Did I get lucky?

I had a series of panel interviews two weeks ago for a sell-side firm. I think i did well during the first part of the interview where they asked me questions about my background. The position I was applying was for a quant risk analyst position. In the second part of the interview, they started asking me questions about portfolio risk and various types of rebalancing methods. I honestly didnt know how to answer it but I just kind of worked my way through them based on my understanding of portfolio management from the CFA curriclum. I felt like maybe they were trying to pull teeth from me with all these questions. I was sure based on this performance that that was it for me. I didn’t have high hopes for the position given my performance.

However, I received a phone call today indicating that they were looking to schedule a follow-up interview next week. What happened there? Anyone experienced this before? Perhaps I didn’t really need to know anything risk models for the role and they were just surveying my knowledge base?

They may have just been testing your ability to hold up under the gun.

Of course, you are bewildered because interviewing firms adopt these tactics to bring the illusion of “rigor” into the interview process, when the fact is that picking a great candidate is fraught with uncertainty no matter what is done, and so this kind of nonsense gives the hiring manager the “confidence” that a world-class bullshitting session is, in fact, some kind of state-of-the-art process in logical decision-making.

But hey, you made it to round 2, so congrats.