Inside a Finance Interview: Real Evaluation Revealed

Inside a Finance Interview: What Mock Interviews Reveal About Real Evaluation

Introduction

Finance interviews rarely fail at definitions—they fail when candidates are asked to apply judgment. Once the basics are covered, interviewers shift from what you know to how you think. This article breaks down a real GoCrackIt finance mock interview to show how candidates are evaluated when concepts turn into decisions, explanations, and structured reasoning.

Meet the Mentor

Sonal Kapoor is a finance and strategy professional with experience across organizations such as Deloitte, Capgemini Invent, Cognizant Business Consulting, Canara Bank, and Indian Bank, an MBA from IIM Lucknow and international exposure through ESCP Business School, France. Her background across consulting and banking environments shapes a mentoring approach rooted in how interviews are actually judged in practice. As a mentor, Sonal focuses on helping candidates to develop structured thinking, financial clarity, and interview judgment—guiding them to translate their background into professional narratives that stand up to real interview scrutiny.

In a finance interview, there is a specific moment where the interviewer stops checking your credentials and starts testing your judgment. It usually happens right after the standard introductions, when the questions shift from “What is this?” to “What would you do?” This transition is where candidates either establish themselves as professionals or remain students of theory.

This blog explores a GoCrackIt mock interview led by mentor Sonal Kapoor with a mentee, a student from a prestigious B school and a commerce graduate from Maharashtra. The session provides a rare look at how a mentor dissects a candidate’s responses in real-time, moving from the basics of finance to complex case studies and financial scenarios.

The Mock Interview

1. The opening

The interview began with the mentee introducing himself.

Mentee: All right. So my name is….I come from the rural part of Maharashtra. I’m a commerce graduate. I have done my Bachelor of Commerce from Brihan Maharashtra College of Commerce, Pune, and that is where I also pursued a postgraduate diploma as well. Apart from that, my hobbies include gaming. I love to play with numbers. And I also love to travel a lot, bike a lot, hike a lot. So that’s all.

Mentor: Can you explain what you did as a part of Area Enterprises? What was your role?

Mentee: As a part of Area Enterprises, I was an accounting trainee. So most of my work related to the cost accounting part of it, such as inventory management, which was one of the key parts, and bank reconciliations. So these were the basic accounting entries of purchases and sales. So that was the basic work that I did as an intern.

2. Finance questions

The interview moved into finance topics that are common in early-stage discussions.

Mentor: What is the difference between a cash flow statement and a balance sheet?

Mentee: Let’s look at the balance sheet first. A balance sheet reflects the financial position of a company. It has assets and liabilities. It showcases what the company owns as opposed to what it owes.

Mentee: And if we talk about the cash flow statement, that tells us about the flow of cash in the firm in three different activities: operating, investing, and financing. It shows these cash flows over a particular time period, maybe a month or a year.

The interview then moved from definitions to a situation where a choice had to be made.

Mentor: If you were stranded on a desert island and had only one statement to review the overall health of a company, which statement would you use and why?

Mentee: I would prefer a balance sheet to analyze the company. The balance sheet provides an overall view of all the assets and liabilities. That is the financial position of the company at a particular date.

Mentee: The other financial statements give you more of a short-term view. A profit and loss statement shows performance over a year. The same goes with cash flow.

The mentor stayed with that answer.

Mentor: Why not cash flow?

Mentee: Cash flow does tell us about inflows and outflows, but that is limited to a particular time period. What a balance sheet tells us is what I own and what I owe. That gives a longer-term view of where the company is heading. It shows capital structure and whether the company is financially sound enough to repay its liabilities.

3. Negative working capital

The discussion stayed within finance, but focused on what happens when an explanation has to be built, not recalled.

Mentor: What does negative working capital mean? Is that a bad sign according to you?

Mentee: I believe that negative working capital may or may not be a bad sign. There may be a case where a company does not have a good credit disbursing facility. It may just be that it is having lower inflows as opposed to higher outflows.

Mentee: There may also be a case where it has outflows and then it has inflows. Could I just rephrase and think about it?

The answer restarted.

Mentee: Let’s say there is a company. It has a lot of raw materials coming in and a lot of raw materials going out. So it has a lot of outflow. It may pay upfront, but the suppliers that they are purchasing from may have a higher credit period.

Mentee: So they might pay, so they might have some in….. I’m sorry, I’m not able to raise it.

The direction of the question shifted.

Mentor: Let it go. No worries. Could you ever end up with negative shareholders’ equity? What does it mean?

