Analytical interview questions can be about your specific analytical skills or
they can be about how you'd solve a problem or an analytical puzzle. Learn
how to answer both types of analytical questions in this video. I'm Jen with The
Career Force. We help smart career minded professionals stand out in today's job
market. We post new career related videos every week, so be sure to subscribe and
check back weekly to get the latest career advice. There are two major types
of analytical questions that you'll experience in interviews. The first is
how you use your analytical skills and the second is normally solving a problem
or some sort of puzzle. Let's look at how to answer both types of questions. First,
we're going to look at how to talk about your past analytical skills. Here's two
common questions you might encounter in this type of topic. First is "tell me
about a problem that you experienced in the past where you had to use some
sort of logic to solve it." The second question you might encounter is "your
resume mentioned you have experience in ____ area. Can you tell me more about
that?" In this case, that blank is going to be something analytical. It
might be a software. It might be solving some sort of process problem. You'll know
what to expect based on what you actually put on your resume. So how do
you answer these types of questions? These are perfect questions to use the
STAR model for. The STAR model walks through the situation, the task, the
action ,and the result. So it takes someone through all the steps of
explaining a past situation so that they're able to fully understand it.
When you talk about your analytical skills, you talk about what was the
situation where you needed to use them, what were you trying to accomplish - the
task that you had. So something you're trying to accomplish, solve, figure out,
whatever word you want to use there. Talk about the steps that you took to solve
it. That's where your action is and that's where most of the time in your
STAR responses should be spent because regardless of what the background was of
what happened and what you were trying to accomplish, what really
conveys expertise is what you did. How did you approach solving a problem?
Whether or not the result was successful, your problem-solving approach is such a
crucial aspect of being a good analyst. So explaining that to the interviewer is
going to help them understand how you'll be able to solve problems for them in
the future or use your analytical skills in the future.
If you want to learn more about how to use the STAR model, I put a link below
so that you can go check out more details about it. The second type of
analytical interview question is the analytical problem or analytical puzzle
situation. So in this circumstance you're given a particular problem or a puzzle
and asked how you would solve it. These are notorious at companies like
Google where it might be "what's the the best design of a
manhole cover? Round or square or some other shape? And why would we make them
round?" It could be "how many ping-pong balls fit on the school bus" or something
else. Let's look at a specific problem and how I would go about answering it
and what I would look for if I was interviewing someone to look for a good
answer and really be impressed with what they have to say. In this case, we're
gonna use this example: "There are 25 mechanical horses and a single race
track. Each horse completes the track in a pre-programmed time and the horses all
have different finishing times, none of which you know. You can race five horses
at a time. After a race, is over you get a printout with the order the horses
finished, but not the finishing times of the horses. What is the minimum number of
races you need to identify the fastest three horses?" If I were answering this
question in an interview, here's how I'd go about answering it. I don't
immediately know the answer to it so I would start talking through the logic
that I'm using to figure it out. So I would start out by saying, "I'm not quite
sure how to solve this, but let me walk you through my logic. I know there's 25
horses and I can race five at the most per race. So I would say at the
minimum, I know I need five races to start out so I can find the five fastest
horses. I would race each group and say I would take the winner from each of those,
but I would also need a sixth race because I only need to know the top three and
the top one from each doesn't tell me because I don't know the times. I just know
which one won, what order they finished in. So I would do a sixth race
and that six race I would run the five fastest horses. That would tell me what
the top three out of the top five were. But I would probably then run another
race because I couldn't be sure that the fastest group that had the fastest horse
didn't have a second-place horse that was faster than the first-place horse
in the second fastest group. So in that seventh race, I would run the fastest
horse, the second fastest horse from the same group as the first fastest horse. I
would take the second-place finisher from the sixth race - so the second
fastest group - I would run that one and the second-place finisher from that
group and I would take the third-place finisher from race six and I would put
that horse in the race. So that gives me five horses. That gives me the top two
from the fastest group, the top two from the second fastest group, and the fastest
horse from the third group. So when I run those, I would know whatever the three
horses that finished first would be the top fastest horses out of the twenty-five.
I would say the minimum number that I need to run would be seven races
to find the three fastest horses, not knowing anything about their finishing
time only knowing about their finishing place. I'm curious how well you followed
along with that. Some of you probably thought "oh, duh. This is obvious" and other
ones of you probably thought "I have no idea how I would have solved that
problem." You know what, there are plenty of different problems just like
this so if you want to practice just google logical problems or
analytical problems or puzzles. You'll find plenty of different ones out there that
you can practice with. Whether it's other videos or just googling it, you'll be
able to find some things to practice with. And the really important thing here
wasn't even necessarily that I came to the conclusion that I needed seven races
to solve this problem. It was that I was able to explain my logic of how I got
there. If I would have just responded to the question about how many races were
needed and said, "Oh, seven." and then just shut my mouth, then I haven't told the
interviewer that much. They might be impressed that I knew it off the top of
my head or they might just think, "Oh, well, she's heard this problem before so she
knows the answer." The interviewer really wants to understand what's the process
that you go through to solve a problem because as an analyst that's so much of
your job. That's really the value you're bringing is being able to solve these
complex problems. The data and the math part of it are actually the smaller part
of the job that you're going to be doing versus knowing how to actually solve a
problem. There is one other place where you might encounter these problems where
you don't have a chance to really show your work -
even if it's verbally. Some employers now use logical screening problems to
pre-screen candidates before they have interviews. So typically how this works
is you'll get a link to a website. You'll have a certain amount of time to go in
and take a test - let's say typically 20 minutes to answer maybe 20 questions.
In those cases, you'll be given a series of things and asked to predict what
comes next. So you might be given a series of squares that have different
shading and you might be given four of them and asked, "OK, now that you know
these four, what would the fifth one look like?" These are normally multiple-choice
answers. In those cases, take your time, think through it, and in if you're pretty
limited on time, make your best guess. A lot of times you're probably going to be
right. I would recommend if you know that you're gonna have a screening like this,
take some time to search for these types of tests and practice them ahead of time.
This isn't the type of work that most of us do every day so having a little bit of
momentum going into it can really help make sure that you do well when
taking that test. I hope that you found these tips helpful for knowing how to
answer analytical interview questions or how to solve analytical puzzles and
problems. If you want more career advice, check back next week when I post new
videos or check out the linked videos below that go into more detail on some
of the topics I talked about today.Thanks so much for watching