1. Direct Response
The line you say out loud. Short, with no preamble. If you can say only one thing in the room, say this.
The Direct Response is what candidates rehearse first. Everything else builds context around it.
2. Intuition
Why the answer is true. Not the math: the reason. "EV/EBITDA is the default multiple because it strips out capital structure, so you can compare companies with different leverage" is intuition; the formula is mechanics.
Intuition is what lets you handle a follow-up without panicking. Memorized answers fail when the interviewer twists the prompt. Intuition keeps you oriented.
3. Trap
The wrong answer that sounds right, and the follow-up the interviewer asks next. "Don't discount free cash flow to the firm at the cost of equity. That is a mismatch." "Don't count synergies in the standalone valuation."
Most candidates fail an interview by stepping on a known landmine, not by missing an obscure detail. The Trap section names the landmine before you step on it.
4. Deep Dive
The full mechanics: what the question is testing, the step-by-step reasoning, and the tables, walkthroughs, and worked numbers behind the answer. Formulas render as real math, so DCF, LBO, and accounting answers display correctly.
A candidate who only learns the Direct Response fails the first follow-up that pokes at the calculation. The Deep Dive is where the depth lives.
Why four sections, not one block
Most prep tools collapse all of this into a single block of text. The candidate reads the block, recognizes the answer, and feels prepared. Then in the interview they cannot produce the answer cleanly, because they never separated the parts.
The four sections make each part explicit:
- Direct Response is the line you say.
- Intuition is the recovery when the interviewer goes sideways.
- Trap is the mistake to avoid.
- Deep Dive is the depth check.
A candidate who learns this structure can handle any phrasing of the question. A candidate who memorized one paragraph is stuck.
In practice (GOBLINMODE, GOBLIN100, Bank & Round, or Topics), you answer the question first: pick an option, answer it on a flashcard, or say it out loud. Then you open the full answer.
On the first pass, most candidates read the Direct Response and the Intuition. When a question keeps coming back, they read the Trap and the Deep Dive more carefully. By the third or fourth time, they are checking that their own words land as cleanly as the Direct Response.
Behavioral questions
Behavioral questions ask for your own story, so most of them come without a written answer. The four sections cover the technical questions.
The format is not a script to recite. In an interview, no one says "now for the Deep Dive." You just answer, with structure, because practice trained you to think that way.
It is also not new as an idea. Disciplined bankers think in some version of this structure. What OFFERGOBLIN adds is making it explicit on every technical question in the bank.
