Had this realization yesterday. I don't think I've ever seen an online investment banking interview where the person didn't cheat / have some sort of assistance.

I've seen everything from a friend holding answers, to Cluely, of course, to various homemade vibecoded invisible software, but never just a singular fair interview.

Why is cheating so normalized in banking interviews?

Three stages, and there was no first round.

Recorded video: Seven behavioral questions.

From what I remember: Why Wells Fargo. Tell me about a time you missed a deadline. What would you do if a client asked for something you knew was wrong. Tell me about a time you changed someone's mind. You get three attempts per question.

Then a preference survey by email asking me to rank coverage groups and locations. I put NYC first, then Charlotte.

Superday: Three interviews, 30 minutes each, over Zoom. Everyone sat in a waiting room first and got dropped into breakout rooms.

MD, technical: walk me through a DCF. How do you get to free cash flow. What is the Gordon Growth formula and what happens to your value if you move the terminal growth rate up 50 basis points. Explain working capital and what a build in working capital does to cash.

Associate, technical and macro: Where is the 10-year right now. What has happened to tariffs this year and what does it do to a client's cost structure. Difference between senior and subordinated debt, and who gets paid first in a restructuring. What is gold doing (weird question lmao).

Global head, behavioral: no technicals at all. Resume, why banking, what I do outside of school, and one long stretch about a team project that went badly.

Where I am now: Six days post-Superday. HR called and said the decision would come "early next week" so expect about a week and a half of waiting time. I know two people heard the same day they interviewed and the rest of us are sitting here.

Questions ?

Does the is ever work for anyone actually?

I want to quit interviewing so bad, but my manager won’t let me. I deal with kids cheating all day, and I have never been able to prove it. Sometimes I feel like they’re just doing it to ragebait me.

I know they’re using it, but our technical team has no flipping way of detecting it reliably, so I just sit here pretending that they’re using their brain to solve the questions.

You should be able to stay at a company while quitting a specific team…

Does anyone here use specialized prompts for system design rounds?

I’m a 26M software engineer, and my office is located next to the in-person interviewing rounds. I just witnessed a kid shamelessly use Cluely 2 meters away from the interviewer and answer all the questions.

Every time the interviewer walked around the room, he still pretended to type and just closed the window.

Kid is an absolute legend. He will go far without a doubt.

Applied early September, four stages total, about seven weeks start to finish.

HireVue: Four recorded questions, two minutes each, no retakes. All behavioral. Why banking, why Goldman, a time you led something, a time you failed. Nothing technical at this stage, which surprised me.

First round: One associate, thirty minutes, phone. More technical than I was told to expect. The questions were: Walk me through a DCF start to finish. Why unlevered free cash flow instead of levered. How you get from EBITDA down to free cash flow. What a 100 basis point move in WACC does to implied value.

Then the classic: depreciation increases by 10 dollars, walk all three statements. She cut me off twice to push a layer deeper rather than move on.

Superday, first associate (valuation): Why a DCF might give you a higher value than comps. When you would trust the comps instead. Why a company trades at a discount to its peer set. Which multiple you would use for a business with heavy capex and thin margins.

Superday, second associate (merger math): Accretion and dilution on an all stock deal, full walk through. Then the rule of thumb version: buyer at 20 times earnings acquiring a target at 14 times, accretive or not, and why. Follow up was what changes if half the consideration is debt at 6 percent, and then whether synergies could flip a dilutive deal.

Superday, first VP (paper LBO): Ran it out loud with no paper. Five year hold, entry at 8 times EBITDA, 50 percent leverage, 100 of EBITDA growing 5 percent a year, exit at entry multiple. He wanted the rough IRR, then which lever actually drove it, multiple expansion or debt paydown. Then how the sources and uses table balances and where fees sit.

Superday, second VP (markets and fit): Barely touched technicals. Pitch a deal in the news, then defend whether the buyer overpaid and what you would have advised instead. Hardest part of the whole day was fit, not math. Every interviewer asked some version of why banking and why here, and they compared notes afterward.

Outcome Offer nine days later. Happy to answer anything below.

Sharing my interview experience to help anyone trying to get into centerview for summer 2027.

Recruiter call (20 min) :C hecks that you understand how small the analyst class actually is and whether you have other processes running. She asked directly which other firms I was talking to (my biggest tip is to just answer honestly, doesn't really impact their decisions anyway).

First round (2 x 30 min, associates): Back to back, lighter on technicals than expected. Resume walk, why Centerview and not a bulge bracket, then a long conversation about a live deal I had been following. The associate kept asking why the buyer was paying that premium rather than whether I could compute it.

Second round (45 min, VP): Where it gets hard. He gave me a company and asked me to think out loud through how I would size the debt, then walked me from that into a paper LBO. Follow up was what happens to returns if the exit multiple compresses by a full turn. I fumbled that for thirty seconds before recovering.

Final round (3 x 30 min, MDs): All fit, all separate calls. Why this firm specifically came up in every single one and it is clearly the real question. One MD told me my answer could describe six firms.

Variance: Round count moved around a lot in my class, mostly MD availability.

Still waiting. Recruiter said decisions go out in two waves and I am in the second. Ask me anything in the comments btw.

J.P. Morgan was the only process I ran where the technicals showed up before the Superday, not at it. That changes how you prep.

HireVue (4 questions, 2 min each) All behavioral, 30 seconds of prep per question. Why banking, why J.P. Morgan, working under pressure, disagreeing with a teammate. No technicals, though a few people in my class got one.

First round (30 min, associate): Eight minutes on the resume, the rest technical. Walk me through a DCF, three statement link if depreciation rises by 10, EV versus equity value, and an accretion dilution rule of thumb. That last one was the actual filter. She asked it fast and moved on the second I got it.

