Prudential Financial Interview Questions and Answers

Round: Resume Shortlist
Experience: With help from seniors resumes. I did not attend PPTs. I didn't think too much about the job, since it was a backup option for me.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: The McKinsey website. Individually, though I suppose preparing in groups will be better. Written test, follo wed by interviews of the shortlisted people. 12-13 poeople were recruited finally.

Skill Tips: A senior told me this, and it actually worked.. when you're done with the interview, a simple Thank You, have a nice day goes a long way.
College Name: IIT BOMBAY

Round: Resume Shortlist
Experience: The key to resume preparation is by highlighting what you have done in various areas YOU have worked in (rather than what the project/ position was). If you are writing about a project, you need to emphasize upon the work that you did in that project. The results need to be emphasized upon. Use of strong words like ‘studied’, ‘analyzed’ creates good impact. While mentioning about your positions of responsibility you need to portray your skill set that was developed and the value addition the position gave to you. Numbers if available should be used and points should be crisp and concise. A resume gives an interviewee the direction, stress more on the topics you on which you want your interview to be focused upon. Apart from the resume writing workshop by McKinsey, I showed my resume to a lot of people who gave their inputs and helped me improve upon the content. I attended most of the PPTs. PPTs are eye-openers, they give a very good picture of the company. PPTs were usually good and worth attending. After 50 PPTs one hardly remembers what was told in which PPT, so it is advisable to take notes during a PPT (which most students don’t do). This helps a lot during interview preparation .I spoke to a few seniors and collected their job XPs. This was helpful in letting me decide which job I want to go in.

Round: Group Activity
Experience: Pru was a day 7 company, the first round was resume based short listing (40 out of 385 were short listed). The next round was GDs. 2 each were selected from 4 GDs (group of 10 in each GD). Of the 8 people interviewed, 2 were made final offers. There was only one interview which lasted for 15 minutes.

Round: Group Discussion
Experience: The GD topic was ‘Vegetarian is a crap’. The GD tested basic GD skills, of communication and working in a group. Noting down points helped in summarizing. I avoided the usual donts of posture and eye-contact with the panel. Everyone was asked to summarise at the end (not a conclusion), the key being discussing even the irrelevant points as well and not adding your own view points that were never discussed during the GD!

Round: HR Interview
Experience: The interview was the most weird of interviews. The panel was being extra informal. It started with ‘what are you doing here at this point of time? Why don’t you enjoy your time elsewhere in the campus?’ The other typical questions being ‘It’s a hectic job to shortlist 40 people from 300 odd CVs, how would you do that if you would have been in our position? Lets try something different, lets all stand and have the interview’. This was followed by a few HR questions, strengths, weaknesses (they asked me to quote an incident on some strength). Then came a small case study to estimate the no of pianos in Bombay. They wanted all the different approaches possible. I could cite 3 different approaches for the same and that was more than expected. The interview ended with a few questions from my side.

General Tips: Stay cool headed! That’s the first key for a Pru interview (for any interview for that matter of fact). The key to crack the GD is avoid the usual donts. Practice a few cases and guesstimates apart from typical HR questions. Always prepare a few questions that you want to ask the company people, that shows your interest in the company. Be confident
College Name: IIT BOMBAY

Round: Resume Shortlist
Tips: Many times good preparation can overcome short comings of your resume. This is particularly true for those people whose resume don't give clear picture of there caliber.

Round: Group Discussion
Tips: Do's:Considerate Group which shunned the possibility of GD becoming a Fish Market.
Inputs to give the direction to the discussion and bringing the focus back case discussion has deviated from the main topic
Smooth elaboration of someone else points with some additional information. (This works well when you are short of ideas).
Don’ts:
Do avoid them (I got to know from after recruitment talks)
Including your own thoughts while summarizing the GD at the end, rather stating what was discussed.
Facing the GD coordinator while talking to the group.

Round: Other Interview
Experience: Second Round was Personal Interview. It was roughly structured in 4 parts. It first started with introduction and some general questions, then few questions on resume and situational cases. It was followed by a CASE STUDY, which involved estimation of number of tattooed people in India and finally questions from my side.
Tips: Thorough preparation of general questions which helped in forming good starting impression and also gave me confidence to go further in interview.
Preparing the questions for the company. They access you interest in company by this.
Honest answer for situational questions. ( Situation given was that you are at fault how you will convey your team about it so that they don’t loose there confidence in you for future work)
Trying to solve given case study by standard approach (Generally starting with population of India) which lead to a deviation from actual problem statement.
Not attending company PPT and also not browsing through company website.

College Name: IIT BOMBAY