Take this with a grain of salt, since I do plan on working at Morningstar after graduation. I interviewed for the MDP for Technologists role this past fall.
I think the interview experience at Morningstar was the most extensive and involved one, but it was well worth it and it’s paid off. In my opinion, I found there were many opportunities to prove yourself and Morningstar really did evaluate on many different levels. I submitted my app in October, which was shortly followed by a one-way video interview, a 45 min live interview in November, and the final interviews (5 hrs) in December. I will now talk about each part in some detail.
The application: really straight forward; just a workday application, but you do have to submit a cover letter (I think this is very important). I submitted this in October. It took 30 mins to fill out an app, 30 mins of research, 45 mins to write the cover letter (I’m not very adept at writing them tho).
One-way video interview: this is very similar to HireVue if you have used that before, but basically you 3 questions and you have 1 min to respond. You have 3 tries per question and you can take as long as you wait between the attempts, so you basically have unlimited time to prepare for every question. You can find the 3 questions really easily on other interview experiences. I got the invite for this a few days after the initial application.
First live interview: I got the invite about 2 weeks after the one-way interview. It was a 45 min live interview with one current MDP. They asked me general behavior questions, some resume questions, and a few technical questions (but no real coding, just specifics about my projects and databases). Felt very casual and the interviewer let me ask about 10 mins work of questions.
Final interview: after a bit more than a week, I got the invite for the final interview. This was the heftiest process by far, and trying to balance this with school was tough. The attire is business formal (which felt really weird on zoom) but you arrive along with all of the other interviewees. You sit through an information session about the MDP program and you can ask some questions, and then you’re sent off to do your interviews or the collab challenge (half of the interviewees do each). The interviews are really straightforward: four 30 min interviews, and almost all behavior questions. Though most of the questions are not technical, you can still answer in terms of a technical project or challenge you went through. One interviewer did ask pretty technical questions and asked me to go to a codeshare site with a leetcode easy question.
The collab challenge is really unique—definitely not something I’d witnessed before. I probably shouldn’t leak the problem statement, but after the intro, you break off into 2 teams (2-3 people each) and get to work. Your time is quite fragmented but you have a decent hour to think through the systems architecture/write the design spec/write pseudocode/think through classes. Then, both groups present, which is another 30 mins.
In the end, the group doing interviews and the group doing the collab challenge join back up for a final debrief. You have time to ask questions and give feedback. Anyway, the information session (1 hr) + collab challenge (2 hrs) + 4 interviews (2 hrs) + debrief (15ish mins) = a bit more than 5 hours. You do have lunch in between.
After the final interviews, you are asked to complete a technical exam (you have 30 mins and all questions are multiple choice) as well as a personality test (felt very much a briggs-myer test).