At Goldman Sachs the first hurdle is usually a camera, not a maths paper

Goldman Sachs describes a video interview as the first step for selected student applicants, not a reasoning test. Prep sites say some roles add a numerical or logical aptitude test, and our reasoning test is a sensible warm-up if your invitation mentions one.

The stage Goldman Sachs itself names is a recorded video interview of about 30 minutes, which no multiple-choice test can rehearse. Engineering applicants take a HackerRank coding assessment instead. If your invitation lists only the video, spend most of your time on spoken answers, not sums.

Half an hour sounds short, but it is long enough for several distinct questions, and recorded interviews leave no room to read a friendly face. You are speaking to a lens. The skill being sampled is whether you can give a clear, specific answer about yourself on the first attempt, without a prompt from an interviewer.

Prep sites describe roughly 30 seconds to think and about two minutes to answer per question. Those figures are reported, not stated, so treat them as a rehearsal target rather than a promise. If you can deliver a tight two-minute story with a pause to think first, a slightly different format will not throw you.

Goldman Sachs publishes a recruiting scams alert that names its approved interview channels: HireVue, or a Goldman Sachs account on Zoom. That is useful in a practical way. If someone contacts you about an interview through a personal messaging app, or asks for payment, it does not match what the firm says it uses.

Knowing the platform also helps you prepare the room. HireVue runs in a browser, so test the camera and microphone on the same laptop and network you will use, close other tabs, and charge the battery. The Goldman Sachs interview guide suggests joining early, keeping the camera on and placing the webcam at eye level.

Goldman Sachs interview guidance says questions tend to centre on practical, real-world problems and that you should be ready to talk through your own experiences, with specific questions shaped by the role. Generic praise for the firm is weak material. A short account of something you did, why you chose that route and what changed as a result is strong material.

Write down five experiences before you record anything: a team problem, a time you were wrong, a time you used numbers to decide something, a time you persuaded someone, and the reason you want this division. Most behavioural prompts can be answered from that list. Rehearse each one aloud, timed, then cut it until it fits.

• Open with the situation in one sentence
• Spend most of the time on what you did and why
• Finish with a result and one thing you learned
• Connect it to the division only if the link is honest

Several prep sites say some Goldman Sachs roles add one or two aptitude tests, typically numerical or logical reasoning. We could not find that on the firm's own student pages, which describe the video interview and, for engineers, HackerRank. If your invitation names an aptitude test, it will usually say so plainly.

If it does, the most transferable practice is reading tables and charts quickly and working out percentage changes without a long setup. Our numerical reasoning test guide explains the common question types, and the free reasoning test below gives you a timed sitting to see where you stand.

Goldman Sachs says it typically conducts between two and five interviews for campus hires, depending on the division. Candidates and prep sites call the final block a Superday, with several interviews of around 45 to 60 minutes each on one day. The division sets the technical depth, so a markets interview and an operations interview will feel different.

The firm's guidance to prepare a few questions for each stage is easy to overlook. Asking each interviewer something specific about their own work shows that you listened, and it gives you a breather in a long day. Our video interview guide covers recorded formats across other banks for comparison.

These come from anonymous reviews, university careers pages and prep guides. They often disagree, and Goldman Sachs has not confirmed them. Read them as leads, not rules.

• Prep sites describe the recorded interview as several behavioural questions with about 30 seconds to prepare and about two minutes to answer each one.
• Prep sites give different question counts for the video stage, from three to six, which suggests the number varies by programme or year.
• Candidates report a HackerRank test for engineering lasting somewhere between about 90 minutes and just over two hours.
• Prep sites say candidates report three to five Superday interviews of around 45 to 60 minutes each.
• Prep guides estimate four to eight weeks from application to decision, though individual candidates describe longer gaps between stages.