the technical capacity to operate at an elevated level within a specific career path. This can include questions to assess overall knowledge of a function, as well as questions designed to dig deeper into your problem solving, critical and creative thinking skills, and your passion for the field.
 

Sample knowledge questions

Finance

• Why might a company choose debt over equity financing, or vice versa?
• How will a decrease in financial leverage affect a company’s cost of equity capital, if at all? How will it affect a company’s equity beta?
• What are the different ways to value a company?
• What is the difference between a DCF and comps?
• What is the difference between enterprise value and equity value?
• Which of the three financial reporting statements (balance sheet, income statement, statement of cash flows) is most important and why do you believe this is so?
• How does depreciation affect each of the three financial statements?
• What is your best investment idea right now?
  If I gave you a million dollars, how would you invest the proceeds?
• What is your investment style?
• What sources of information would you use to analyze a company?
• What is the difference between IRR, NPV, and Payback?
• What is the difference between I-banking and Private Equity?

Operations & supply chain

• What factors would you consider in determining the location of a distribution center?
• How would you improve the utilization of a process?
• You must process 50 units and have two options. In the first, you can start two lines with 1% defect rate and a capacity of seven units an hour. In the second option, you can start three lines with fewer people but a higher defect rate and a higher capacity.
• Looking at overall picture, which process is more efficient and why?
• It costs $200 to train a new person, and a training session has an overhead cost of $2000. You have 220 people to process in the coming months. Given the normal attrition rate, you expect to lose 40 of the trained employees. Does it make sense to call for overtime or add new folks?
• You have a fixed budget, and heat in the building is causing increased attrition. Also, as your productivity targets are revised upwards each year, you want to buy a couple of machines, which would dramatically improve productivity. In particular, the machines would improve the productivity of the best associates by at least 20%, but these are the same folks who are threatening to walk out if something is not done about temperature. What would you do?