Questions to expect in strategic finance interviews

Learnings from interviews at a dozen Bay Area tech companies

After spending the last two months recruiting for strategic finance roles, I wanted to give back by sharing the types of questions I received during the process.

At a high level, strategic finance interviewers are looking to get insight into your career background and motivations, your technical ability to do the job, and how you work with others. At the end, there is also typically a minute or two where you’ll be asked about other processes or offers.

I split this topic into three sections. Part I consists of question types you are likely to see in almost every interview, Part II and III give a flavor for technical questions and take-home cases, respectively.

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Part I: Career trajectory, prior projects, behavioral, general case questions, and process questions

Study up… it’s almost a certainty you will get many of these in your strategic finance interviews.

Intro and career trajectory

1. Walk me through your resume

2. Why [our company]?

3. What do you want from this role? What excites you the most?

4. How are you thinking about this next stage of your career? What are you optimizing for?

Prior project deep dive

5. Walk me through a project you are particularly proud of.

6. What was your role on the project?

7. What was the outcome?

8. How did you decide what course of action to take?

9. What was the biggest difficulty in completing the project?

Behavioral

10. What was a time you disagreed with someone or something?

11. What was a time you made a mistake? What did you learn from it?

12. What was a time you got into an interpersonal disagreement with someone?

13. How would colleagues you’ve worked with describe you?

14. How do you work with cross-functional partners?

15. What was a time when you had to communicate a technical concept to a non-technical audience?

Interview process

16. Where else are you interviewing?

17. How are you evaluating different opportunities?

18. How does this opportunity compare to other opportunities you are considering?

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Part II: Technical questions

Prep these for the specific company/industry you are applying to. Depending on the interview, you may be given some data to guide your answers.

19. What do you know about [our company]?

20. What do you know about [our company’s industry]?

21. How should [our company] decide where to invest next?

22. Who do you think is going to win in [our company’s industry]?

23. How do you think [our industry] is going to evolve over time?

24. We operate as one of [X] players in [sub-market A]. How should we decide how much to invest in this market?

25. How should we price our product?

26. How important is product-level gross margin for our business?

27. How should we prioritize investment between our regional sales offices?

28. What are relevant comps for our business?

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Part III: Case study prompts

Take-home and timed cases will vary company to company. Below are a few examples of the types of case interviews you will receive.

29. Create a cash flow model using the assumptions provided

30. Create a 3-statement projection model using assumptions provided

31. Create a 1-page investment memo for our business

32. Use retention curves to model business

33. Create a three-statement model of a lemonade stand

Case study questions (in response to the cases above)

34. Walk me through the model and your thinking behind the assumptions you made.

35. What do you think are the most important assumptions in the model?

36. Are these unit economics attractive? How would you contextualize these to investors?

37. Based on these outputs, should we make this investment?

38. Where would you focus your time diligencing this model?

39. Based on the numbers in the case, how would you decide if we should prioritize growth or profitability?

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Bonus Section: Technical + situational questions

Questions that combine technical topics with behavioral skills

40. You are making a budget and the business unit lead wants to input an aggressive assumption to the model. What do you do?

41. You are working with the strategy team on a contract negotiation with a major vendor. What would you like to know to be able to assist them?

42. At quarter end, you have overspent your budget by 15%. What do you do?

43. You are leading a project to invest in a new facility. How would you work with the BD/Strategy team to execute the project?

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My other articles have some additional tips and resources for nailing your interviews. Happy interviewing!