Fake position.
Three phone interviews with different quant analysts.
On-site full day “technical assessment” ending with one hour interview to present answers.
Like other reviews mentioned, the position advertised is a scam. They fish for trading strategies and research ideas and have developed a well-oiled “interview” process so it doesn’t cost them any time or money to talk to candidates.
They’re nothing like you would expect for a hedge fund. I’m an experienced quant and have presented my research many times to traders in hedge funds who are normally very relaxed, open-minded, curious and result-oriented. People at Squarepoint were narrow-minded, uptight, arrogant, and conservative. It was impossible to engage with them in a discussion and every interview was very much a one-way process where they ask very specific questions about trading strategies ideas but don’t really answer any questions. It felt like talking to robots.
The job sounded really interesting so I ignored the warning signs that they were wasting my time. I ended up taking a day off to travel to their office for the on-site test. Given my profile and experience, taking a “technical and analytical test” (as they call it) was the last thing I expected to fail.
Unfortunately the “technical and analytical” test turned out to be more like a poorly worded stats 101 exercise with questions 1) a. 1) b. 2)a. ... I’m surprised they didn’t include a point system for each questions.
I was put in a room by myself to work on a remote machine (with all the lag, poor display, and system issues that come with it). A kid half my age who looked like life had been drained out of him gave me the questions and went away.
There wasn’t any clear research objective and questions were very specific and weirdly worded, forcing the candidates to follow one precise analytical path but without stating clearly what was expected either.
I’ve interviewed my fair share of candidates throughout the years and I’ve set up the technical test for two different teams at my current employer. The “test” at SP left me utterly puzzled.
At the end of the day when the time came for me to present my answers to the technical questions (yes, like a 25 yo finishing his master’s thesis), the depressed kid came to get me and put me in a video conference room. It turned out I hadn’t been told who I would interview with (never heard of that in an interview process before) - it wasn’t with that poor kid whose name I had been given ahead of the interview. None of the people I interviewed with had bothered showing up to the office that day. The connection was poor so I could only hear half of the few words they spoke and by the look of things they couldn’t quite hear me either.
The interview left me underwhelmed and speechless.
Twice in the previous phone interviews I was told “we don’t do anything advanced like this here” when I talked about my research but 10 minutes in the technical assessment, after no discussion, I was told quite arrogantly that what they expected was basic data analysis which I apparently had not done. I was told they were the ones asking the questions, not me, when I tried to understand what they had in mind with the questions they asked. They weren’t interested in what I had done or my train of thoughts. The rest of the interview was a mixture of awkward silence and condescending comments about my lack of knowledge in statistics (without asking me any statistics questions directoy), my inability to handle a new dataset, and my very specialised experience (no idea how they reached that observation, certainly not from my resume nor from talking to me).
I had a chat with a friend who interviewed there recently and had a terrible time.
It looks like they have to justify not moving further with the process (given they are actually not hiring) so they set up candidates for failure and pretend candidates fail the technical interview due to lack of skills.
A recruiter I spoke to at the time told me he stopped working with SP as they are just using interviews as part of their research and not because they are actually hiring.
If the recruiter who reached out to you doesn’t normally work on this type of role or sector, if your profile is different from SP analysts (meaning you are not a man between 25 and 35, French or Chinese, who graduated from the pool of 5 unis they all come from, and think/breathe/talk the way they do), don’t waste your time. They are not interested in you. Just fishing for ideas and code tricks.
No company should ask candidates to take an entire day off and work for them for a day as part of an interview process while interviewers aren’t even around. One-day on-sites normally consist in meeting many people face to face and technical/analytical tests should be short and let you free to perform the analysis the way you want.
Don’t waste your ideas, time and annual leave: decline interviews at SP.