A) 15 mins ~~ Brief introduction from interviewer. Outlines his background (keeps emphasizing the importance of his two-ish years in banking), but provides little else to do with the mechanics of his work/reporting. Or for that matter, anything at all about the team. B) 15 mins ~~ Asks me to walk through my resume. Shows little to no interest in asking questions. Good ones or otherwise. I quickly give bullet points like "I managed non-consolidated FP&A functions for 200M of operational cost for X film studio". The interviewer asks next to no questions, and clarifies nothing. C) 1 hr ~~ So now I'm being asked a range of questions from easy "how would you explain an accrual to a non-finance audience?" to extremely vague questions like "if I see, uhh, well - let's say engineering lets you know they're going to be buying 2M of material. But you uhh, let's say it's 10 million actually. I don't see the charge hitting when I pull actuals, what do you think happened?" I mean, are we talking about depreciation? Or just a mis-coded charge? Or is it part of an accrual? This guy is disorganized and taking almost 2 hours to interview me, but I'd better have presidential experience if I plan to be a Sr Financial Analyst here. This is an old story for finance professionals. If you aren't a banker, a big four auditor, or a consultant - don't bother because you're not qualified. Then there's the arrogant tone. I made the massive mistake of comparing Riot to Blizzard (they host their own online community, are focused on fewer titles with more balancing, have great creative minds, and play an increasingly prominent role in the eSports scene). My interviewer immediately asked me "Why don't you just work for Blizzard then?" I mean, what? I read an interview online with the founders of Riot where they made the same comparison, proudly. But I say it and I'm applying to the wrong company. Lots of little moments like that. Asked the interviewer for the biggest issue facing the finance org: "Finance has very little influence and not much to do. We're not really credited with the traditional sort of impact a finance team has. We aren't part of the approval gating or critical pathing". Sounds cut and dry right? You'd like someone with 5-7 years out of school, an understanding of consolidation, and the ability to communicate with diverse non-finance teams. You're not looking for Aswath Damodaran to come by and run discounted cash flows. A business level SFA is in need of a BCG or Bain background in order to meet your goal of making finance more useful to business partners? I look back at the job description to make sure I'm not going crazy. I have noted that the interviewer himself said he took his role as it was "less strategic, and allowed me (interviewer) to gain experience in operations which I had lacked". I read limited FP&A functions (no 5YP etc, 2 forecasts a year), expense accounting, and some ad-hoc type reporting supporting business partners. Maybe I missed the boat, but this role on paper (and from the interviewer himself) sounded like a different job entirely than what I was being interviewed for. In sum - 1) It's a young company. People can be rude, communication is poor. They promote a young progressive culture, but they lack a coherent identity. 2) You'd do well to start prepping yourself with regard to cases. If you haven't read Case in Point, it helps. The TL;DR for the case and finance/account questions? Very amateurish attempt at the style of large consulting firms. No prompts, poorly planned verbal examples/questions, no time to work the information etc. In consulting the academic correctness of your response is often less important than how you articulate it. Your interpersonal style, analysis, and ability to advocate are the keys. Here, it was a midterm in your first accounting class. 3) This is the type of company that believes it should hire investment bankers to work a business level forecasting role. My interviewer never asked, but in my prior role I had run two forecasting cycles a month for 12 cost centers (24 individual models to plan and update, work variance analysis on, and consolidate - A MONTH). At Riot, my role would have required exactly one forecast every 6 months. 4) Finance seems to lack structure, and key reporting systems are apparently either flawed or difficult to get the best out of. Sounds like a lot of data cleaning/maintenance, and a significant amount of legwork prior to working a proper model. To top it off, by my interviewer's own admission, finance is a long way from influential at Riot. Maybe its that "we're aware that our peers do not see the value in finance, and that we have difficulty communicating our goals or work in laymen's terms. So we go out, ask academic accounting interview questions, and try our best to hire investment bankers to contribute 2 forecasts a year" approach.

The interview process is a bit longer than most. I talked with 3 people and there was a two week gap between each person I talked to. The initial screen interview is done by an HR person. I next interviewed with a director. A few weeks later, I interviewed with an senior financial analyst. My process stopped after the interview with the senior financial analyst interview.