Hi I'm Jen. I've been through a lot of data analyst interviews both as the
interviewee and the interviewer. It can be really intimidating preparing for
data analyst interview questions when you're not sure what they're going to be. You
might not know what interview questions to expect or exactly how to prepare to
make sure that your interview is success and you come out as a strong candidate.
Today I'm going to help you prepare for your data analyst interview by going
through the most common data analysts interview question types and how to
prepare for them. Are you ready for an analytics career? Get the comprehensive
guide "how to become a data analyst". Topics include key skills and how to
build them, career paths, gaining experience, and launching your career.
Check out the link in the description for more. The first type of data analyst
interview question is the technical question. This has something to do with
your programming skills or just your technical computer skills. These are
questions about your skills with SQL, with SAS, with Python, with R, with
whatever programming language that was probably mentioned in the Job
Description. The real purpose of the employer asking you this particular data
analyst interview question is, "Can you do the programming work?" Here they're not
just looking for "yes, I've done that. I've had this course or this training." They're
looking for what can you do with it - what skills do you have? It doesn't matter if
you have all the training in the world if you can't implement it and put it to
use you're not a very helpful candidate for them. As you answer questions
about these technical skills, about your programming skills, your interview
answers should reflect that you have the skill set and how you've shown that you
have that skill set. Sometimes these technical questions are
also fairly simple questions on how you personally would solve a particular
problem. An employer would ask these questions about specifically how you'd solve a
common data analyst problem because they want some proof that you
actually have the skills. For instance, I might ask a candidate that I'm
interviewing for a position where they're using SAS how would you join
two tables. And all I'm looking for is a pretty simple explanation. It's not a
trick question. I'm not asking for a complicated answer. I just want to know
that they know exactly how to do some basics. These types of questions could be
verbal, they could be a timed online test, or they might be something where in the
middle of the interview you're given a whiteboard and asked to write out how
you would solve that particular problem or program a solution to that particular
request. You can prepare for this by testing yourselves on some basics and
really the best preparation is just using that programming language and
going through the exercise of doing work in it if you know that that's the
language that they're going to be asking you about during the interview. The
second type of data analyst interview question is the math or statistics
question. These again are not going to generally
be very complicated but they're going to test how articulate you are at
explaining differences in different terms - statistics terms or just testing
can you use these skills? Which skills would you apply? For instance you
might be asked something like how would you distinguish between a population and
a sample and how would you use these differently when you're performing
analysis. These are questions that you can study a little bit for but again
comes with a lot of practice. Be familiar with general statistics terms. Those are
going to be the most common things that come up during this portion of the data
analyst interview. The third type of question will show up throughout your
entire interview even within those math and statistics questions and the
programming questions. Those are questions about your past application or
experience with data analytics. In many cases these questions take the form of
tell me about a time when you ... so "tell me about a time
you had to explain the results of your analysis" "tell me about a time when your
results didn't turn out like you expected" "tell me about the time when you
weren't able to solve the problem" "tell me about a time when you performed the
wrong analysis" These types of questions are really looking for your actual
experience doing this day to day work and encountering problems that most
people as the data analyst are going to encounter. There is one great way to
answer any of these data analysts interview questions about experience and
that's using the STAR model which walks through the situation, the task, the
action and the result. It lays out in a pretty concise way a good answer to
those interview questions. I've done a whole video on the STAR model and it's a
great way to talk about any experience during a job interview. I'll put a link
to that so you can go check it out for more details. The last most common type
of data analyst interview question we're going to talk about today is the general
interview question. Don't get so caught up preparing for specific analytics
questions that you forget the basics that are asked in almost every interview.
Two questions in particular that you have to prepare for if you're doing any
job interview are "tell me about yourself" and "why should we hire you". You should be
answering "why should we hire you" throughout your interview with all your
other answers. "Tell me about yourself" is a question that kicks off most
interviews and the interviewer is really looking for a bit about your background.
They're also looking for how do you communicate. All of these interview
questions are a combination of actually answering the questions and showing your
communication skills to the person that's interviewing you. With those two
questions that I mentioned that you should be prepared for, I have videos for
those as well so I'll link both of those in case you want to go into more detail
about preparing for those. Those are the four most common types of data analyst
interview questions and answers, how to prepare and make sure that you really
stand out as a strong candidate. If you want more insights to landing a
job which I'm guessing you too if you're watching this video I've put together a
handy guide with all the critical steps to landing your job. I'll put a link in
the description where you can sign up to get your free copy. Thank you so much for
watching. I can't wait to see you back next time to talk more about all things
analytics.