In investment banking, it’s not uncommon for the application process to feature a number of interviews in the double digits. While it’s no death sentence to have over five interviews, a recent post by a data scientist on R-Bloggers.com suggests you should be increasingly concerned once you’ve done more than five.
The data scientist, whose reasoning you can examine here, estimates that, once you have more than five interviews, the probability of being given an offer (without an additional round) exponentially decreases.
Goldman Sachs in particular is known for interviewing candidates an egregious number of times. Former CEO Lloyd Blankfein said the firm would “torture” people with 45 interviews in the past; one retired partner said his own application consisted of 42 interviews.
Times have changed a little since those days with the introduction of HireVue interviews, but the process can still be excessive. One applicant for Morgan Stanley on the r/FinancialCareers subreddit last year said that they had been through 12 rounds of interviews and had yet to receive an offer. The interviews were with “12 different people from the same M&A bracket from Analyst to MD,” even before encounters with HR. Writing on the same thread, multiple other candidates said they had gone through six interviews and had since been ghosted.
At Goldman Sachs specifically, one Goldman Sachs equity research intern on Glassdoor in 2024 said they had nine interviews but did receive an offer. A desk strat, meanwhile said they had eight interviews, all of them technical. An associate said their 10 rounds of interviews were “pretty intensive and exhausting.” At the other extreme, an engineering intern said they received an offer after only one interview conducted on-site at a careers fair.
On average, however, successful applicants to Goldman Sachs in 2024 via Glassdoor had ~4.9 interviews before receiving an offer. Generally, this would encompass a HireVue round and an on-site ‘Superday’, which would consist of three or four in-person interviews.
By the time you hit your sixth interview, therefore, you need to do something to stand out to improve your chances. Many bankers use the ‘Airport Test’ when hiring; they ask themselves whether the candidate would be enjoyable to be around if you were stuck in an airport with them for 100 hours. One M&A analyst in New York who received an offer said they “ended up talking a long time over fantasy football.”
