I'll just talk about the phone interview and assessment day because the steps before that are pretty standard across firms.
Phone Interview (30 minutes)
- First question is your motivation to join LSEG, why this role, and how you explore your interests in technology and the financial markets.
- For the next questions they give you 2 options for each question, either it can be a 'tell me about a time where you showed X' or it will be a hypothetical situation 'what would you do if you were put in X situation'. They'll ask you both formats and you choose one for that specific question.
- Tell me about a time where you worked as part of a team and one or more member had conflicting viewpoints. How did you manage the situation and what was the outcome?
- Imagine u need to achieve a specific goal with people with competing viewpoints. How would you determine the way to achieve that?
- Tell me about a time when you identified a process you thought could be improved. How did you identify it? How did you suggest changing it? What impact did it have? What did you learn?
- Tell me about a project you are very proud of. What was your approach? How did you keep track of your progress? What were the challenges and how did you overcome them?
- What would you do when you can’t do everything on time. How would you approach managing your time?
Assessment Centre (half a day)
- Competency Interview was questions in the same style as the phone interview.
- Group exercise was with 3 other candidates. We were given an information pack and 30 minutes to read through it individually, before coming back to the main call for another 30 minutes and discussing our ideas whilst 2 interviewers were listening. Each candidate is given a different factor (ESG, economic, political, technological) and we discussed as a team which has the biggest impact. I don't think the interviewers are as worried about the actual content of your ideas (although obviously that is important), they're looking at how you work in a group dynamic.
- For the case study you are given 30 minutes to look through a quite lengthy information pack on features of a fictional website. From these features you have to identify the top 3 most critical cybersecurity threats to this website and possible solutions to them. After the prep time, there is a 45 minute discussion with an interviewer where you present the 3 threats + solutions (no slides, just you talking), and then they will ask you follow up questions and prompts.
- The follow up questions go beyond the information pack and will ask you about steps to building a website (What features could you include? Where would you store the data? What languages would you build it in? What other teams would you talk to?)
I would just say that the interviewers aren't trying to trip you up. For a few of the questions I was honest in saying I didn't know, or hadn't worked with that before, and I think that comes across better than making stuff up.