The job interview

I had reached the final interview for the first real data job of my career. I really wanted this one. I turned down a job offer at another company the day before and was all in on this job.

The final interview was a presentation where I was asked to deliver a data story using a data visualization tool. Any topic or dataset I wanted.

It was grueling to pick a topic to present on. I spent a lot of time working through ideas. Then my wife said, “just pick something they will be most interested in”.

Then it clicked. I had been looking at all sorts of random datasets from the public domain. Everything from housing prices to interest rates and population data. It was all pretty boring.

But the moment I turned my focus on the two people I was presenting for - the CEO and COO - it became clear. Both of them traveled a lot for work. They were based in a smaller city but were within driving distance to three larger city airports.

I expected they spent a lot of time evaluating different airports, airlines, and flight options when they needed to fly somewhere for work.

This is where it got fun. I immediately had a dozen questions that I expected my audience to wonder about. Once I found the right datasets, the analysis and visualization came together quickly.

When I sat down to present for them at the interview, they both said “Ah, something we care about”. Based on the response I got, I expect most candidate presentations were about generic public data - without any personal connection to either the presenter or the audience.

Data fundamentally needs a human connection.

We need a reason to care about a piece of data.

Interesting facts, figures, or trends get rapidly boring.

We need data that gives us something useful. That we can change our lives around.

Something to help us make better decisions.

That’s human connection.

I’m here,

Sawyer

from The Data Shop​

p.s. I got the job.