In finance, they have lots of books and sources for interview questions. Especially, 'brainteasers' are pretty famous. A brainteaser can be logical deduction questions or questions like 'when does the hour and minute hands of a wall-clock are exactly at the same place after 3 PM'. There are also questions dedicated to the finance field.
My question is the following: how kind of questions can we ask for OR & Analytics jobs? Of course, it can not be very detailed mathematical questions since the expertise in OR can vary from financial modeling to discrete optimization. Hence, I am thinking about a good way to measure the analytical thinking skills of applicants for the OR & Analytics fields.
Hence, I will be happy to see whether:
- We have good sources for such questions
- We can give some good examples here showing what kind of skills does this question measure
Let me list some examples. An OR & Analytics applicant needs to be really good at induction, so without going in much detail we can ask:
Use induction to show that \begin{align*} \sum_{k=1}^n k^3 = \frac{n^2 (n+1)^2}{4}. \end{align*} Hint: For induction you need to define a base case, ....
Or, even to measure mathematical modeling skills we can again stay in the high school level and ask questions like:
George is 1 year more than twice Luke's age. 3 years from now, Maggy will be 27 less than twice George's age. 4 years ago, Maggy was 1 year less than 3 times Luke's age. How old will Maggy be 3 years from now?
Or, with a very simple question, we can measure the knowledge of functions and calculus with:
On what interval(s) is the function $f(x) = x^3 e^x$ increasing?
Note: I am aware that there is a similar discussion here, but I think it can be nice to give some problems here as a resource for applicants and application receivers.