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I have been on both sides of this process. Doing the hiring, and being the one who got rejected.
Most people prepare for the wrong things. They practise SQL and forget about the behavioural round. They nail the technical assessment and then hand in a take-home task that is so bad it undoes everything.
This week I recorded a full YouTube video walking through all four stages in detail — including a real take-home task I reviewed that was an immediate no. Link at the end.
But here is the overview.
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Stage 1 — The CV and HR Screen
One goal: get you to the first call. That is it.
If a recruiter gets lost reading your CV, it is over. A CV needs to be screened in under ten seconds.
Structure it in this order: summary, technical skills, work experience, education.
That order lets someone get the full picture fast.
It also must have all the right keywords (in both technical skills section and throughout your work experience). This will allow ATS systems that scan your CV to match it to the job description. It doesn’t mean you need to make anything up, it just means that if the job description is specifically asking for Big Query experience and you indeed have it - make sure it is listed somewhere in your CV.
Format of your CV also matters. Send it as a PDF. I have received CVs as a txt file - once I opened it, the formatting broke and it was impossible to read, which became an immediate ‘No’ even though a candidate might have been a great one.
The HR call is only trying to answer one question: are you who your CV says you are, and can they picture you fitting this role?
Stage 2 — The Behavioural Round
This round is not about your skills. It is about whether the interviewer can picture working with you.
I once asked a candidate where he saw himself in five years. He said travelling the world, playing DJ sets in Ibiza. Love the idea. But we were hiring for a corporate analytics role, and that answer told me nothing about why he wanted to be hired.
The questions vary by interviewer but a handful come up almost everywhere: where do you see yourself in one or five years, your strengths and weaknesses, a conflict at work and how you resolved it, a time you made a mistake and what you did after.
Have a real answer ready for each before you walk in. And you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to run a mock behavioural interview with you — it is genuinely useful preparation.
Stage 3 — The Technical Assessment
This round is not just testing whether you know SQL. It is testing whether you can think through a problem out loud, under pressure.
I will say this: I am against live coding interviews. I have anxiety, and with someone watching me type, I can barely spell my own name. At that point it is not testing your SQL — it is testing how you perform under one very specific, very artificial kind of stress.
Worth knowing: Meta has stopped live SQL interviews and now lets candidates use an AI assistant during the assessment, specifically to see how someone works with AI. Because that is the job now.
If you do get a live technical round, focus on thinking out loud. Explain your reasoning as you go. Interviewers want to see how you approach a problem, not just whether you get the right answer.
Stage 4 — The Take-Home Task
This is where I have seen the most disasters. And it is the stage that matters most — because it shows exactly what people are getting on day one if they hire you.
The most common mistakes:
No executive summary. The recommendation should be on slide two, not slide ten. Sometimes the hiring manager only reads that one slide.
Too much technical jargon. Coefficients and p-values presented as you would show them to another analyst. Translate it into plain language. Put the regression table in the appendix.
Text doing the work that charts should do. One point per slide, stated in one sentence, and let the chart carry it.
Unpolished visuals with no clear takeaway in the title. Give every chart a title that states the finding — not just the metric. And match the company's brand colours. Download their annual report or investor presentation and build your slides to match.
We spoke about how to present data to stakeholders in details in this newsletter → https://karina-datascientist.beehiiv.com/p/how-to-present-data-to-stakeholders
The full video is out this week
I go through all four stages in detail, including showing a real take-home task I reviewed that was an immediate no — and walking through exactly what was wrong with it.
If you are actively interviewing or preparing to start, this one is worth watching.
Watch it here → https://youtu.be/8F1e3zV-O6M
Keep pushing 💪,
Karina
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