The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Mercer in Oct 2009
Interview
The night before interviews there was a "happy hour" for those who had been selected for first round to socialize with interviewers/recruiters. they provided drinks/appetizers and were extremely nice and knowledgeable. There was not a very good ratio of candidates to recruiters though.
One 1:1 interview with mostly behavioral, generic questions such as "walk me through your resume", "tell me more about this experience", "why do you want to be an actuary?", "why Mercer?", "tell me about a difficult situation", "tell me more about this extracurricular activity".etc
At the end of the interview there is a case question then an excel question.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
in the middle of the interview he asked me a case question: how would you estimate the number of students living on my school's west campus? He specified that I should not use any calculations or numbers, we just want to know your thought process/ how you approach the problem.
one excel question where the interviewer described two spreadsheets verbally and gave you the information in each column. He then asked you how to count the number of some information- can't remember what exactly.
The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Mercer in Jan 2008
Interview
Fill in long application form
Phone interview (more a formality than anything, basic questions about reasons for applying)
Interview day - 5 min presentation on a current financial topic, group assessment exercise involving looking at the accounts of 4 companies and comparing their outlook (involved some calculations), interview with 2 current members of staff consisting of mostly competency questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Give an example of a time when you worked in a team and things didn't work out as you'd planned.
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Mercer (San Francisco, CA) in Feb 2010
Interview
On campus recruiting, UC Berkeley. They interviewed 14 candidates for the first round at UC Berkeley, and I'm not sure how many got into the second round, but I didn't and my friend also didn't. Basically, they didn't ask any technical questions. All behavior questions, so it's easy to prepare.