ONE OF THE WORST INTERVIEW PROCESSES I HAVE EVER HAD. The whole process took 3.5 months, just for completing a numerical assessment, a case study which was to be completed in one week and two rounds of interviews. On top of that, the HR representative never responded on time. In fact, the responses used to come atleast after one week. Used to call me for an update but never did pick up the call when I wanted to ask for an update.
It started with receiving a numerical assessment after 3 weeks of applying. After I completed the assessment, it took another 3 weeks for the first interview to be scheduled which was a team fit round. The interviewer was good and I was able to pass that stage. Although the interviewer felt like I did not have a lot of business understanding so they demoted me to a position of Junior Data Scientist. I feel like you can only gain business knowledge by working for some company and if I am able to pass the interviews and my knowledge is strong, it shouldn't be a problem. Anyways, it took another 2-3 weeks to hear back that I had cleared the round and I was sent a case study to solve in a week. And at the same time, the next interview was also scheduled.
I did solve the case study in the most detailed manner possible. But, there was no data dictionary provided which could tell me what the variables actually meant. There were a lot of sparse variables which had information about a claim regarding the insurance and the name was not very suggestive of what the variable is supposed to mean unless somebody has actually worked for a similar kind of problem. Even after I explicitly asked for data dictionary, I wasn't given any information on the variables. Anyways, I went with my hunch on a lot of variables and did a very thorough analysis, engineered some features, cleaning, hyperparameter tuning, building of models, etc. The doc for the case study mentioned that either I should make a separate report summarizing what I did or I can just explain my thought process in the jupyter notebook itself. I thought that I might as well put all my time and effort in the notebook so that I can perform as much analysis as I can out of the data.
Now comes the interview to discuss what I had done in the case study. It was with a guy who had in total 5 years of work experience and was a Senior Manager at the company. It was almost a year ago so I have forgotten a lot of things which went wrong from the interviewer's end. I was trying to explain the analysis as much as I can because I had done a lot of it and that too in great detail. He pointed it out by saying that I am spending too much time on the analysis and in the interest of time, I need to speed up. Modelling is one of the easiest parts while creating a predictive model when it comes to tabular data because there is a lot of information you can extract just from the data either by analysis, engineering new features, etc. Also, because there was no data dictionary, I assumed the meaning of one of the variables (which was apparently wrong) and he asked me some questions about it. When I answered it, he told me that I have interpreted the meaning wrong. Yes, because there was no explicit information on what the variables were supposed to mean, what do you expect me to do? But it gets better. The biggest red flag of the interview was the part where I used DecisionTrees as a challenger algorithm to create one of the multiple models I created. The problem was a regression problem. The interviewer asked me about why did I use decision trees for a regression problem and how does it work. I knew the theory part of it and how decisions are made for regression problems and explained it to him. Then the guy responds by saying he did not know that you can use decision trees for a regression problem. 5 years of experience and senior manager at the company. And he does not even know that you can use decision trees for a regression problem as well.
After this, did not hear back anything for 2 weeks. As usual, the HR wasn't responding on the emails nor was he picking up my call. I had to bring in the first interviewer (with whom I had the team fit round) and ask him to nudge the HR to let me know about what exactly is happening. The guy responded and tagged the HR in just literally 20 minutes of my sending the email and the HR also responded almost instantly after that saying they are finalizing things at their end and will get back as soon as possible. How difficult is it for you to just say this so that the interviewee is not kept in dark?
I got a call from the HR after a couple of days with a rejection. And the first reason he told me is that I did not create a separate document summarizing the case study. I told him that it was explicitly mentioned in the task that I can either do this in notebook or create a separate presentation for it. The HR responded by saying that he was sorry and he cannot do anything because it's just the communication he was responsible for and not the decision making process. I was done at this stage. 3.5 months of the process and it ends like this. The worst and slowest interview process I have ever gone through. If anybody is interviewing with them, please be patient (unless of course these guys have changed their interview process). And do not keep a lot of hopes even if you perform in the best possible way anybody can.
