Goldman Sachs Investment Banking Interview Questions

Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is an investment bank and financial services company, headquartered in The United States of America, a world leader; investment banking, securities, and investment management field. Several Fortune 500 companies use their services. So, without tremendous luck and grit, it is no less than a dream for many people to work for the company.

Getting a job and an Interview at Goldman Sachs is not easy. First, you have to go through a series of screening sessions, Interviews, technical and behavioral questions, and personality tests. This hiring process is largely typical to all positions, ranging from managerial to administrative.

Goldman Sachs Interview questions for experienced begin with a phone conversation where they ask a few screening questions to know about your experience, communication skills. If you pass the first screening process, they invite you for an assessment test that comprises technical and activity based questions. Let’s have a look at some trickiest and frequently asked questions that you may expect during the process of Interview for Goldman Sachs.

Frequently asked Goldman Sachs Interview questions :

1. What would you choose to be if you were an object? – Goldman Sachs Interview question for Financial-analyst candidate
2. What would you do if you were to move a high-rise-story building across the river? – Technology-analyst candidate
3. If we randomly ask one of your past supervisors, how would they describe you? – Legal entity management analyst candidate
4. There are 20 horses. If you are allowed to race only five horses at a time, what is the least number of races you require to determine the top three horses? – Software engineer candidate
5. How would you make a program that could vote for the top three wittiest people in the office? – Technology-analyst candidate
6. You have only 60 seconds to impress the panel and get hired. – Summer analyst candidate
7. What would cause you to stop using your smartphone? – Goldman Sachs Interview question for Extended-managing-director candidate
8. Is there anything about Goldman Sachs or the profile that makes you nervous? – Operations analyst candidate
9. Tell me that one instance when you failed, and you couldn’t fix it. – Summer-associate candidate asked for an Interview at Goldman Sachs
10. What is one characteristic that you do not want to reveal and that might prevent your hiring? – Operations-analyst candidate
11. What annoys you? – Financial-analyst candidate
12. How would you deal with the situation if a client asserts at making a transaction that you believe and know is not viable for them but would benefit Goldman Sachs? – Goldman Sachs Interview question for Operations-analyst candidate
13. What is the design layout of the Google.com page? – Summer-analyst candidate
14. Suppose you have ten identical balls. One of them is marginally heavier. What’s the least number of times you need to find the heavier ball using a balance scale? – Goldman Sachs Interview question for Software-engineering-intern candidate
15. Any business ideas that you heard and found very interesting? – Analyst candidate
16. How was your experience as a team associate, working under a team leader? – Corporate-service and real estate candidate
17. By the end of the Interview, you need to convince us that we need you more than you need us – a Mortgage-private-wealth candidate.
18. What, according to you, led to the financial crisis? – Operations-analyst candidate
19. What’s your opinion about Napoleon? – Goldman Sachs Interview question for Operations-analyst candidate
20. If cops catch you and put you behind bars for something you thought and believed wasn’t wrong, what would you do? – Interview question for Goldman Sachs  for Hedge fund-analyst candidate
21. You are a waiter in a hotel, and the hotel has a policy that all tips that are received must be put in a jar. Then divide the money, after the working hours, between the staff. Suppose a customer gives you a huge tip and advises you not to share the money with the other waiters because you deserve it. You are also aware that there are some of the other waiters who have not been sharing their tips. What would you do in this scenario? – Legal-analyst candidate
22. Name one relevant issue in the news that you think might affect the business at Goldman Sachs. –Analyst-intern candidate
23. If I ask your best friend or sibling to tell me one good and bad thing about you, what would they say? – Goldman Sachs Interview question for Research-associate candidate
24. If an investor or a trader approaches you with a trade that he expects you to transact immediately, but before you transact, you need to check appropriate ways to make sure that it’s good for the business, what do you do? – Summer-analyst candidate

