Sources and scope
This page collects workplace experiences, questions and discussions submitted by users. Dates shown are submission dates, not periods of employment. Individual reports do not describe the entire company.
Read the community guidelinesI interviewed for a statistical analysis position. Before the interview, there was a written test covering Excel operations, including lookup functions and pivot tables. There was also an aptitude test, which I won’t go into. Once the formal interview began, two managers came in at the same time: the HR team leader and the team leader from the hiring department. The HR team leader asked relatively casual questions, while the hiring team leader asked the technical questions related to statistics.
Although the advertised position was for a statistical analysis specialist, the interviewing manager had absolutely no understanding of statistical analysis and focused on just one question from start to finish: “Can you complete the work independently?” Moreover, the job description on the recruitment page was quite vague, with no details about the models or tools required. After asking about it during the interview, I learned that the company was simply looking for someone to run SQL queries to retrieve data and then use Excel to compile it into reports. This should have been clearly stated on the recruitment page from the outset. Otherwise, in an era when big data and machine learning are discussed so enthusiastically, how many people would realize that the statistical analysis specialist they are recruiting for actually refers to this kind of low-technical-threshold work?