Prepared for Great Lakes Institute of

Management, Gurgaon, 2017

Things to Keep in Mind during Analytics Interviews

When facing an analytics interview, the questions can range from very generic (trying to
assess your interest and what type of person you are) to very technical (assessing your
competencies). However, while what they ask you is not in your control…..how to impress
them is in! So here are some broad as well as detailed pointers….

Key skills (some or all) they are looking for…

1. Do you have it in you to do the mundane boring stuff
2. Do you have it in you to understand a problem, find the key features and formulate
it in a way that can use data techniques to solve
3. Do you have it in you to read, follow and be interested in what is happening around
you and apply
4. Do you have a clear thought process

While all the above must be true for most other roles, for Analytics, I will try and jot down
how to address these. In particular, being able to convey the last point well is what will
impress them most…so how do you do it?

How well do you convey your clarity in thinking?

This will be assessed mostly using two types of cases- (1) a guesstimate (2) explaining what
you have done so far

While you can never prepare adequately for the first, but preparing well for the second will
help you crack the first one well. So here is how?

How to explain your project?

Doesn’t matter whether was an academic or a live project, the following steps and order of
thinking is a must. And do communicate your thought stepwise

1. Problem statement: This is very important…how was he problem statement

proposed to you? What exactly did the client want and why? E.g., an E Comm startup
may have asked ho to identify whom to target? A Bank asks…how do I separate the
bad borrowers from the good ones? Insurance company asked you who among all
the discharged patients will be readmitted within a month….. Problem statement
may be given by the client or the faculty. But clearly explain what it was.
 2. Problem formulation: How did you convert it to a analytics problem? What were the
key results/hypotheses you wanted to test? For example, wanted to establish that
gender, age and occupation is the major determinant for my target customer list? Or
wanted to develop a model that would best capture the factors that separate good
from bad borrowers? Or wanted to develop a pure classification model….or a
continuous response …or a segmentation…etc
3. Data type and source: Was it primary? Secondary? Others? Where did you get it
from? Did you combine multiple types? Why? How? Any data source you ruled out?
4. Data description: Records…how many rows? Columns? Year(time)? Geography?
Types of respondents you considered and did not consider? What do the rows
mean? Are they individuals/ Households/ transactions…? What are the broad groups
of columns-demographic/economic/behavior etc.?
5. Data Preparation: Missing value treatment if done? Outlier identification and
treatment if done. Basic take away from univariate and multivariate analysis
6. Analysis; In line with point 2, what did you do? Straightaway supervised learning or
unsupervised/ why? (remember…”when we were executing the project our skill set
was limited to the techniques A,B,C is an ok answer…but do show your interest in
analytics by being prepared with ‘if we were to do the same thing now, we would be
doing it differently because….”. This will show that your eager to learn and apply!
7. Explaining techniques employed: You must be able to describe the techniques you
employed briefly. For example, “we did logistic regression, cleaned multicollinearity
and then got these these feature important with these signs…”. (Do see the excel
sheet on “Algo” for quick shot understanding)
8. Accuracy and further improvement: What steps did you take to improve your model
from the first cut to the last submitted? What did you look at/ Improving R square?
Reducing MSEs? Improving confuse matrix accuracy? Improving type I or type II error
etc? How did you improve? Why did you stop at where you stopped?
9. What were the key learnings? What did you learn while doing the study? What
mistakes? How would you do it differently today?
10. Did you think of deploying? If your results have to be deployed, what is your
thought? You can skip this if it was a pure play academic project, otherwise….give
this a thought.

Remember

If you can show a clear step by step approach to problem solving, the battle is more than
half won. Realistically, most interviewers will be impressed by the time you have reached
step 6/7….so get that absolutely cracking.

To impress the interviewer fully, the only thing you need to understand and explain well is
your understanding of various analytics techniques. Check the Excel file for that!