Our next cohort of The Data School begins their training in early October. I thought I’d share a bit of insight into their final interviews. First, let me explain how the interview process works. It’s a two-part interview, with one candidate in each of the two interviews, then they swap spots:
- A more “typical” interview: We look for people that believe in the mission of the Data School, believe in our company mission, will fit into our company culture, show enthusiasm for their work and demonstrate potential. Ultimately what we’re trying to identify here is their passion for the role. A great question to ask is “What will you do if you don’t get this job?”.
- A demonstration of their work in Tableau: We provide them all the same data set to work from, and they have to give a demo of what they created. We look for insights, good storytelling, an engaging viz and best practices.
For the final interviews, I provided a data set of felonies in New York in a packaged workbook. (You can download it here if you’d like to play with it). They have one week to work on creating something that would tell an amazing story or show some interesting insight. These seven days are a lot of fun for me as many of them reach out to me for help and feedback. What they don’t realise is this is a trait I look for in good candidates; Will they ask for help and will they ask for feedback?
One of the favourite outcomes of the way we identify talent is the diversity of the backgrounds in the applications that we receive. I truly believe that our process breaks down walls that many companies put up that deter candidates and inadvertently reduce diversity. In DS4, we continue to tradition of hiring many great women with four more to join us. The diversity makes the Data School unique; not only the gender diversity, but the academic and cultural diversity as well. They all lend to a great experience that only we can produce.
The bar to get into the Data School is incredibly high, as you can see below from the eight people that will soon be joining us. In no particular order, here are the vizzes that each of the consultants in DS4 demoed during their interviews. Click on any of the images to interact with it on Tableau Public. I can’t wait to see what they create over the next four months!
If you want to be a part of a future cohort and think you have what it takes, sign up for our newsletter and you’ll get all of the details. We plan to start hiring for DS5 in early January.
Peter Silvester
Daniel Watt
Gwilym Lockwood
Bethany Fox
Rachel Costa
Anna Noble
Ian Baldwin
Megan Hunt