Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Interview Questions
& Process

Interviewing with this company was an awful experience. I wouldn't recommend wasting your time applying or interviewing here. They don't treat candidates like people, more like numbers. The HR team is totally fake. They'll leave you hanging for months after you've put in time, money, and effort, then reject you when you've completely forgotten about them. They talk about cultural fit, but honestly, they need to look at how dysfunctional their hiring culture is. I feel like I dodged a bullet.

It wasn't a super long process, but it did take a while to get responses back. There were quite a few interviews, though the calls themselves were short, about 30 minutes each. I spoke with a lot of senior people on the team, including VPs, Directors, and even the Executive Director.

The interview was really bad. It started with a 2.5 hour onsite interview that included 7-8 math and coding questions to solve in just 1 hour, felt like a Google interview. The questions were printed, no test cases provided, so you had to guess the problems and test cases. You only had 10 mins at the start to ask questions about all 8 problems. Everything had to be written down with pen and paper, no coding editors allowed, like being back in school. The interviewers seemed more focused on their own answers than understanding my thought process, even saying 'It's not going to work!' at one point. They seemed more interested in finding flaws in my solutions rather than encouraging alternative approaches, and even tried to find issues with correctly answered problems. No questions were asked about my experience, so it seems like you should forget your resume and just focus on LeetCode-style problems with pen and paper, plus math. After the coding part, there was a 30-minute resume review, which felt like a formality, focusing on how much I knew about capital markets. You either needed to know everything or nothing, with no middle ground. Expertise in the Treasury market was required, just some knowledge wasn't enough, possibly because they expected you to trade too. They also showed no interest in answering questions after the interview, clearly in a rush to finish after the 2-2.5 hours of an unnecessarily difficult process.

It was a three stage interview process. The first stage was a screener where they reviewed my CV and experience. The second stage was technical, involving some short technical questions and a coding exercise. The third and final stage was non-technical and I met with the IT director and a product owner. I noticed their tech stack is outdated, and it felt like they aren't seeking candidates to introduce new technologies or drive changes. Instead, they seem to prefer individuals who are comfortable working with their existing, dated stack. I'm not convinced that candidates are selected purely based on their technical knowledge and experience.