Goldman Sachs Strategist Interview Questions and Answers

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Be confident and should communicate well in English. Be Truth.

Round: Test
Experience: In this round there was an online test which had objective and subjective questions regarding the mentioned sections.
Duration: 1 hour
Total Questions: 30

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: The interviewer asked such questions about my graduation subjects and a little about how familiar I am of the work the company deals in.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: This round had the HR person ask general questions about my hobbies and about my family background and also told me about the company, its culture and the salary structure

College Name: Maharaja Surajmal Institute Of Technology

Round: Test
Experience: 28 questions, 18 quantative + 10 financial awareness, negative marking. I took one pass through the Quant section, leaving about 5 questions, went on to the financial section, realized I wasn't going to score that well there so went back to Quant eventually attempting all 18, having to guess 1 answer since I ran out of time. I attempted probably 2-3 in financial. The test matters a lot to get shortlisted - some CSE students didn’t get shortlisted apparently because of a low test score. I would suggest that focus should be primarily on the quant section rather than the finance section - a friend in CSE who said he did well in the finance section didn’t get shortlisted.

Quant
1. Find next in sequence : 10,1,.......7,7...11,5 - don't remember the rest of the sequence but it looked random
initially it but if you take the difference between alternate terms an obvious pattern emerges .
2. Probability of two people telling the truth = 0.4,0.6 - what is the chance that they are inconsistent in what they say ?
3. A 3 digit number is a square less than 500, the reverse of the number is also a square. on repeating last digit still a square. What is the difference between the initial square, its reverse.
4. In a 1000m race if x gives y a head start of 40 meter, x wins by 10m. how much will x win by if y gives x a head start of 40m
5. With 16 matches, how many distinct triangles can you make?
6. You row at 7kmph in a calm lake. fisherman drops something 14 km upstream and the river current is 3kmph, how long will it take to reach you (14/7 = 2hrs ).
7. The sum of the multiples of 7 between 200 and 400 is what (trick was instead of calculating, to observe that the answer is odd and of the 5 options, only one was odd)?
8. Sum of consecutive page numbers in a book starting from 1 to n is 1000 - one page was repeated. which page was it? (idea was to subtract each choice from 1000 and see if it was n _ (n + 1)/2)
9. Last digit of 508508
10. 6 men + 4 women. Make a committee of 3 from them - Guy X wont be with Guy Y. Guy Y will be only with Woman Z in committee. How many ways of making the committee?
11. Run in circle of radius r. 1st 30 seconds at r meters/min, then next 1 min at r/2 m per min next 2 min at r/4 and so on. ratio of times taken in round n, previous round
12. |(x ? 11)/2| < 3 what is the range of x?
13. number of integer solutions to 3x + 6y = 13 (take 3 common on LHS and the answer is clear).
14. 5 students give an objective exam (+1 for correct, 0 for wrong) with 5 questions each with 5 choices. Their answers were given in a 5x5 matrix. Given they all got different marks, who got the lowest.
15. A,B,C,D stand in a line in increasing order of height. Given that X was shorter than Y but didnt stand first, and (a few more conditions) , who stood last? (X and Y had been specified as one of A, B, C, D - I don’t remember exactly since I gave the test 10 days back).

Financial
1. Rupee-dollar exchange rate (options were ranges of 1 rupee answer ws 39-40)
2. value of some index (some non-Indian East Asian country’s stock market - I forgot the name)
3. Effect of interest rate cuts on a bond coupon
4. Simple question on call option - which of following is not true about it
5. 1st Indian IT company to be listed on Nasdaq

6. Given a pie chart where it showed that for capital, a company relied 80% on equity and a small fraction on debts, what investment strategy is the company using? Conservative/Aggressive?
Duration: 40 min minutes

Round: HR Interview
Experience: I was the last person DB interviewed that day. Towards the end, the interviewer said “I am sure you are going to join Tower Research and not DB”. They also seemed to have decided before I came in to the interview that I would get an offer with some other company and would not choose DB - kept attacking the answers I gave to ‘Why not Microsoft/Tower’. In hindsight maybe I shouldn't have listed all the 4 tech companies I had interned with.

