Great article! I remember finance/hedge fund recruiting from college. Looking back, it is absurd for buy-side companies (whose entire business is to develop conviction of unconstrained markets/businesses) to ask hyper-constrained coin-flipping probability riddles as a filter.
One time when I got a coin-flipping question, I told the recruiter that there was precisely zero signal in the question, and I then offered up a few alternates that he could use for other candidates. (Happily, I did not get the offer!)
From talking to various folk about this, it has become clear to me that multiple interview setups is probably ideal. Personally I find the four 1-hour bits significantly luck-based, even if designed well. Lots of noise. Though I did read a book a long ago that I remember had a pretty good plan for reducing that noise (Hire with Your Head). I am finding myself more fond of the project-based setups, though I know some people personally who absolutely can not do a "homework assignment", which is fair enough. There's a venn diagram at play between what the interview is measuring and how good the candidate is, and different interview setups will intersect with "quality of candidate" in different ways.
Great article! I remember finance/hedge fund recruiting from college. Looking back, it is absurd for buy-side companies (whose entire business is to develop conviction of unconstrained markets/businesses) to ask hyper-constrained coin-flipping probability riddles as a filter.
One time when I got a coin-flipping question, I told the recruiter that there was precisely zero signal in the question, and I then offered up a few alternates that he could use for other candidates. (Happily, I did not get the offer!)
From talking to various folk about this, it has become clear to me that multiple interview setups is probably ideal. Personally I find the four 1-hour bits significantly luck-based, even if designed well. Lots of noise. Though I did read a book a long ago that I remember had a pretty good plan for reducing that noise (Hire with Your Head). I am finding myself more fond of the project-based setups, though I know some people personally who absolutely can not do a "homework assignment", which is fair enough. There's a venn diagram at play between what the interview is measuring and how good the candidate is, and different interview setups will intersect with "quality of candidate" in different ways.