I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Optiver (Chicago, IL) in Sept 2016
Interview
I applied through their website online in late August. Received a email with the numerical test soon after. Here's the rundown of their interview process.
1. 80 questions in 8 minutes - Very basic arithmetic. Multiple choice so you have to think and click fast. I actually had the most trouble clicking because the buttons were so small. Also, for fractions, some answer choices are not simplified.
2. Behavioral phone interview - Went through resume and asked me basic questions like why I want to be a Trader. Also gave me the option of going with the Execution Trader or Derivatives Trader track. I chose Derivatives Trader.
3. 26 minute quantitative skills test - A few fill in the blank math/probability questions. The rest were identify the sequence/pattern type of questions. The weirdest part for this was that there were two questions that were exactly the same. Question and answer choices were all exactly the same. Most of the questions were not hard.
4. Technical phone interview - Went through some relevant experiences and asked why I want to be a Trader for the first 10 minutes. Basically four sections: Fermi questions, speed mental math, probability, brain teaser/math questions. The questions were pretty challenging and engaging but standard for competitive firms. Interviewer said he is looking for speed, accuracy and thought process. He also said he was most interested in the way I thought.
--- Got cut after the tech phone interview ---
5. Onsite - Didn't get here! Good luck to the rest of you :)
Given $1, $5, $20, and $100 dollar bills, what is the fewest number of bills needed to form amounts ranging from $1 to $100? (eg. $4 would need four $1 dollar bills) You can reuse bills so the number of bills is not cumulative.
What is the fewest amount of bills you need to always have exact change for a transaction of $x and $(100-x) given that x<100?
Find the largest 5-digit number such that the pairwise digit sums of the numbers are unique. Find the smallest 5-digit number with the same property.
Explain why it doesn't work for 7-digit numbers.
Does it work for 6-digit numbers?
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.