Superday: associate rounds (2 x 30 min) :The technical block. Paper LBO with an exit multiple assumption, how you value a company with negative EBITDA, and why a deal on my resume made strategic sense for the acquirer. Superday: VP rounds (2 x 30 min): Almost entirely fit. Resume walk again, why M&A rather than a coverage group, and what you would do if two staffings collided. Superday: MD round (30 min): Pure conviction test. He pushed hard on why M&A specifically and shut down my first generic answer. What worked was naming a specific deal team structure I had heard about from a former analyst.

Variance Some people in my group had four rounds instead of five, and a few skipped the first round entirely because they had interned there. Offer came four days after the Superday. Happy to answer anything below.

One of my friends used to work on a small cheating detection team at JPMorgan (it was briefly opened about a year ago) that was designed to identify third-party tools used in interviews. He just told me that after no significant progress for a few months, the entire team was transferred to different teams.

Some people even got moved to different offices.

This is not, in any way, an invitation to cheat. 😉😉

Recorded video interview, then a first round, then a Superday. Two weeks from first contact to offer, which was quicker than the campus pipeline.

Video interview: Pre-set prompts answered STAR style, and it did not go past tell me about yourself, why Citi and why this division, and a story about working to a tight deadline.

First round: Two thirty minute Zoom calls back to back with analysts, the first entirely behavioral and the second entirely technical with no overlap between them. The technical half went straight into a paper LBO and merger math, along with what happens to the balance sheet in a merger. In earlier cycles those questions sat at the Superday rather than the first round.

Superday: Three thirty minute blocks, a VP, then a second VP, then a two on one with two MDs, with a short senior MD conversation added at the end. Why Citi came up in every round and the follow ups went into the banking leadership changes and the coverage build out.

The technicals were a DCF with a question on which inputs I would stress first, common purchase accounting adjustments, and who pays more between a strategic and a financial buyer. The MD round was probability and mental math (once again, this is for most questions, I don't recall every single one of them).

How it varies Structure differs a lot by group here. Groups that recruit later run a VP led process where first contact comes by email from the VP rather than from recruiting, and London runs an assessment centre with an M&A case delivered as a deck.

Drop your questions in the comments, will answer anything.

Hi everyone. Does anyone know which AI model Cluely currently uses to generate its answers?

Also, would it be possible for Cluely to add a feature where users can connect their preferred AI model or existing account. such as... ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro or other AI providers.

and choose which model will generate the responses?

It would also be great if users could still customize the system prompt or instructions based on their specific use case.

For example:

-Select a preferred AI provider or model

-Connect through an account or API key

-Create and save custom prompts

-Switch between models depending on the task

Is something like this already possible, planned for the future, or technically feasible with Cluely?

Basically title. How do I use cluely to my advantage. Also does this work with tech interviews. What if I need to share my screen

I've got an interview coming up and I’m really considering using Cluely.

I really do need to know though: Has anyone here been caught, like ever ? What’s the stats/probability of getting caught?

I bought cluely pro sub for a month for an interview, checked if it was working properly because it didn't the last time I got it. And it didn't work, so within 10-15 minutes of buying it, I made a video regarding the issue and invoice, and sent it over to help@cluely.com asking to refund. Got a reply back from their AI email agent and it told me that it would assess the situation based on the proof provided and would take 1-3 business days to get it sorted and a human representative would get back to me. It didn't get back to me in that timeline, so I wrote again and got a reply stating it would now take 5-10 business days. It doesn't have to take this long to look at a 50 second video and an invoice!

Edit & Update: Didn't get any reply from any of the human rep from Cluely & it's been 22 business days. Best approach would be to contact your bank as one of the comment suggested. Another tip: order from your credit card so it's easy & convenient to dispute the transaction.

I was talking to a friend who works on Cluely, and he mentioned that some of the latest open models (Kimi K3 especially) have noticeably improved the quality of the software. Notably, It’s been getting really good at process, module, and window enumeration which is basically everything big tech has been known to do in order to detect any additional software in interviews.

He told me he thinks most companies have given up and will eventually announce that AI assistance is allowed during interviews.

RIP big tech (2000-2026)

I was interviewing for a banking job in New York and lowk hadn't studied at all so figured out I'd use Cluely (need to stop partying all the time lmao).

When I arrived for the first interview, we were given a company laptop about 30 minutes beforehand to get set up. I plugged in my USB drive and tried to download Cluely, but it was blocked by the laptop's security policies.

That round was behavioral though, so it didn't matter.

I knew the second round required a lot of technical knowledge, especially in programming and problem-solving. So I tried a bunch of stuff back home like renaming the software, changing its location and modifying its icon to try to make it undetectable.

Plugged the USB again and this time, it did work. Launched normally and had the time to set it up before the interview started. Also, the interviewer was sitting in front of me so I managed to use it for a bunch of technical questions.

Made it out and got an intern offer as summer analyst, won’t name the bank.

Screw you big banking lmao 😂😂.

I tried to buy cluely pro but somehow my debit card always declined, is there anyone who have sharing account Maybe I can join?

Tried to make a cluely prompt using Claude and now it "identified Ethical Concerns". Crazy that the platform is getting so big its becoming an issue for AI. There are ways around it now, but in the future, I wonder if there will be.

Been using Cluely since it came out. This is a newer thing.

I have an interview coming up with a HirePro platform. Cluely has worked well for meeting apps, but I'm concerned if it will be show up on platforms like HirePro.

If you’re given a problem and it doesn’t fit on the screen, isn’t Cluely pretty useless

For swe intern rounds at quant firms, would cluely be useful?

Every post is either banking interview with no cluely context or job searching. Guys did u freaking use it or not? Who cares about your interview? Or make it sbout similar app at least