what's up everyone it's kenji here in this video i want to share some tips and tricks
to ace your goldman sachs high review so it's a bit of background i worked at goldman sachs
myself as an investment banking summer analyst in new york city so i had to go through to hire
you probably just like you so hopefully this is gonna be useful to you so i split the video
into five main parts the first one has to do with the structure of the higher view
then we'll look at the research that you should do ahead of this higher view interview thirdly
we'll look into the types of questions that you might get asked and i'll show you some examples
then we'll have the 30 seconds of prep time and i'll explain what you should do during that time
and then lastly we'll go over some of the answers the types of answers that i would give that
hopefully can be useful to you as well so let's get into the details all right so let's get into
a structure and i want to give you some context as to where the higher you fits in so firstly
to recruit for goldman sachs you need to send an online application the second step is the higher
view then you would have a super day or assessment day which is basically a final round interview
and then lastly if you're successful you're going to get an offer that's typically the case for
internship roles as well as full-time junior roles right so basically you can think of
the higher view as a first-round interview and what it actually consists of it's just a video
interview in which you get a set of pre-recorded questions that you're going to have to answer
at your own time so it's more or less usually around three to six questions for goldman sachs
and you get about 30 seconds to prepare before each question so you'll get the question you'll
have 30 seconds to prep and then you're gonna get about two minutes to answer the question
now you only get one try so you really don't wanna mess that up and you can't pause it you can't do
anything like that and if you go over the two minute mark the video is just going to shut off
before the interview starts you do get a couple of practice rounds that you might want to use
just to get yourself comfortable with talking with the camera which isn't necessarily the most
comfortable thing for most people out there right as for how popular the higher views are they're
actually widespread across investment banking i've had to do some for jp morgan bank of america
many other investment banks sometimes they may vary in terms of instead of being three
to six questions it might be six to eight it might be a bit longer a bit shorter
but the overall theme is still very much the same as for the science behind the higher view
you might have heard that they use artificial intelligence in this so basically they try to
detect things like how good your eye contact is whether you feel nervous whether you're confident
and so on and so forth and basically when they're reviewing it it's usually an analyst from what
i've seen usually an analyst in the division you're applying to is going to look at the higher
view and he's basically going to get a bit of support from higher viewing that it might say like
this person's confident or this person's nervous and so on and so forth and that's basically going
to give you a score and based on that they're going to assess how good you are as a candidate
i know it's a bit disturbing that there's a algorithm essentially analyzing you but
try not to think about it and just do it as if you would do say any other zoo interview for instance
in terms of preparation ideally you should do about half an hour of research before you do the
higher view and here you want to look at things such as getting to understand the role really
well understanding what you're exactly applying to the second one would be understanding your
motivations and having a good storyline for that and then thirdly i look at some recent financial
news as in higher views that's a common question as to hey tell me about some recent financial
news that goldman sachs has been involved in or something along those lines now as for where
to do the research i personally recommend the wall street journal if you're in the us and the
financial times if you're anywhere else and both of them kind of cover the whole finance circles
fairly well and they can give you good story lines basically also in the pre-interview stages where
you want to get comfortable with the camera so you might want to try to talk to it a bit um make sure
that your eye contact is there because if you talk like this you can see it doesn't impact as well as
talking like this where i'm actually looking at you it's a lot more passion to it make sure your
hand gestures are there and other things like that so that's where you want to try to get comfortable
if you can as for the dress code just dress the same as you would in an in-person interview right
i personally went for a suit and tie that just it's just a safe bet really but some people decide
to just go with a shirt and that probably works as well so that's the pre-interview prep and now
let's jump into the questions so for the most part in higher views the questions are more behavioral
as opposed to technical so if you don't know the difference a behavioral question basically
it doesn't require any previous knowledge and it's more about your behavior really so for
instance the questions could be things along the lines of tell me about a time when you overcame
a difficulty or tell me about a time where you had a great achievement something along these
lines which doesn't really require previous knowledge right whilst the technical question
typically does require some knowledge of finance and accounting so it might be something like
what is the cost of equity or link the three financial statements for me and things like that
that obviously you need some background knowledge or else you're not gonna be able to answer but for
the higher view you typically don't have to worry so much about that as they're mainly behavioral
that said depending on the bank a goldman sachs at least they're mainly behavioral but some
other banks do try to put some technical questions in there so keep that in mind
and here's a list of some common questions that they ask and feel free to take a screenshot
and pause the video if you want in my experience the questions that i had were mainly behavioral
