So I made it through two rounds of interviews for a corporate development gig and the last stage is they want me to take an excel financial modeling test. The manager came from a private equity background so I’m guessing the test is similar to somethign you might see there or in the hedge fund world.
Does anyone have any advice on what I should prepare for or (even better) a completed model I could use to practice with?
Thanks!
I personally hate those online excel tests. They aren’t very hard, but I have encountered some that are so automated that any clicks the computer doesn’t recognize are counted as incorrect. I did one test where I thought I did 100% and the computer gave me like a 30% … because it didn’t recognize my shortcut commands or something like that. Usually the excel tests aren’t that hard if you use excel everyday.
Hopefully this tests your value of what they are asking over the actual clicks you use in excel to find the value.
Perhaps an “excel modelling test” would be different and than a simple “excel test”.
Some of those “excel tests” are very simple and require carrying out some simple tasks within a certain time/number of mouse clicks etc.
By the sounds of it though, your test is testing more of your actual modelling knowledge, rather than simple generic excel tasks.
Check out http://www.asimplemodel.com/
Wow, the last link is very cool. Thx!
S666 Thank you… this is exactly what I was looking for!
Pretty sure his test will be different from what you had. Seems like what you did was the computer asked you to do something in Excel and it grades you on whether you clicked on the correct button or command. I did not even know they hand out these “tests.” What positions give out such tests? Or was this for an excel class?
What the OP will most likely get is a story of some company or scenario. He will need to model different scencarios, pro forma statements, create table, and simple formulas such as EV, DCF, or IRR depending on the story and the job…Most likely all from scratch although when you’re full time you will have templates.
best bet is to take a professional financial modeling course so you can learn the industry best practices and make sure you understand how to use things like goal seek, index match functions, choose functions for scenarios, managing circular references, xirr, etc etc. there are free youtube videos too but you probably want to pay for a pro course if you really want to nail the interview.
do you have any friends who work in corp dev, ib, or equity resarch you can ask for models to play around with?
you can also check out macabacus but you have to teach youself and the models are pretty complicated