r/analytics • u/Nearby-Cockroach8655 • 20d ago

Discussion WHY ARE DATA ANALYST INTERVIEWS LIKE THIS

I’m currently interviewing for data analyst roles (mostly entry level) and every take home task i get is the same. It’s a bunch of tables with masked data, and they all want actionable insights, except i feel there’s never enough information to actually find an actionable insight. you can rarely use domain knowledge as identifiable data is anonymised and they never provide enough historical data to see if differences really matter.

Do other people feel this way or have i gotten the wrong end of the stick, if so any advice would be appreciated.

EDIT: Thanks you for the advice in the comments, I think being curious, documenting my process for the analysis I can do and explaining what data I needed to delve deeper is the way to go.

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u/naijaboiler 20d ago

I am usually on the hiring end. my bigger fear is not the person that can't think structurally, those are easy to filter out, its the person thats overconfident in their limted knowledge and doesn't have healthy respect of knowledge from non-data business persons.
so over-claiming from incomplete or unavailable information which this type of take-home encourages is exactly what I do NOT want. A test that doesn't even have enough to test that is really useless to me.

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u/chips_and_hummus 20d ago

uhhh you should easily be able to express limitations and assumptions and how that impacts your level of confidence in your findings with this type of take home

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u/naijaboiler 19d ago

But when the test is missing so much that you can't say anything at all. What's the point. 

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u/chips_and_hummus 19d ago

everyone’s getting the same test. they all typically have enough to do basic analysis and thought processes on. 

it’s weird to assume these tests have 0 content to say anything about

i’ve never seen anything like that 

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u/naijaboiler 19d ago

Like i said, I'm rarely in a place where in filtering if the person can do the basics. It's more like their judgement and posture I'm usually tl wanting to evaluate. A test that's missing too much is useless for that

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u/chips_and_hummus 19d ago

fortunately most sql tests aren’t missing that