Goldman Sachs Investment Banking Interview Questions

1. If you are in a trade that wants to reserve cash, would you use LIFO (Last In, First Out) or FIFO (First In, First Out) inventory accounting method in a time of rising prices?
2. Why is cash deducted from EV (Enterprise Value)?
3. How do you get to FCF (Free Cash Flow) from EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation, and Amortization)
4. Take us through the different ways of company valuations.
5. What is LBO (Leveraged Buyout) analysis?
6. What elements can lead to the reduction of EPS (Earning Per Share) in an acquisition?
7. You meet the CEO of a company, and he wants to know his company’s valuation. What information would you require from him to answer his query?
8. What is Discounted Cash Flow? What does it do?
9. Why do we add Minority Interest in the Enterprise Value formula? What is it?
10. What happens to the WACC (Weighted Average Cost of Capital) when a company raises the debt?
11. Share deal details with us that you have read recently.
12. A client in the automobile industry would like to know the related markets that impact his stock price. Which related markets and industries would you consider?
13. What is shareholders equity? How does the net income of a company affect it?
14. What do you think would be your KRAs (Key Result Areas) as an analyst in an investment institution/bank? 

Goldman Sachs Markets and Risks Interview Questions

1. What is a Put option?
2. Do you see an economic slowdown? If yes, then how did it begin?
3. How do you see markets respond in the next three months, six months, and twelve months?
4. A company loses its market share due to a single incident/event. How would you value this company which was doing very well and was very successful until this event?
5. Do you think that gold is overpriced?
6. What’s your analysis of the recent market volatility? How and when do you see markets stabilizing?
7. Share with us your top three stocks that you would advise us to invest in and why?
8. Which one particular equity do you think is overpriced, and why?
9. Which one would you pick, Ford Motors or Facebook? Why?
10. What is your opinion about Bitcoin?
11. Explain depreciation, and where would you show it in a financial statement?
12. Explain Black Scholes Model
13. Please share your knowledge with us on Option Greeks.
14. Between a Par Bond and a Zero-coupon bond, which one has a higher duration? 
15. Pitch a short stock and Pitch a long stock
16. Explain the beta of a slot machine.
17. What is the first question that you ask a potential client?
18. Which assets class interests you?
19. Suppose you have $1k. How would you use or invest this amount?
20. How are you better at picking stocks than other candidates?
21. What are the returns that you get on 10-year treasury bonds?
22. Is there any political event that you track? How is it likely to impact the market? 

Goldman Sachs Brain Teasers Interview Questions

1. If you win a lottery for $10 million, would you buy one 5-star hotel in the center of Washington, or would you buy three cheap motels along the ring road? 
2. Can you identify the angle between the minute and hour hand of a clock at 6.15?
3. What is the total of all the numbers between 1 and 50?
4. What’s the probability of getting results that sum to six if two dice get rolled six times?
5. What is 48 squared?
6. In a game of poker, what is the probability of getting a complete house?
7. You have a coin that you toss three times. Samantha wins if the result is HHT (Head, Head, and Tail), and Nicole wins if it is HTH (Head, Tail, and Head). What is the probability that Samantha wins the game?
8. How many times do you need to toss a coin until you get consecutive tails?

Logical Reasoning, Aptitude and General Questions for Goldman Sachs Interview :

One of the toughest Goldman Sachs Interview Questions are judged on the parameters mentioned above-

