FAQ: Prepare for BUSINESS SENSE analytics & data science job interviews
Have an interview coming up? Not sure how to prepare? The process I follow, and what I advise to the people that I coach is:
Think about the business
Day of and during the actual interview
Originally I was going to send all of this in one email, but it became a very long email, so I’m breaking it into four parts.
Read on for part three - how to prepare for the business sense interview.
Step One: Familiarize yourself with the company
“Why do you want to work for our company?” or “Have you heard of us before? What do you know about our company?” is a common interview question.
So before even the recruiter screening, I would make sure you know what the company does. Visit their website, read the “About” section, if it’s a product or tech company, use the product or see if they have a demo.
Go to their LinkedIn page and see if they have recent posts to see what’s new.
Go to Google News and see if they’ve been in the news lately.
Go to Wikipedia and read up on the company’s history.
Step Two: Prepare for the Business Sense interview
Additionally, you need to think about how you would solve problems if you get the job. At some point, likely during the hiring manager or final/onsite/panel round, you will be asked about hypothetical business problems and will need to talk through how you would solve them. These are sometimes referred to as case study questions.
It helps if you are already familiar with the industry and the problems they solve, and also if you have a framework for answering these types of questions.
To familiarize yourself with the industry - look at the company’s content. In addition to what I mentioned above, also check to see if they have a blog, and if they share white papers and/or case studies on their website, Medium, or LinkedIn.
If not (or in addition to that), here are a bunch of tech company blogs to review if you are applying for product analytics or ML or other data roles at tech companies. These can give you an idea of how similar companies use data to solve problems.
As for frameworks, there are a few different approaches you can take when answering questions. Here are some frameworks that I use that are relevant for product or marketing analytics roles, specifically root cause analysis, defining new metrics, measuring feature adoption, and running an A/B (hypothesis) test.
Stay tuned next week for Part Four: Day Of & During the Interview
Need more help? I’m thinking of putting together a job search cohort course - join the waitlist to find out when (if?) it launches!
You can read my answers to past FAQs. Have a question of your own? Reply to this email!
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