The Tesla Financial Analyst Interview Guide
Walk through the Tesla financial analyst interview process and learn how I landed a job with Tesla’s FP&A Business Operations team.
Introduction
In this article, Michael (former FP&A and Business Operations Analyst at Tesla), will walk you through the steps he took to land a full-time analyst role at Tesla. This guide will cover the various stages of the interview process alongside general notes, tips, and sample interview questions and answers.
#1 Passing the Resume Screen
Tesla received 3 million job applications in all of 2021. This may sound a bit daunting, but there are several different things that you can do to squeeze past this first obstacle.
Clean Up Your Resume
First, you need to clean up your resume and tailor all of your experiences to best fit the financial analyst role or whichever role you are applying for.
Tesla is an innovative, technology-driven company that likes seeing people use data to make logical business decisions. Keep this in mind when tuning up the bullets in your resume.
When writing the experience section of your resume, you should make sure to start each bullet with an action verb. This will help cut down the excess “fluff” in your resume and make it easier for recruiters to understand your previous tasks and experiences.
Sample Action Verbs:
- Executed
- Organized
- Expedited
- More Action Verbs
In addition to using action verbs, you should quantify your resume as much as possible so that you clearly state how you added value to your previous companies. For example, you can change “Reduced product line wait time” to “Reduced product line wait time by 3 seconds resulting in a 15% increase in production efficiency.”
For more details and tips, check out our other article on how to write the perfect resume.
Try to Obtain an Employee Referral
With thousands of applications flowing into Tesla each day, an employee referral would certainly help bring your resume to the top of the stack.
Now if you don’t have any existing friends or connections that work at Tesla, you can try to use LinkedIn and cold emails to contact an existing employee to ask for a quick phone call.
When scrolling through your LinkedIn network, try to look for your school alumni and ideally people who work on the finance team or the team that you are applying to. The goal is to hop on a phone call with your connection so that you can learn more about the working roles at Tesla and demonstrate a genuine interest in the company.
For those looking to better their chances of a referral, we recommend you check out our article on Networking Cold Email Templates.
#2 Phone Screen
If you make it past the resume screen, then congratulations, you’ve made it past the largest cutting stage of the application process.
Following the resume screen, you’ll likely have to hop on a call with one recruiter and one or two finance managers. These calls are quite straightforward and very behavioral-focused. Although they seem quite simple, it will be important to give off a good impression and to make your interviewers believe that you will be a good fit on one of their teams.
Preparation Tip: Read Up on Tesla News
- Spend an hour reading online articles on Tesla. Finance-oriented publications like CNBC, The Financial Times, and Bloomberg are great places to start.
- Watch YouTube videos on recent company stories. Tesla has its own channel and Rob Maurer also runs a very informative YouTube channel called the Tesla Daily.
- Read Tesla’s 10-K annual report. Every public company is required to post a publicly available 10-K company report. I’d recommend taking a look at the section on “Risk Factors” and “Management Opportunities, Challenges, and Risks.” (These sections are perfect for coming up with interesting follow-up questions that you can ask your interviewer).
Sample Questions & Answers
The following should give you an idea of the types of questions that you may be asked in these phone screen interviews.
Q: Why do you want to work for Tesla?
Sample Answer:
“Tesla seems to be a very dynamic and innovative company. With this in mind, I figured that this type of work exposure, particularly at the junior level, would be extremely rewarding as I would be forced to learn many things in a rapid environment. Although this may seem daunting for some, I’ve always been the type to throw myself into challenging situations to force myself to figure things out. Tesla has made tremendous progress since its first factory opening in Fremont, California and I’d simply love to take part in its massive global mission.”
Q: Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Sample Answer:
“It’s hard to answer that question specifically as 5 years is quite a long time. What I can say is that I would like to spend the first few years of my analyst career learning the little details and all the ins and outs of the business. Then, after building up my fundamentals and overall experience, I would like to transition into a role that would allow me to make thoughtful and impactful business decisions.”
Q: What do you like to do outside of work and school?
Sample Answer:
“I really enjoy going fishing when I have some free time over the weekend. Although it seems like fishing is a relatively relaxed activity, I actually really enjoy the strategic side of a fishing operation. Whether it's looking a weather and wave height reports or researching specific species and testing different baits and fishing equipment, I actually really enjoy the process of testing out different theories to find what works best for me.”
