I applied through university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Optiver (Chicago, IL) in Sep 2009
Interview
My interview process started with a written math test (simple arithmetic) that I completed in a classroom with 20 others from my university. You get the results back immediately, and 3 out of 20+ of us were told that we passed. After a quick 1v1 interview with their hiring manager, there's an all-day interview process at their office, which begins with 2 more math tests and ends with 3 1v1 interviews. The 1v1 interviews were of very high caliber; the last one intellectually crushed me so bad I was very uncertain whether I would get the job. There were no simple brainteasers, I think the 3 math tests are used to filter out anyone without above average intelligence, and their 1v1s are meant to really drill down and see how you solve difficult problems under stressful conditions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You just found out that there's been a terrorist attack in downtown Chicago. What do you do?
spent about 1.5 months pretty much purely dedicated to preparing for interviews for all the pre-penultimate programs (Optiver, IMC, JS, SIG, Citadel, etc). I used these resources:
Green book (Really good starter but I got bored of it after a few weeks)
EverythingQuant (Went through literally every single interview prep question, went through the interview guides, and completed the probability course just to make sure I covered all bases)
Briefly read through this guide
Watched coding Jesus in my spare time (not sure if this helped directly lmao but he’s a great creator and very informative)
Mental math test, beat the odds, online puzzle like games etc online, brain teasers during physical interview and a behavioral interview where they want to assess how competitive and assertive you are.
OA was weird and hard. there was only three sections (i think) this year compared to 5 last year. questions are weird and I don't know how they can judge your ability base on that.