6 Tips to make a Turning Point in Your Data Science Interview

How to avoid some major mistakes and increase your chances to get the job

If you are looking for a Data Scientist/Engineer/Analyst, getting picked for an interview can be really hard nowadays. There are more and more people on the market and the job market is now slightly picking up in most of the places in the world.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

In my previous article A few tips to get a job in Data Science from a Junior I explained that my call back ratio using job board LinkedIn and Indeed to name a few were around 5–6%. There are a few other strategies that I could have used to increase the number of calls back, like networking through LinkedIn or trying to reach out hiring manager by email. I will probably extend my thoughts in another article, stay tuned.

Back to the main topic of the article, receiving a call back from a recruiter (most likely) was rare for me when I was looking for a job.

An interview is a weird process where you need to show someone a recruiter or a hiring manager that you are sort of qualify for a position you just read online. Based on my personal experience, I have a few tips from my failures, after talking to recruiters, friends, hiring managers, and from books (I have listed some at the bottom of the article).

If you have been studying for months Data Science to finally get a chance in the interview, and you might think that you are done. Unfortunately, you are likely wrong because there is a whole new skill set that goes into interviewing that is very specific to interviewing.

1 – Understand the business you are applying to

This is the first feedback I received from a Hiring manager after failing at an interview. I finished the second step of the interview with the hiring manager of the consulting firm, and he asked me if I know what are fields the company is working in on. Sadly, at that time because of having a full-time job on the side, I did not allocate enough time to fully understand the business and I failed.

After this, every time I was selected for an interview even for the first round I did a little research on what the company is working on. Sometimes it can be easy since most of the companies have a website, and you can likely understand the area they are working on. Additionally, some companies might be writing an article about Data Science on Medium and you can have a few hints on the technology they are using which you can use to your advantage when talking to the manager.

2- Not knowing all the skills is ok but …

One case that I remember is that I was interviewing at one big company, and they asked me a lot of harder and harder software engineering and data engineer questions. It got to the point where they asked me something that was super academic.

When I gave my answer, the interviewer was clearly disappointed. I feel like the interviewer asked the type of question that’s really more from a trivia game than something that demonstrates my thinking.

Having a job is about resourcefulness in your ability to solve things you don’t know. It’s not about your ability to come into a room knowing all you need to know already.

— Emily Robinson and Jacqueline Nolis in Build a Career in Data Science

However, I don’t recommend people to say "I don’t know" to a question, instead, I always try to demonstrate my way of thinking. For example, I remember that I have been asked questions about building a pipeline with microservices into GCP. As I had no experience with this platform, I tried to explain how I would do it in AWS because I have been working with this platform.

3- Ask if you don’t know

Breaking news! We are humans, and we are not machines (as yet). So it is fully normal to not understand a question from a recruiter, hiring manager etc. It is totally ok then to ask to repeat the question if you did not clearly understand it. Always feel free to ask your interviewer to repeat the question.

4- Show interest to your interviewer

As an applicant, I was sometimes feeling that an interview is an opportunity for the company to test you and see if you are a good fit. However, this is also the opportunity for you to see if you like them. The interview process is sort of flirting between, you, the applicant, and the company.

I often have a few questions written before starting the meeting and I usually add a few more questions after knowing a bit more about the role/company. Based on the response you get you can judge if the company is a good fit for you.

In my opinion, not asking questions is a red flag for the interviewer and he or she would think that you don’t have a lot of interest in the role and/or the company.

5- Be prepared

It’s very common to think (I was one of those) to believe that you can just walk into an interview without preparing anything and think that your experience and your resume will make the interviewer impress, but it’s not working that way.

You can be easily be struggling to answer a question such as "Tell us about a time you had trouble or disagree with your manager" unless you have really prepared you can babble and talk to circles. In my opinion, there is nothing worse than someone talking this way. One way to learn this skill is to do as many interviews as possible but if you have a call back ratio of 5% it would take you a little while to learn it. Otherwise, the method I have found is to check up on the typical questions you are going to face.

Because no matter where you are interviewing, you are going to follow the same steps, you will face behavioral questions, technical questions, and probably some business case questions.

My advice would be, know the common behavioral questions. Check as well the types of technical questions being asked for a Data Scientist/Engineer/Analyst, you can find plenty online and most of the big companies are using the same set of questions!

Here is a great article about common questions at Microsoft from Terence Shin.

Microsoft Data Science Interview Questions and Answers!

6 – Feedback helps you to be better

I love feedback, in sports or professional environments. Good feedback can help you a lot to be better and understand the gaps you are having. Therefore, every time I failed an interview I was always trying to get feedback from the hiring manager. But don’t try to ask for feedback during the interview, you will likely put the interviewer on the spot and make the situation uncomfortable. I think a better approach is that if you receive an email saying that you failed, you can follow up and ask for feedback, just be aware that the hiring manager might not have the time to answer to you and/or can legally not provide any feedback.

Not that you have learned my best 6 tips to succeed at an interview, you know what to do, I can’t assure you that those tips will give you a job but I think you can increase your chances to get an offer. If you did not reach that step though I made another article about how to prepare your resume.