How a first-round interview is structured
By SuperdayReps · Wharton MBA · ex-Greenhill · investment banking interview coaching
4 min read · updated July 22, 2026
Before you prep a single answer, you should know the shape of the room you are walking into. A first-round interview is not a free-form conversation. It runs in a predictable order, and once you have seen it a few times you can feel the interviewer moving through the checklist.
The order it almost always runs in
Nearly every first round follows the same arc:
- "Walk me through your resume." The opener. They want a tight two-minute story that gets you from where you started to why you are sitting in this chair. Not a recital of bullet points, a narrative with a direction.
- "Why investment banking?" Why this job, and why now. They are checking that you know what the work actually is and that your reasons hold up under one follow-up question.
- "Why our bank?" The specific one. This is where generic answers go to die. Name a group, a deal, a person you spoke with. Show you did not just paste the firm name into a template.
- A few behavioral and fit questions. Tell me about a time you led something. A time you failed. How you handle pressure. Whether they would want to be stuck in a room with you at 2am.
- Then the technicals. And there are usually several. Accounting, valuation, a DCF, maybe an accretion or dilution question, maybe a paper LBO. This is the part that most often decides it.
The first four are the warm-up. Real, and you can lose points, but the warm-up. The technicals are the test.
The hard truth at the analyst level
Here is the thing nobody says plainly enough. At the analyst level, the technicals are everything.
You can have a genuinely great first half. A crisp resume walk-through, a thoughtful "why banking," a "why us" that shows you did the work, and fit answers that make you likable. And you can still get a no-go if you bomb the technicals. It happens constantly.
A strong first half does not save a weak technical performance. If you cannot get through the core technicals cleanly, the fit points barely matter. At the analyst level that is the single most important thing to internalize about how these interviews are scored.
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Frequently asked
- What is the structure of an investment banking interview?
- A first-round IB interview almost always runs in the same order: walk me through your resume, why investment banking, why our bank, a few behavioral and fit questions, and then several technical questions. The fit half comes first and the technicals come last, and the technicals are usually what decide the outcome.
- Do technicals or behaviorals matter more in an IB interview?
- At the analyst level the technicals matter most. You can have a strong first half on resume, why banking, why us, and fit, but if you bomb the technicals it is usually a no-go. Acing the technicals and stumbling on fit can still get you dinged, but you keep a real chance. The reverse rarely does.
- Why do interviewers weigh the technicals so heavily?
- Mostly because at the analyst level the technicals basically are the job. Your day-to-day work is building the models and running the analysis, so a technical question is testing whether you can actually do the work, not standing in for something else. On top of that, the person interviewing you has to vouch for you to the MDs, so they want to be sure you will hold up once you are passed forward.