Mentee: I don’t recall if I have come across negative shareholders’ equity ever, so I’m not particularly aware about it. Sorry.

4. The case

The interview moved from finance concepts into a business situation that required an entry point.

Mentor: Your client is a pharma company which is seeing an increase in revenues but a decrease in profits. You have been hired to analyze why. What questions will you ask and how will you approach?

Mentee: If the revenues are increasing and the profits are decreasing, the first thing that I would like to ask is whether the company is investing heavily into a lot of assets, because that might show a lot of expenditure and that might bring down the profits of the company.

Mentee: Then I would also ask about the gross profit margins and the net profit margins. If there is an issue with the gross profit margin, that would show that there are issues with the operations of the company, the operational efficiency of the company.

Mentee: And if there are issues with the net profit margin, then we could look at whether there is an issue with financing costs, whether the financing costs are too high for the company to bear, and also look into other expenses such as administrative and other expenses after the gross profit.

Mentor Feedback

1. The opening minute

The mentor returned to how the interview began, focusing on what the first minute communicated.

Mentor: Intro should be catchy, and you have to mention some details. You could start with telling about yourself, and then talk about how you felt the need to upskill yourself and got interested in the finance side of things. Then you can say that you decided to join the MBA program.

Mentor: As a part of the internship, you should highlight what you actually did. You can talk about reconciliation work, or that you prepared detailed cash flow statements contributing to financial decision making.

Mentor: The intro part should be 1 – 1.5 minutes maximum. Prepare a note, record your intro, and check how much time it is taking.

2. Finance preparation

The feedback moved into how finance knowledge was being maintained and positioned.

Mentor: Financially, I think you are sound, but you should go back and revise some of the concepts.

Mentor: For example, when we discussed negative working capital, that is a very basic balance-sheet concept. Those are things you should be completely comfortable with before walking into a finance interview.

Mentor: When you said that if you were stranded on an island you would review the balance sheet, I would push you to cash flow, because overall health is first about survival. The cash flow statement tells you whether the business is self-sustaining or cash-dependent. A firm can have strong assets and even accounting profits, but if operating cash flow is weak, the business is not healthy.

Mentor: You are interested in investment banking, So although I did not ask, you need to know how bonds work. You need to know what beta is, what the significance of beta is, CAPM, and what options are. You have to know each and everything. You could be asked anything. And if you do not know something, be very clear and transparent about it.

3. Structuring answers

The conversation then shifted away from topics and into how experiences and ideas were being organized inside answers.

Mentor: One of the things expected from an MBA graduate is structuring answers. We follow the STAR framework. Situation, task, action, and result.

Mentor: Because you have worked in an internship, you could have faced challenges while handling stakeholders or while working in a team. As part of a behavioral question, it could be asked, give me a situation where you faced a challenge while working in a team. You should start preparing notes and stories around what challenges you faced while working in this company.

Mentor: It could be anything. Your colleague was not working as expected, so the workload was on you. You coached the person. You made sure the person improved. I am just giving you an example.

Mentor: Similarly, while preparing cash flow statements, you might have had difficulty getting data from stakeholders. You were new to the firm. They were hesitant to share data. It took time to build that relationship. Think about such situations and present them using the STAR framework.

4. Cases and guesstimates

The final part of the feedback addressed how open-ended questions were being entered.

Mentor: In cases, you should start by asking whether it is an industry-wide problem or only this firm is facing this problem. Then you should go into whether it is a cost problem or a revenue problem. Then you can break costs into fixed costs and variable costs.

Mentor: For revenue also, a pharma company will have multiple SKUs. You can ask whether there was a strategy change or an operational change.

Mentor: For guesstimates, you should know the population of the country, how many are adults, how many are children, what the rural and urban split is. Whatever you assume, you should have a defensible reasoning behind it. It can be asked why you are assuming something, and you should be able to justify it.

By this point, the feedback had expanded from the mock interview into how future interviews would need to be approached.

Conclusion

This session shows how finance interviews evolve. They begin with familiar questions. Then the conversation stretches. Explanations get tested. Follow-ups start reshaping the direction.

GoCrackIt mock interviews are designed to surface this exact moment, when knowing something is no longer enough and the conversation begins to examine how that knowledge is being used. The real value lies in revisiting these exchanges with a mentor who can translate them into specific preparation paths before the real interview.

Check out all GoCrackIt resources for career and interview preparation.

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Tagged Case Interviews, Finance Careers, Finance Interview, Financial Statements, GoCrackIt Mock Interview, Guesstimates, Interview Mentorship, Investment Banking Preparation, MBA Finance, Mock Interview