1. Take us through your Curriculum Vitae (CV).
2. Why Goldman Sachs?
3. For this role, what skills do you think are required?
4. How is Goldman Sachs diverse from its competitors?
5. As a team head, you find that one of your team members isn’t contributing. Despite your confrontation, they still don’t contribute. How would you deal with him, and what next?
6. Your client agrees to close a sizable business deal, but he put certain conditions that can go against your company policy. What would you do?
7. Your senior inadvertently mails your confidential data that was intended for someone else. What will you do?
8. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
9. What motivates you?
10. Share any experience that you had with work/life balance?
11. Tell us that one mistake you made in the past, that you regret today, how did you overcome it?
12. Who is your role model, and why?
13. In your previous job or any other field, share your experience when you could not meet the deadline?
14. What is more critical: Quality of work or project deadline?
15. Did you ever face a shortage of time while delivering a big project? How did you manage that?
16. Share an example of a time when you streamlined a process?
17. Take us through your previous job role?
18. One thing that you didn’t like in your previous jobs?
19. If you were to choose between a regular team member of a winning team or captain of a losing team, which one would you pick?
20. Give a few examples of your leadership quality.
21. Tell us a time when there were disagreements between team members of the same team.
22. Tell us one work-related example which proves that you are a multitasker.
23. How will you accommodate a team with members from diverse cultures and countries, and probably different native languages?
24. Your best friend is cheating during a test, and he has already received his last warning. He continues to cheat despite the caution, and you are the only one who knows that he is still cheating. What will you do?
25. Your team leader tells you to deliver an assignment in 30 minutes, and you have something else that needs to finish in the same time duration. How would you deal with this situation?
26. You have three minutes, is there anything you wish to convey that we need to know? 

Goldman Sachs Technical Assessment Interview Questions

One of the most frequently asked interview questions, the candidate will be assessed according to how well they have scored on a technical level.

You are given a chance to pick one closed door out of the three. While there is prize money behind one of them, the remaining two doors hide piles of stones. Once you decide which door needs to open, we will ask you to open one of the remaining doors, and unfortunately, you do not find the prize there. You will be then asked whether you would like to change your selection to the other unopened door, or whether you stick to your original choice. Here is the problem. What will you do?

1. Using the iterative method, write a code to create a Fibonacci sequence.
2. Using recursion, write a code to create a Fibonacci sequence.
3. Write a code to identify whether a number is a palindrome.
4. Write a code to identify whether two words are anagrams.
5. Write a code to identify whether a binary tree is a binary search tree or not.
6. Using coding, find the mirror image of a binary tree.
7. Starting from scratch, write your own Java hash map.
8. Combine fractions from two arrays into a single, using a piece of code.
9. There is a stepladder that has X steps. You can climb the ladder by taking either one or two steps at a time. Write a function to identify how many possible different combinations of one or two steps you need to take to the top of the ladder.
10. What is the dissimilarity between a thread and a process?
11. When would you select a thread over a process?
12. The binary tree is worse than a Monte Carlo model. Why?
13. Compare hash tables and binary tables. Why is one better than the other? 
14. Design an elevator.
15. Garbage collection works in Java. How does it work?
16. The N Queen problem.
17. Write down the differences between JS React and JS Angular? Which one do you prefer?
18. Object-oriented programming versus Functional programming, when do you use them? 
19. Can you explain the model of inheritance in C ++.
20. Can you build a Linked List?
21. How will you locate the middle element in a Linked List?
22. How can we reverse a Linked List?
23. Take us through the Java design patterns.
24. How to speed up a database query?
25. How will you locate the intersection of two linked lists?
26. Explain the difference between Stack Memory and Java Heap Space.
27. What is the use of abstract classes in Java?
28. Write a program to find the highest number in a list of 10 numbers.
29. Explain Object Oriented Programming (OOP)
30. How is Process-Oriented Programming different from Object-Oriented Programming?
31. Explain polymorphism in OOP
32. Explain inheritance in OOP.
33. Write a code to find the cube root of a triple-digit number.
34. Can you design a DFS (Distributed File System)?
35. Using the least square method, how do you calculate the linear regression?
36. How would you implement role-based access control?
37. Build a function to examine a string array and sort out the words conferring to their sizes. 

Final Thoughts

Goldman Sachs doesn’t just look for candidates with finance qualifications and experience. It wishes to attract candidates with different and uncommon profiles. What is most important is your ability to highlight your individualities like communication skills, self-motivation, leadership, and above all, a passion for finance. It is important to describe to the recruiters why you like investment banking and how well you fit at Goldman Sachs. Interview questions for Goldman Sachs can incorporate the standard that they require all candidates to maintain- exhibiting qualities that already exist in their top performing employees. The interviews are structured, also, digital methods are incorporated for frequently asked interview questions, which measures the candidate’s vocabulary to eye movement and speech patterns.

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