and some other questions that i got was why this particular company and why this division for
instance as well as i also got some ethics ones which was something along the lines of you've been
given confidential information your boss wants to know about it is it okay for you to share it
or something along those lines and we'll get into how i actually answered them in the next section
alright so the 30 second prep and as i mentioned earlier as soon as you get the question up the
time is going to start ticking so you really want to have a pen and paper ready just to jot down
a couple of thoughts you might have ideally have a bit of a structure to it and i'll show you how
i did that here so for most questions i used what's called the star method which stands for
situation task action and result and overall it gave a really good structure to the higher
view right the last thing you want is to be forgetting things and going like
oh yeah by the way i forgot to mention that this thing was here and other things like that you want
to have a good structure that's going to be a lot more impressive right so during those 30 seconds i
would essentially have the paper and write the star down and i'll put one thing for each way
all right so let me show you an example of how i went about it suppose the question is something
like tell me about a time when you missed an important deadline this is quite a common question
by the way so keep that in mind and so i'm just going to use a previous example of some work
experience that i had working as a bellman and i'm going to use that and apply it to the question
so as i mentioned i'm going to use the star method and in the situation i would write something like
bellman working at a hotel because that was my internship experience then for the task i might
say like tasked with giving a birthday decoration to a girl's room something like that then next up
for the action i might say something like buy the decoration and put it in the room and lastly the
result i might say that i missed the deadline and i might write a couple reasons why and some
takeaways something like that and in the next section we'll talk about how i actually went
about answering it but overall i personally don't really recommend going on the internet and trying
to type something quick as you're probably gonna get even more stressed because you won't be able
to find a quick answer and also for behavioral questions there's not really a right or wrong
right you really just wanna try to structure it well and give a clear answer that's all they're
really looking for obviously there's no right or wrong experience yeah all right so for the answer
as i mentioned earlier you got two minutes for this and ideally you want to keep three things
in mind the first one has to do with eye contact right making sure you're looking at the camera
the second one has to do with having some sort of a hand gesture or a face gesture
if you're like this the whole time it just sounds a bit dull and you might not necessarily
seem like you want the job right so you want to try to be a bit more energetic
and then the third one has to do with having a clear structure right if you
have a couple things jotted down on your paper then that's obviously helpful right
so let me show you how i would answer the tell me about a time when you missed the deadline question
so here it goes the situation was that i was working as a bellman at a hotel about two summers
ago and i was given the task to basically decorate a room for a guest whose daughter a small child
was having a birthday so they wanted a bit of a cake they wanted some decoration and things
like balloons and other things like that so basically i had two main actions that i had
to take the first one was to contact the finance team to see what kind of a budget i would have and
the second one had to do with actually buying the goods so going to a website and buying these goods
and the delivery date i got was one day prior to the actual guest arrival time so that would give
me a bit of a margin to prepare the room and so on unfortunately i missed the line because the guests
came and the goods just weren't there they had actually been delayed by a day so i was hoping
that while the guests would come i'd be able to go up to a room and get the decoration ready but they
were already there so i decided to take some quick action and leave them at the lobby and let them
know gave them a drink and let them know that the room wasn't quite ready yet so i went up to a room
uh the decoration just arrived on time so i went up quickly and got it already and let them know
that it was now ready and overall the exp and the experience although i did miss the deadline
um i think we took some quick action as a team and we managed to have good customer
service which is what we were looking for as a hotel and some takeaways for me there were one
uh to communicate more clearly let them know that this is urgent and then secondly to to check up
right to make sure that it's ready so call them every one or two days to know that things are on
track or whether they're not right so something like that could be the answer and i would say
that it doesn't really matter if you don't cover the two minutes the one thing you don't want is to
go past the two minutes right you don't want your point to be cut halfway through but you can very
easily a one minute mark say say that's enough if you have your answer ready then you have it
ready right you don't really need to drag on also as you saw here the example i made has nothing to
do with finance right it basically just answered the question in an ideal world maybe i would make
it somewhat more finance related but that said i realized probably many of you don't have finance
experience so you can just use something like this whether it be at a restaurant or somewhere else
or maybe even a university that might be relatable too as for how long it's gonna take for goldman to
get back to you from what i've heard the typical range is around one week to one month but that's
really an approximation and don't get too fixated on that now i imagine most of you are preparing
for a higher view yourself so best of luck if you decide to do so and i hope you enjoyed the video
if you did feel free to like and subscribe and i'll hopefully catch you in the next one