I applied through university. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at BlackRock (London, England) in Oct 2012
Interview
Initial round of interviews were not really interviews at all, more just sanity checks to make sure you weren't insane. After that, 4 or 5 interviews on competency (what projects I've worked on, when have I been challenged - the classics) and a little bit on technical ability. Very simple really. Had to also take a Java test, but that was pretty useless as it was for incredibly specific knowledge - I have a feeling it was an excerpt from the SCJP Java 5 exam.
The final analysts coming out of the process had a very wide range of abilities, so all can apply really!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you decide whether a given number is prime or not.
Was pretty straight forward, very technical and business oriented. Focus heavily on current events as well as business acumen to translate to a technology front. With simple preparation and due diligence beforehand it should be fine.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is one market mover currently happening that interests you and postulate what markets it is and will impact?
Technical Questions as well as a few short free response questions. Pretty quick interview, all questions were done online. Sometimes can record the answers. Very quick and easy process for the first step.
Included a recorded interview answering one of their questions with infinite retries, and a leetcode medium coding challenge that was on the easier side. There was no time limit on the coding challenge.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Why do you want to work at BlackRock as a software engineer?