#3 Excel Case Study Interview
If you make it past the phone screen stage, you’ll likely move on to an Excel case study interview. To prepare for this Excel case study test, I recommend you make sure you are comfortable with basic Excel skills and finance fundamentals.
Excel: In my case study, I ended up using simple formulas like SUMIFS and VLOOKUPS and I didn’t have to use pivot tables or macros. That said it certainly wouldn’t hurt to learn pivot tables and other Excel functions as they’ll likely switch up the case studies every now and then.
Finance: The Excel case study (at least when interviewing for the financial analyst role) is very much finance oriented. At a minimum, make sure you understand the ins and outs of an income statement so that you can comfortably solve for gross and net profit margins, EBITDA, etc.
General Tip: They will likely ask you for your insights or recommendations given the figures and data available. If certain figures or assumptions seem a bit high, perhaps you could recommend the analyst to speak with the manufacturing team or distribution team for more details on mandatory vs optional expenses (this makes it seem like you are familiar with real work scenarios).
If you’re interested in learning more about how you can best prepare for your interviews, consider checking out our Excel for Business & Finance Course and our Complete Finance & Valuation Course. These two courses should help you comfortably tackle finance interviews at the most competitive corporations and investment banks!
#4 Final Round: 4-5 Back-to-Back 30-Minute Interviews
If you make it past the Excel case study test, you’ll likely have an opportunity to take part in a final round interview consisting of 4-5 back-to-back 30-minute interviews with members from various finance teams.
These interviews will consist of mostly technical and brain teaser questions. With this in mind, you should expect to open up Excel during the interview to share your screen and walk through mini case studies and teaser problems.
General Tip: Once you find a reasonable solution, don’t just stop at the numerical answer. The interviewer wants to see how you can connect the data to actionable business ideas. You’ll usually want to make some surface-level assumptions to arrive at a figure, then tell your interviewer the types of follow-up questions you would ask if you had more time to work on this in a real business setting.
You should also expect a couple of behavioral questions at the end of the interview alongside an opportunity to ask the interviewer general questions.
Sample Questions & Answers
The following should give you an idea of the types of problem-solving questions that you might be asked in the final round of interviews.
Q: Tell me 3 different methods that you could use to price a Tesla car entering a new market?
Sample Answer:
- You can use a competitive pricing model. Simply put, you can look up the prices of competing cars in the new market and price the Tesla car within a certain range of its competitors (maybe plus or minus 5%). It will also be interesting to factor in any potential tax benefits that some countries give to electric vehicle consumers as that could give Teslas a big pricing edge over traditional combustion engine vehicles.
- You can use a cost-based pricing model. In this method, you can add up all the costs required to manufacture and distribute a vehicle. Then you can apply a percentage premium to that cost basis to arrive at the consumer-facing price. Perhaps you could use some industry-standard or comparable markup figure to determine the percentage premium to use.
- You could create a model based on customer income. In this method, you could start by looking at all of the existing markets, and create a ratio using the Tesla prices in those markets relative to the median family income in that area. Once you have that ratio, you can apply it to your new market by finding the median family income in the new area.
Q: Identify the bottleneck of the car manufacturing line given XYZ data
Sample Answer:
This question will likely require you to use simple math to figure out which stage in the production line is taking up the most time. Once you figure out the bottleneck, the interviewer might ask you a follow-up question modifying the figures of the original scenario.
For example, your interviewer might say: “If you were presented with the opportunity to invest $X amount of dollars to cut down the bottleneck time by 25%, would you proceed with the project?”
To approach this problem, you would likely have to calculate how much more product you would be able to produce and the dollar value of that additional product. From there, you could calculate the payback period or essentially how long it would take for the additional profits to cover the cost of the initial investment.
#5 Job Offer!
If you make it past the final round of interviews, congratulations, you’ll likely receive an email and a call from the HR team.
If you don’t get the job offer, don’t worry and keep your chin up. It’s already quite an accomplishment to make it to the final round of interviewers. Even if you don’t end up at Tesla, you can still apply to many other great companies like Apple, Amazon, Visa, and more.
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