34 Questions About Financial Management to Ask in an Interview (With Examples)

34 Questions About Financial Management to Ask in an Interview (With Examples)

You will probably have to go through an interview as part of the hiring process if you are starting a new job in financial management, moving to a new company, or switching roles. During your interview, you will likely talk about general topics, your background, and some more in-depth financial management topics. Reviewing questions the hiring manager might ask is a good way to get ready for your interview. This article gives you a list of questions a hiring manager for a job in financial management might ask you during an interview, as well as some sample answers to help you feel ready.

General questions
One way to feel more confident and ready for the interview for this job is to review financial management interview questions. If you know what kinds of questions interviewers ask people who want to work in financial management, you can figure out what qualities will help you do well if you get the job. Here are some general questions a hiring manager might ask to help you get ready for your own interview:

• Why do you want to make money decisions?
• Why do you want to work for our company in particular?
• Where do you see yourself in five years? Ten?
• What do you want to do with your work?
• What is the most important skill to have at work, in your opinion?
• How do you do your job?
• What do you do really well?
• What do you think is your worst trait?
• What does it mean to you to be a good leader?
• Think you can be a good leader? Why?
• What do reviews of performance have to do with taking care of money?
• What would your current boss or a boss you used to have say about you?
• What would people who work with you now or in the past say about you?
• Why should we hire you and not someone else?

Questions about work and history from the past

Your interviewer will probably also ask about your experience and background in financial management and other roles. This is because what you’ve done in the past can help you do well at your new job. Here are some questions an employer might ask about your financial management experience and background:

• Where did you go to school?
• What classes did you take that helped you learn how to handle money?
• How long have you been in the business of managing money?
• How have you been involved in managing money?
• As a financial manager, what is one of the most important things you’ve done well?
• How did you deal with one of the hardest things you had to do as a financial manager?
• What was the best boss you ever had?
• Tell me about a time when you had a hard client or portfolio to work with. How did you get to this point? What would you do differently?
• How much do you know about money rules and how much experience do you have with them?
• When have you had to deal with something that made you feel stressed? How will you deal with stress at this job?

In-depth questions

How well you do in this field can be judged by how well you understand the complicated parts of financial management. Because of this, your interviewer will probably also ask you some specific questions about the business. Here are some more detailed questions about how you handle money that you might be asked at your interview:

• If you could only tell a client to buy one stock, which one would it be and why?
• What do you know about running a business that deals with money?
• How do you make sure that all of your financial paperwork and records are as accurate as they can be?
• What kinds of ways do you know of to manage relational databases?
• Have you ever had to put together financial paperwork in a short amount of time? How did everything go?
• Explain how a cash flow statement helps you figure out how well a business is doing.
• Have you ever told your boss something that made them more money? Explain.
• What does it stand for? How do you calculate ROI, and what do you do with that number?
• What do you think is the biggest issue with money right now?

Explain what deferred tax liabilities and deferred tax assets are and why they’re important.

Sample interview questions and how to answer them

One of the best ways to get ready for an interview is to look at sample answers. Even though it’s important to be flexible and change your answers based on the question and the situation, having a general idea of how you’d like to answer a few common questions can help you feel and look more confident during your actual interview. You could also do a practice interview with a trusted coworker or friend who works in the financial management industry.

Here are some examples of how to answer some common interview questions about money management to help you get ready for your interview:

How do you make sure that all of your financial paperwork and records are as accurate as they can be?

Your interviewer will probably ask you this question to find out how you feel about how important accuracy and paying attention to detail are when filling out paperwork at work. This can be a very important part of your success as a financial manager, since mistakes can cost a lot of money and you may be in charge of a lot of it. When you answer, give an example of a situation, your task, what you did, and the result to show how much you care about being right.

Example**:** “I try my best to keep accurate records at all times, especially since my work can affect the success of both our company and our clients. I think that one of the best ways to make sure that both people and businesses keep good records is to use collaborative technology.

For example, at my first job, I found that the company kept a lot of records using old-fashioned methods that took a long time and were hard to check. I started an unofficial task force to look for new solutions, and within a few months, we had found a digital tool that would help us quickly and accurately update our accounts and then share those reports so we could check their accuracy in more ways. The next year, our sales and customer satisfaction went up a lot because of this.

What do you think is the biggest issue with money right now?

Most likely, your interviewer will ask you this question to find out how much you know about the economy right now. This is because if you know about the market and economy, you can do well in this job. To show that you are up-to-date, be sure to talk about specific details and how important they are in your answer.

Example: “One of the biggest problems in finance right now is one that has been around for a long time: how to make the most money using technology. As quickly as our money changes, so do the tools we have. Keeping up with all of them can be hard. That’s why I try to have a financial solutions architect or other tech expert on my team.

At my last job, it was hard to keep up with the new tools we needed to stay quick and effective. I brought a solutions architect onto our team, and as a result, we updated our processes to make them as efficient as possible within six months. By the end of the year, we had made more money.”

Explain how a cash flow statement helps you figure out how well a business is doing.

Your interviewer will probably want to know if you are good at the analytical part of your job as a financial manager, so they may ask you about how you use information to solve problems that are specific to your field. When you answer this question, try to use your experience with cash flow statements to give a situation, a task, an action, and a result that helped your company.

Example: “A cash flow statement is one of the most helpful things I can look at as a financial manager. This document shows how money enters, leaves, and moves around an organization. It’s important to remember that a cash flow statement doesn’t include assets and liabilities, so it may not give a clear picture of how a company is doing.

At my current job, for example, my team used cash flow statements a lot to decide what to do until we realized that some companies that weren’t doing so well were making their cash flow look like they were doing well, which hurt our sales. Our group came up with a new way to rate companies that took more information about each one into account. In the end, this helped us make more money and be more flexible.

Tips for an interview

Here are some general things to keep in mind for your financial management job interview:

• Check out your answers. You can feel more confident and ready for the real thing if you practice answering interview questions with a friend or coworker. You could ask someone to help you by giving you fake interview questions.
• Get plenty of rest. If you can, try to sleep as much as you can the night before your interview. If you get enough sleep, you can think more clearly, answer questions quickly, and make the best impression possible on your interviewer.
• Eat a good breakfast. If you eat a healthy breakfast before your interview, you might feel more focused, calm, and in charge, which can help you do your best. If you can, try to eat something healthy before your interview.
• Try to breathe deeply. Taking deep breaths can help you feel better if you’re nervous before an interview. Look into different breathing exercises to help you relax and feel more confident at your interview.