I applied through university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Optiver (Chicago, IL) in Oct 2013
Interview
The first part of the interview process is a fast math test - all questions of the form x _ y = z where _ is an operation and two of x, y, and z are filled in and you need to solve the third. They won't tell you what score is required, but they do have some specific cutoff. I don't think there's much one can do to prepare for this sort of thing, you can do it or you can't.
This is followed by a non-technical phone screen - they called this a "behavioral interview" but at least for me it was nothing like the sort of interview typically associated with this name. The point seemed to be to make sure that you behave yourself when talking to someone.
Then is a technical phone interview with a trader. Seemed to be pretty normal for something along those lines.
I didn't get past that, but they said it would be followed up with an on-site interview and that would be the end of the process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
In the technical interview, be prepared to give your percent confidence in all of your answers.
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.
