10 questions reported in Unilever interviews, organised by the group that asks them. Every question carries a model answer and graded feedback on your own attempt.
Questions
Easy · Medium
Hard
Model builds
Built in the spreadsheet grid
Capital structure, covenant headroom, FX and interest rate hedging. 4 questions
Tests whether a candidate understands how multinational treasury teams make fragmented cash usable.
What is cash pooling? Explain the difference between physical sweeping and notional pooling, and when each can fail.
Treasury teams must protect operating cash and derivative collateral from a bank failure.
Your company holds substantial deposits and derivatives with several banks. How would you manage bank counterparty risk?
A common first-round treasury question because account sprawl creates cost, fraud and visibility problems before it creates a funding problem.
A multinational has 480 bank accounts across 18 banks, many with small dormant balances. Why would treasury rationalise the structure, and how would you do it without disrupting the business?
A corporate treasury inbox escalation requiring prioritisation of cash, funding, and stakeholder actions.
You are the treasury analyst for an acquisitive public company after a delayed receivables cycle and an upcoming debt maturity tighten liquidity. Rank the actions as new information arrives, then send…
Driver-based forecasts, variance analysis and forecast accuracy. 3 questions
Asked to assess whether a candidate can design a useful forecasting process rather than simply update a template.
What is a rolling forecast, and how would you run a monthly forecasting cadence without creating a burdensome process for the business?
Used in FP&A and strategic finance interviews to test decision-support judgement.
A team wants to outsource a process. The vendor charges $900,000 per year. Keeping it in-house costs $1.2m, but $500,000 of that is unavoidable fixed cost for the next two years. Should the company…
Common in FP&A and corporate strategy interviews.
Compare zero-based budgeting with incremental budgeting. When would you implement ZBB, and what typically goes wrong?
Project selection, returning capital and measuring per-share value. 3 questions
A first-round question on how corporate finance teams screen investment proposals.
What is a hurdle rate, and should every project at a company use the same one?
A practical treasury and FP&A question with a clear quantitative component.
A company with $2bn of revenue and $1.4bn of COGS has DSO of 65 days, DIO of 90 days and DPO of 40 days. Calculate the cash conversion cycle, quantify the cash released by improving DSO to 50 days,…
A CFO case in which a cost programme must improve near-term liquidity without impairing the recovery.
A company must improve cash flow by $80m this year after demand softens. The CEO proposes an across-the-board 10% operating-expense cut. How would you build a better plan?
Write your answer, get it graded on technical accuracy, completeness and communication, and see exactly which mechanic you missed.
Company tags reflect where a question type is commonly reported in interviews. They are not sourced from, endorsed by, or affiliated with Unilever.