I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Optiver (Chicago, IL) in Sep 2013
Interview
Submitted my resume online.
Got emailed about taking a quantitative test. Same as detailed elsewhere on here - 80 questions, 1 point for right answers and -2 for skipped/wrong. Answered ~58 questions and did well enough to move on.
Next step was a phone interview with someone in HR. Pretty straight forward - Interest, what makes you a good candidate, etc. Nothing interesting here, but again, was asked to continue on.
Third step was a technical interview with a trader. He asked a bunch of questions (detailed below) with a high stress on how long it would take me to answer and how confident I felt about my answers that I provided. Be prepared to do a lot of mental math and with accuracy (he noted my estimations were strong but my ability to be precise was not). Pretty friendly and it lasted about 45 minutes. That said, I struggled at times and did not do well enough to proceed with my candidacy.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Make a market on the number of laptops in the United States
How many squares exist between 1000 and 2000?
For two numbers, 691 and 697, tell me which (or both) is prime
Pretend that you own a single taxi and drive it as a business. Tell me about two short-term and long-term challenges that you face.
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.
