Sent an application at the beginning of december, received an invitation for a phone interview scheduled for mid-January.
The phone interview was quite easy, most of the questions were related to your motivations to apply to Bloomberg, plus a lot of general questions on my background:
- why financial product and sales? who are bloomberg competitors? why are you applying to bloomberg...
One day later I received an invitation for an in-house interview.
In-house interview: my interview was scheduled for 8.30 a.m. Be there on time, at first I was invited to make my way upstairs where I would have met an employee. I was shadowing an employee in the analytics department, she was very kind and showed me how the tickets worked and the way the reply to it. From my understanding the analytics job is not any more than any helpdesk, she received some queries from clients going from "could you please check that the data in the terminal are correct" to "where can I find data on XYZ stock". Overall, she told me that in an average day, they would receive approximately 20-25 queries. Then, the moment of the interview came. The interviewers were managers of analytics and sales, they took me to a quite room for a 2:1 interview. The manager from the analytics department started asking me some general questions, unfortunately I mentioned that I would rather work in financial services than in investment banking. From that moment, my interview went wrong. The interview from the analytics department bombarded me with questions on investment banking. Needless to say, I wasn't prepared to answer such questions and I provided weak answers to that. Questions went from: how many terminals are there in your country? to what are the main areas of operations of an investment bank? what are an investment bank main operations? After my bad performance on investment banks I knew that I would have not been offered a job, anyway I tried to do my best to finish the interview in a good way. The analytics manager asked me other questions of how I would convince a SME to buy the terminal. After this part , I was interviewed by the second manager, who asked me more about the current developments in global affairs. Then, a couple of questions on financial calculus, such as what would happen to the current price of a bond if the interest rate went down.
Couple of advices for people being interviewed: know intimately why you would want to work for bloomberg and not for an investment bank. Know bloomberg. And last, but not least, be prepared to be questioned in any case. The interviewers will never be satisfied with your answers. However, try to be confident enough to motivate your choices, there is no wrong answer, it depends on the motivation you give.