I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Optiver
Interview
First they sent me the 80 math questions 8 min test. This was easy enough. Anybody with decent practice should be able to do it. Right after, they wanted to schedule an interview by HR. They postponed the interview not even last minute, 20 min after the original time. I took that interview on the following week, which was normal motivational interview. CV questions. I moved on to the round with a trader. Market questions, math problems, mental math, market making, options theory questions. Although I was right on every answer and considerably up by market making, I got declined w/o any feedback. This was surprising. All the people I talked to were nice but they are unexpectedly unprofessional.
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.