College Name: IIT KANPUR

Round: Test
Experience: Quantitative, verbal, reasoning and basic technical questions.
Duration: 1 hour
Total Questions: 50

Round: Technical + HR Interview
Experience: Questions based on data structures, algorithms, and object oriented programming concepts.
Tested basic knowledge in Finance sector especially related to the company.

College Name: Delhi Technological University, Delhi

Round: Resume Shortlist
Experience: A lot of fundaes regarding the writing of the resume were given at a session by McKinsey earlier in the year. I prepared my basic resume based on that and changed it according to suggestions from some friends. Pre-placement talks are essential for getting a broad understanding of the company and the work that one is going to be doing in the job, inspite of the fact that a much nicer version of the reality may be presented in these talks. If one does not have a good idea about a particular sector or a company, attending PPTs can help a lot.About 90 people were shortlisted initially for the inteview, based mainly on a test conducted by the company earlier. The test evaluated students on basic quantitative and DI skills. Out of those, after an interview of about 20-25 mins, about half were shortlisted for the second and the last interview, which immediately followed the first one.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: In my case, the only interview I attended was for Deutsche Bank, and it did not require any such special preparation.However, some basic finance fundaes were obtained with the help of google and wikipedia. I prepared for interviews with some of my friends. We conducted mock interviews of one another, asking possible questions, especially the HR ones. If done seriously, it helps a lot, in terms of preparation for the few stock questions in interviews and others that one can anticipate. A lot of improvements can be suggested by your friends in terms of framing answers correctly and many other things. Preparation is best done in groups.

College Name: IIT BOMBAY

Round: Resume Shortlist
Experience: DB directly shortlisted from resume. There was no test. After the initial shortlisting procedure, I had a months time to prepare.
Tips: I had started preparing for my resume from August when SPO had asked to send in master resume. After making a rough draft I had sent it to a lot of seniors from my department who were placed in different companies and edited it accordingly.

Round: Test
Tips: I had used the material from T.I.M.E and also from CL to prepare for it. Also,there were some classes arranged by SPO and CL which I had joined.

Round: Group Discussion
Tips: I did not prepare much for the GDs. I just participated in 3-4 mock GDs organized by the placement preparation cell.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: I had prepared all my interns and projects along with the courses written in the resume. I had prepared my answers from all the basic questions which are generally asked in an interview and was very thorough with them. I had also gained sufficient knowledge about the work profile of DB along with all major deals in the past year. Specially, for DB's interview I had also prepared for the current affairs by reading newspapers daily for about 3 months and also kept up to date about some major happenings in and around the world such as Syria happening, US shutdown, crisis and bubbles, etc.


I had my interview scheduled at 6:30 in the morning with DB. My first interview went really well and the person told me that I should definitely see the next panel.
Tips: Please do not write those courses in your resume which you found tough as it will create problem at the end moment when you have to prepare so much.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: My second interview was fine and most of the questions were from current affairs and my resume. They also asked me to guesstimate in this interview.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: In my third interview  I messed up some economics related concepts.I thought they wouldn't like me but I was called again

Round: HR Interview
Experience: My fourth interview also did not go well but then somebody from the HR hinted that they liked me for a certain profile and would want to know my take on that.

General Tips: Be yourself and give your best shot. Have faith in yourself. Do not panic.
College Name: IIT KANPUR

Round: Pre-placement offer
Experience: Each intern was assigned a individual project and mentor.
In the last week of internship there was project presentation and interview.
interview was easy .For me 50% of the questions were about project and some questions about algorithms and DBMS.
More emphasis was given to the quality of work on project.

General Tips: Working in company is complete different from working on course project. learning many new frameworks required for the project was really challenging.
Programming : Tree, Btree, Tries ..
Operating System: Memory Management
Networks: OSI model
DBMS : basics. they dint ask me any. Show case your interest in big data, servers and passion for technology
Skill Tips: Be confident, even if you don't know the exact answer don't give up tell your approaches to interviewer. some times they will also help you. Software Developer some question s you can ask are: what technologies do your company works on. how are freshers will be selected to different teams in the company.
Skills:
College Name: NIT Surathkal