Where there's money there's gonna be some uh
fiddling... Let's talk about how to pass UBS's video interview
hey it's mike from Job Ready English we help international students get hired and in the Pass
the Interview series we break down the interview processes for world famous companies. Subscribe
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If there's something that you feel like we missed out or there's something that you'd like us to add
for next time today we're talking about UBS so who is UBS they employ over 70 000 people
in over 50 countries and they are the largest bank in Switzerland with almost 4 trillion Swiss francs
assets under management and they also in 2020 had a revenue of just over 36 billion dollars
UBS is also one of the oldest banks in the world and is commonly mistaken for the union bank of
switzerland but in fact it is an amalgam of over 300 different banks one of which was the union
bank of switzerland and the famous three keys that you see as their logo is a merger of the logo
between the swiss bank corporation and the union bank of switzerland it's a wonderful bank it is
a top-tier investment bank and today we're going to go through the interview process for ubs ubs's
video interview is a little bit different from what we've seen in other interviews for example
with goldman sachs or with jp morgan ubs uses a software called sonru which is from an american
firm called modern hire many of you wouldn't have heard of modern hire in the uk but they're really
widely used in the states by companies like delta airlines amazon and netflix in the us however
though the software may be different the format is something that we're quite used to where we have
six questions and then two minutes to answer and 30 seconds to prepare in between though
candidates have reported some differentiation some have reported six questions some have reported
eight questions also stick around until the end because i'm going to tell you about something
which ubs does in their video interview which is quite unique at the end they give you
two minutes to essentially say whatever you want to say and i'm going to tell you how i think that
you should use those two minutes if you were one of our clients and we were preparing you
for those of you who have watched our other videos and i know that there are lots of you
thank you so much for your support we're gonna go through a fairly methodical style that we've done
pretty much with most of the banks where we have motivational questions competency questions and
then commercial awareness or technical questions and at the end we'll deal with those two minutes
so let's start off with motivational questions with ubs you can expect two of these questions
maybe one or the other which is namely why ubs and why do you want to work for this role why do you
want to do this job so let's do a quick recap how do we answer why do i want to work for x company
well something that i always like to say is pick five facts that you couldn't say about anybody
else you can get them from their about us page the history we've actually got a couple of links down
in the description below ubs have got this really wonderful pdf about the 150 year history from 1862
to 2012. i realize it's a bit geeky but you can learn a lot of facts really quite easily try not
to get caught into saying things like i want to work at ubs because they're really good they have
big clients they have great training they have all of these things may be true but they are generic
we could say them about any company so a good way to just check what you want to say when you're
talking about why this company is to think could i say this about anybody else could i say this about
credit suisse could i say about bmp parabar for example and if you could then maybe try and pick
something else another thing to think about with what type of facts is you really want to pick
facts that resonate with you or that you kind of care about now all of them may not be the case but
there should be some interest in there for you because if you find it boring when i'm watching
you i'm going to know because you're going to look bored and if you're really struggling
with that check out the link in the description below for cover letters that get interviews it's
our free skillshare course about writing great cover letters and in there i actually describe
how to write an answer for this question why do you want to work for this company and i even give
you a really handy step-by-step worksheet all for free why this role okay so we expect this question
we should be familiar with the job description we always want to think about answering this question
in two parts number one what would you do what would your nine to five be like what would be the
daily tasks that you would be expected to do would you be by yourself would you be by other people
would you be in the office out the office what kind of projects would you be expected to work on
and the second thing to think about is what are the skills and experience that you have
that will match the role that is required are you analytical are you good at maths have you got
great teamwork skills have you got good leadership are you cool under pressure what are the types of
things that they're looking for and you can find that in their job description and again if you're
unsure how to answer this check out cover letters that get interviews our free skillshare course
the description below because i give you a video about how to answer this specific question and
also a worksheet that you can go through should be really helpful for you forming an answer something
to think about how not to answer this question is just to speak about yourself or the opportunities
that would give you a really common line that i hear very often from candidates when we first
start to work with them is it would give me great opportunities i would get the chance to grow i
could travel i could do this i could do that and from an employer's point of view they don't care
they're not really that interested they know that it's a great company with great opportunities
they want you to demonstrate your understanding and really the fairness of your research we're
not talking about something that's going to take a long time you get that done in 15 minutes but most
candidates won't bother at all and then they're really baffled why they don't progress through
into the next round competency questions so like we've done in other interviews we're going to just
pick out two or three questions that personally i like the look of i think they're interesting
and also they're a little bit different we all know or we should be able to learn quite easily
how to answer tell me your time when you worked in a team tell me the time when you led a team and so
on and so forth there's a particular question that really baffles you would you like me to do a video
about that pop a comment down in the description below what's a question that kind of doesn't
really make a lot of sense to you and you'd love somebody to explain that for you so i picked out
three questions for you and we're just going to walk through the process of answering them
how have you previously demonstrated skills or behaviors in the past that are relevant to the
role that you're applying for nice question very broad this one generally we would have a question
that would just pick one skill so what i'd say with this question is we'd probably pick out two
