Nice group of guys I interviewed with for the job. The interview process entailed a multi-step process, beginning with a brief phone interview. Next, I was summoned to a office in mid-town NYC where I interviewed with two guys in management. They quickly went through my writing and sales background, which are two huge skill sets for the position I was applying. The pro's, the interviewers were nice. The con's, too many gotcha questions. Many questions revolved around portfolio allocation, which was a weakness of mine, but didnt realize was required for the position. I did the best I could. In the end, I guess it was good enough because two weeks later they called me in for a second face-to-face interview. This time with three guys, two in management and one who was a current private client rep. Again, too many gotcha questions. One or two are fine to judge how the person does under pressure, but when all the questions are based on trickery and deception you end up losing out on the candidate's true qualifications. The current private client rep was in the interview didn't even make eye contact with me, very weird. He kept scrolling through his cell phone, which was distracting. The one question that really irked me was "what company have you been following in the market?" In the position I occupied while I was interviewing with Navellier did not require me to do analysis on individual companies or the overall market. I had a hard time answering that question and made generalizations about the banking sector. Now, HR people in finance, dispense with such ridiculous questions, unless you are interviewing bankers or analysts. A better question would have been "how do you analyze companies?" This would have been a much better question and more revealing of my knowledge. I could have described industry and financial analysis.
Also, considering Navellier is a mutual fund, they have an interest in the sell-side slanted narrative. When asked about my feelings about the economy, I said, "that easy, its over-leveraged, over-regulated, over-taxed" and something else. Cant quite remember. That type of story is of no interest to Wall St and its "buy buy buy" BS. Sorry, no pom-poms for me. Regardless, after this experience and a financial sales position I had lost interest. I never did bother calling them back to follow up.
