Bloomberg L.P. Interview Questions & Reviews in United Kingdom

Interview Details Obtained role through a recruitment agent, with whom I set salary, bonus and role expectations up front. He said that the total compensation numbers we were discussing were fine and that he had communicated them to the client.

First telephone interview lasting 45 minutes. Somewhat leftfield questions such as "what's a segfault?", "What's a bus error?", "What's the twos complement of minus 1?", along with questions about pointers, references, STL containers, constructors, destructors, etc. Was told that the role was not within this interviewer's team but another team.

Second interview, face-to-face, two developers. Questions about hashtables, pointers, how to implement a smart pointer, copy constructor for a smart pointer (hint: int* ref_count in your smart pointer wrapper), write some code to generate sequence of prime numbers. Was again told that the role was not within this interviewer's team but another team. Neither developer had apparently worked anywhere other than Bloomberg.

Third face-to-face interview, another developer then with regional head/hiring manager. Asked questions about designing a chat server, how to cope with connections going down, lots of other stuff, Wrote some code to increment a variable using a pre-defined interlocked_exchange implementation. The interviewer was quite unclear whether he wanted an implementation of interlocked_exchange or something else. Eventually he explained that he wanted me to use it like a library function. The answer is therefore to call interlocked_exchange in a while loop until you get back a true result. Then met with hiring manager, who again had never worked anywhere other than Bloomberg. Within the first 90 seconds he'd said "I don't normally interview people who have been contractors", which I took as rather odd since by this time I'd done over three hours of interviewing with them. Lots of discussion about why I might want a permanent role. Eventually we talked about the job, although he wasn't entirely clear about what I'd actually be doing, and then right at the end of the interview he said, "I have another role that might be suitable for you - you'll have to come back and meet someone else, and the global head is coming over, you can meet him".

Fourth face-to-face interview, forty-five minutes with HR. Again, lengthy discussion of permanent vs. contracting (they really seem to hate contractors there), discussed salary expectations, previous compensation, etc. No warning flags raised. Meet global head after waiting 35 minutes past the time he was supposed to meet me in reception - no apology, no explanation. Discover that global head is essentially junior to me - started in the industry after I did, has never worked anywhere but Bloomberg (can you see the pattern forming?). At this point I started to have significant worries about the seniority of the role, given that I would be two levels below a guy who could easily be working for me.

The whole process took over a month to get through.

Reason for Declining – Wait for an offer, eventually receive it one week later - the base is 25% lower than what had been discussed at the interview, and the total compensation 20% lower in total. I rejected it out of hand and told the recruiter that I wasn't interested in receiving any attempt at an improved offer. All in all, a farcical and very low quality experience. Whilst it is perfectly possible that the recruiter did not send over the figures we discussed, the fact that I discussed the expected numbers with the HR person and the hiring manager makes me think the recruiter was not screwing me around - in fact, he described the offer as 'embarrassing'. The compensation they offered was around the level for an AVP, whilst I was promoted to AVP over ten years ago and have been a VP-level senior contractor for the last 7 years.

My advice is: don't waste your time with Bloomberg. They will lie to your face as they did to mine. Best avoided.

Interview Details I applied for an Event Panner position and the first interview consisted in a phone call in which I was asked about my previous working experience. I was also asked about my current location and about my range of salary expectations. Once I had answered this questions in about 15 minutes the interviewer told me I was going to be contacted for a second interview this time face to face .

Interview Details Telephone interview (5 minutes): why do you want to work with us? why this specific role? what are, in your opinion the mani skills to succeed in this role?

Interview Details I was contacted by HR to arrange telephone interview. I talked with fixed income specialist for 30 mins. He was quite friendly. Questions are :
- Why Bloomberg
- Why Analytics
- Difference between bond and equity
- Leadership experience

It has been two weeks since telephone interview. Let's see how it goes.

Interview Details Phone Interview
In-House Interrview

Interview Details Bloomberg's application process is tightly integrated with LinkedIn, so if you have a LinkedIn profile then it's very easy to simply import your profile in.

The first step was a 30 minute long phone interview. This was primarily about basics of C++ programming. I'd highly recommend candidates to brush up on pointers, C++ STL container classes such as vectors and hash maps, memory management (e.g. why is malloc not used any more).

I got an email offering a face-to-face interview at their London office within two days. The guidance on this was that the interview would last "at least an hour, but please allow for up to three hours". I assume that the length of the interview depends on how far deserving of a candidate you are. The interview was conducted by a engineering team manager and a lead programmer on one of their teams. The first set of questions was solely about pointers and how they are referenced / dereferenced in situations; really fundamental stuff but if you're not clear then you're likely to trip up at some point. Like I did. I did manage to backtrack and walk them through my correct solution when they gave me a hint on one of the trickier ones but I knew by that point my interview was shot. They wrapped it up after exactly an hour.

The whole process was extremely quick, it seemed like everyone was on the ball.

Interview Details Relatively simple application process. I filled out the online form and was contacted 2 days later for a telephone interview. The interview was pretty standard, why do you want to work for us, tell us about yourself etc. I thought I actually did reasonably well but I have not heard back from them. The lady was very nice and the questions were fine. Just study up on who their main competition is etc.

Interview Details Applied via their careers website and received a interview request about a week later. Met with the team leader which lasted about an hour. I thought the interview went well and I felt positive coming out. Unfortunately the next day received a rejection email. In general the interview was relaxed and focused on my CV, how I would handle certain situations, and what sort of team player I was.

Interview Details The interview process consisted of several rounds: 1 online test, 1 phone interview, 2 interviews on-site. Most questions were difficult to say the least. The online test measured your C/C++ skills. The phone interview was OK. The onsite interviews were difficult, especially the final one with the head of R&D and HR.