or three of the main skills for the job you'd be familiar with the job description whether you're
applying for you know markets analyst finance ibd corporate whatever you're trying to do so pick out
it's always useful to make a list of skills that they're looking for and also what you're going to
be expected to do because that's what they're going to test you on and then you could just
in that two minutes you could pick two skills for example just give two quick
star based examples next one is describe a current event impacting the industry and we've
talked about this before in other investment banking interviews and this is really common
more and more so um i i suppose this hasn't really changed since i first started prepping candidates
in 2013 banks always want candidates who are on the pulse because naturally you're going to get in
you're going to be brace you're going to brace you're going to go through the markets wherever
you are front middle or back office and then you're going to reset and come back and do that
again and banks want people who are interested in finance and to be honest some people aren't
interested me personally i'm not that interested it's just not really my thing i've gone through
that phase and if that's not you you're at least gonna have to try and fake it to make it and make
sure that you keep up to date by if you're really not that like familiar with bloomberg or cnbc or
you know even more complicated as the financial times of the economist just read bbc business news
just go on to bbc.co.uk click on business and see what's going on there's some really simple
language and terms which can be defined there and you can also cross-check that with investopedia
on the other side but those who are financially sophisticated who are watching this you don't need
to go overboard you don't need to really dig into the minutiae of it probably you've already got the
knowledge and if you're say for example i have i have dealt with clients who are trading on a daily
basis they are very much okay with the markets and what's going on and for them it's just about
picking one thing and simplifying that finally describe a time where you were in an an ethical
situation what did you do and what is the result another common theme that does come up is just the
element of integrity where there's money there's gonna be some uh fiddling there's gonna be some
things that are happening which are untoward and often banks professional services and financial
institutions will just throw that in there a lot of times so you might kind of struggle to
think about how this relates to you because probably you know you're a nice person you've
not really been in that many unethical situations or if you have it's not really
something that you want to talk about what i tend to find as a common theme that comes up is
people being asked to either compromise on the quality of their work in a group scenario
or maybe just copy somebody else's project or something that seems relatively harmless generally
people don't cheat because they like cheating they cheat just because it's easier they just have to
do less work i don't think implicitly they are immoral it's just the path of least resistance
or at least friction that they're following down so that's an example i've dealt with time and
time again with different candidates and just as an indicator for you to think about how to
answer this question just any time when you're having to compromise your personal principles
or standards to do something because somebody else probably doesn't want to work that hard commercial
awareness and technical questions i wanted to give you three more questions to think about
so you know the level of complexity we're talking about when we say technical questions i'm not
going to give you too many indications about how to answer them because i strongly suspect most of
the people watching this will know better than me because i don't come from a finance background but
it gives you an idea as to how you should think when applying for different roles in terms of
technical questions and these are questions that were asked for markets or investments analysts
give me an example of a recent merger that would pay dividends why give me two metrics that you
would use to choose and assess to choose to assess a company and if you're given five million pounds
what would you invest in now the last question the first two i don't tend to come across too much the
last question i've seen this question asked a lot over the years particularly for investment analyst
roles because essentially that's your job right it's just thinking about what's my job well i'm
going to be working in corporate finance tell me how to tell me how to construct a discounted cash
flow model i mean if you can't do that then really you shouldn't be doing the job it's
like turning up at a mechanics and saying that you want to work there and someone gives you a
you know gives you an oil filter and says cool can you change that oil filter for me
i've already jacked up the car and you're like i don't know how i'm there like why are you here
you don't actually know how to do the job if you want to be a mechanic then you should probably go
and train first when you're done training why didn't you come and see me afterwards
and i think that's something that's often missed with jobs where people say oh i don't know how to
do this but you should because that's what they're asking you to do there is a minimum requirement or
a standard of skill some more technical jobs and you should know how to do that if you don't know
that's fine you have the internet so you can learn like for example from videos like this you can go
and learn how to put together a discounted cash flow model but you shouldn't feel like you're
being persecuted against because you can't answer that question because you were too lazy to prepare
all right so finally just as promised ubs is quite original in the sense that at the end they will
give you two minutes say oh did you miss anything else is there anything else that you'd like to say
now me personally if i was doing this i would do my personal pitch so i would do my personal
introduction so i would talk about you know what i'm doing right now what's my background what do
i want to do and why what's my work experience skills and interest and why i'm the right person
for the job i think a lot of people will probably use those two minutes to kind of just blather
on about how they really want to do the job and they'd be really good and please give me a job and
there's nothing wrong with being like that but when you think about it desperation is
not effective because it's not useful for the other party involved i mean it might play on
somebody's heartstrings but if it's being looked at from an ai you want to be a person who comes
across as strong confident independent knows what they want and ambitious that's generally the sort
of the kind of personality characteristics that we associate with banking or with these types of
companies so if you get the chance of those two minutes make sure you really refine your personal
introduction you can uh check it in the card that should be popping up above my head if you want
to know how to break that down guys thanks so much i hope you enjoyed the video please please
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