Let's Talk About Interviews (Part 1) 😎

Interviews are largely about meeting criteria. The interviewer needs to understand how you think.
Recently there was an interview. The person failed the soft skills. And said outright: only prepared for the technical part.

Knowing that you need to write GROUP BY, but not knowing why, is useless 💯

I've collected questions that are asked in analyst interviews. Let's role-play some scenarios.

Soft skills. HR stage.

According to statistics, this is where most rejections happen. Due to inability to articulate thoughts.

1️⃣ "Tell us about a situation where you worked under deadline pressure"

❌ "Well, we always have deadlines, I'm used to it"
✅ "We were preparing a report for a client. Normal deadline is 2 weeks, we were given 5 days. I broke the task into blocks, automated data collection with a script, eliminated manual reconciliation. Delivered on time."

The difference 🤔
The first said nothing. The second gave a situation, action, result. The STAR method.
Remember that word. They really love trendy methodology names.
You might follow this method intuitively, but in an interview it's important to use commonly accepted phrases 👌

2️⃣ "How would you explain a complex analysis to someone without a technical background?"

❌ "Well, I use visualizations..."
✅ "I remove jargon. Instead of 'p-value < 0.05' I say: we are 95% confident this is not a coincidence. Instead of 'retention Day 7': out of 100 new users, 30 will return after a week."

The interviewer is not testing knowledge here. Can you communicate with the business? 80% of an analyst's work is exactly this 💯

Our beloved Excel ➕

The first six months of a career mostly consist of Excel. Let's role-play this scenario too.

3️⃣ "Explain how VLOOKUP works and when it's not suitable?"

✅ "VLOOKUP searches for a value in the first column of a range and returns a value from a specified column. It's not suitable when the key is to the right of the value. Then use INDEX+MATCH. In newer versions, XLOOKUP searches in any direction."

4️⃣ "How would you find duplicates in a table with 50,000 rows?"

✅ "Conditional formatting or COUNTIF: =COUNTIF(A:A, A2)>1. Or Data → Remove Duplicates with prior copying."

Sometimes they also ask about hotkeys. If you don't answer, that interview point is missed.
Ctrl+Shift+L, Ctrl+T, Alt+=. That's the basic minimum.
Summary post with hotkeys.

5️⃣ Product case

"Retention dropped by 15% in a month. Your actions?"

❌ "We need to improve the product and launch advertising"
✅ "First, I'll clarify: which retention?
Day 1, Day 7, Day 30?
Then I'll slice the data by cohorts and acquisition channels.
If the drop is only in one channel, it's not a product problem but a traffic problem. I'll check external factors: seasonality, updates, changes in advertising. Only then hypotheses."

These examples are from my practice and from the experience of folks who frequently go to interviews. Most failures come down to thinking, not tools.

The most common reasons for rejection:
- weak toolkit (Excel, SQL, Python),
- no concrete examples (STAR!),
- not a single question back to the employer (you came to an interview but don't know what the company does),
- inflated salary expectations (yes, asking for 100k with zero experience is not advisable; this happens all the time).

This is the foundation: soft skills, Excel, thinking. And SQL interview questions we'll cover in the next post.

What questions do you encounter most often? Drop them in the comments, let's take a look.

@data_dzen🙂