This past Wednesday, The Information Lab team hosted nine candidates for the first class of our upcoming
Data School. To say the pool of candidates was outstanding would be a huge understatement.We had two spots remaining in the school for which this pool of nine was competing. We conducted a two part interview, each 15 minutes in length, all in quick succession… speed-dating meets The Apprentice!
- Each candidate went through a more traditional-type interview with Tom Brown and Jonathan MacDonald.
- Each candidate gave a demonstration of the analysis they did in Tableau to Robin Kennedy and me.
For the more formal interview, I informed the candidates that we were looking for people that believe in the mission of the school, believe in our company mission, will fit into our company culture, show enthusiasm for data analysis and visualisation and demonstrate potential.For the demonstration part of the interview, we uploaded a dataset of 19M home sales in the UK to our Tableau Server one week in advance of the interviews. I created a YouTube video with instructions for how to connect and publish. From there, they were asked to:
- Create a visualization, story, series of dashboards, whatever...
- Publish it back to our Server
In this portion of the interview, we told them we were looking for a few things:
- Insights
- Good storytelling (this doesn’t mean you need to use story points)
- An engaging visualization
- Demonstration of visualization best practices (given this warning, chart junk will score you low)
In addition, I provided them with some tips:
- Don’t create something unnecessarily complex; keep it simple and easy to understand
- Sell themselves; this was their chance to make us think we’d crazy not to take them in the School
- Show it to a friend; if they can understand it without asking too many questions, then they probably did a good job
- HAVE FUN!
I provided help and support through the process. Several of the candidates asked fantastic questions leading up to their interviews.The interviews themselves were amazing! We scored each candidate from 1-10 in each of the areas I told them we’d be looking for. The decisions were incredibly difficult as they were all so good and so different.Keep in mind that these are people that have only been using Tableau for a few weeks and had never seen this data set before. These are great examples of how easy it is for someone to create high-quality work and deep analysis in Tableau in a very short time. That being said, here are screenshots of the some of the visualisations showcase.
