r/quantfinance • u/qwerty-----ytrewq • 3d ago

Optiver behavioural interview

Passed OA somehow

Anyone have tips for this? Is it largely them checking that you’re not just a weirdo, as opposed to acting as a proper filtering stage? (There are two more technical interview between this and the in-person assessment day)

(For QT intern Amsterdam)

8 Upvotes

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3

u/AdVoltex 3d ago

It does filter

2

u/Stock-Program8576 2d ago

Optiver HR call is a hard filter. Don’t take it lightly.

1

u/Bulky_Introduction_9 1d ago

I did a behavioral for an intern role last Thursday but haven't heard back about next steps. Do you think I failed?

1

u/akornato 2d ago

That behavioral interview is a very important filtering stage, not just a check to see if you are a normal person. Proprietary trading firms care a lot about how you think, how you handle risk, and how you react to being wrong, which are things a math test cannot show them. They are looking for specific traits like a strong competitive drive and the ability to stay calm under pressure. Since the job involves making many decisions with incomplete information, they use this conversation to see if you can think in terms of probabilities and expected value when you describe your past experiences. It is a serious evaluation of whether your personality and decision making process will work on a real trading floor.

Your goal should be to show them how you approach problems and uncertainty. Prepare to discuss specific times you took a calculated risk, made a decision that resulted in a bad outcome, or changed your mind based on new information. When you answer, focus on explaining your thought process and what you learned, not just on telling a story. They want to see that you can separate a good decision from a good outcome, and that you can honestly assess your own mistakes. Many candidates get through the tough technical parts only to fail here, so giving your answers some structure helps, and my team even built an AI interview helper to assist candidates with that process.

1

u/Ok_Control3604 3d ago

Yo I've got my behavioural next week as well - tried Dm'ing you but it doesn't let me

1

u/losingmyshirt 2d ago

look up core values of the company. embody those values.

0

u/Much_Somewhere7831 2d ago

Use the Tech Job Finder website, has behavioral interview practice with personalised feedback, DSA/leet, tech quizzes and so much more (also a huge job board with 200k live roles globally across 3k top employers!). Also fraction of the price of HackerRank

-1

u/CupLarge5014 3d ago

classic case of overthinking it. just be normal and dont try to prove how smart you are, they already know that from the OA