3 execs reveal their go-to hiring question

Three leaders in finance shared their favorite interview question to assess use on job candidates.

The execs are industry veterans who have come up in hedge funds, banking, and wealth management.

They avoided ubiquitous questions in favor of ones that help uncover candidates’ personalities.

There’s an art to conducting a good job interview — especially for high-stakes, high-intensity roles on Wall Street. Hiring managers have to make a spot-on assessment of candidates they don’t know in a short amount of time for roles that can impact their bottom line in a big way. So how do leaders at the top financial firms do it?

It’s all about asking the right questions.

Business Insider spoke with three Wall Street executives across business lines, firms, and expertise to get insight into their approach to interviews. We asked each of them to share the one question they ask in every interview — and what they’re hoping to learn from it.

We heard from a trader who previously worked at Citadel and started his own hedge fund, a partner and veteran at Goldman Sachs, and a CEO who runs a wealth management firm.

Their answers revealed that they try to avoid obvious and predictable “stock” interview questions in favor of ones that help uncover what type of person the applicant is. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Question: Can you pitch me an idea?

Sara Naison-Tarajano is the global head of private wealth management capital markets at Goldman Sachs. She runs the firm’s Apex family office coverage and the Partner Family Office. Naison-Tarajano started at Goldman as an intern in 1999, and has been with the bank her entire career. She was named partner, the firm’s highest ranking below the C-suite, in 2021.

“I like to ask people to pitch me an idea. It can be a single stock, it can be a company, it can be a macro idea — I don’t care what it is. It can be public, it can be private. But I really want to think about how they communicate, because for what I do, there’s an art to how information is transmitted,” she said.

“Then I ask them follow-up questions that are sometimes really difficult. Sometimes they might not know the answer to it, but how they respond to that, how they handle pressure, how they articulate their thoughts, whether they ask me that they want to come back to me and do some more work — all of those things sort of create a narrative that helps me understand how this person is going to deal with a little bit of the unexpected.”

Question: How have you pivoted into a position of strength to win, not just in business but also in your personal life?