Today, for every job posting, organisations receive thousands of applications from aspirants, thus opting for face-to-face interviews have become tedious to manage for recruiters. Therefore, companies are leveraging platforms such as Skype, Hangout, and other video chat platforms to scrutinise potential candidates immediately.
Video interviews, if not for the final round, are being adopted by enterprises to evaluate applicants for initial rounds. This helps recruiters to trim down the applicants’ list without distributing companies’ resources for managing potential candidates in case of an in-person interview at the office. Besides, the adoption of such platforms is also beneficial for aspirants as they can save their precious time and be more productive.
In this article, Analytics India Magazine gives you five top tips to ace these interviews:
Setup your system
Often interviewers ask to perform some task for evaluating applicants’ technical proficiency. Thus, instead of searching for IDE for coding, you should be prepared with your prefered IDE. Mostly, data scientists utilise Jupyter Notebook. And getting up and running with Jupyter Notebook usually consumes time, as it involves several steps before it starts. One has to open Anaconda Terminal then move to their working directory, write command to activate the desired environment, and then, create a notebook to begin coding finally. To get around with such time taking processes, you should ensure that you already have a clean Jupyter Notebook with relevant packages in the environment.
Budding data scientists should also double-check that all tools are installed and updated to its latest version, as often they do not use all the applications frequently, ignoring the updates are quite common among them. This might lead to an awkward situation for aspirants if the interviewer asks them to do a task on the tool that they have not used for a while. Moreover, few applications do not grant access to its features if the user is running an older version.
Thus, updating the software while making the interview wait would spoil the flow of the evaluating process. No doubt, updates can be released at any time of the day and in rare cases, you may have to update during the interview process, but then you will have a reasonable explanation about it.
Approach and data intuition
Almost all the budding data scientists will boast of their programming skills — so aspirants need to communicate what value will they bring to the table apart from just the technical skills. To ensure this, recruiters ask several questions that have no right or wrong answers for checking your approach to a particular situation.
Case in point, how many cabs are running in your city? While you will have to make a wild guess, but you will not be assessed on the numeric value, you said. Rather, the next question will be: How would you break it down into different variables that led you to estimate the number of cabs?
Categorise the cabs such that it should add up to your previous answer. This is where your approach is examined based on various ways can you ideate. Besides, you can be given datasets, where you need to demonstrate your expertise in pattern recognising and decision-making ability.
Positioning of eye
Everyone knows that they should focus on the camera so that the recruiter gets your image as if you are looking at their eyes. However, it is easier said than done, so practising is the only solution to mitigate this challenge. Sooner rather than later, such problems will be mitigated as Microsoft in its latest event has introduced a technique which can make eyes look straight even if one is focusing at the screen. But, until it is democratised, one has to manage by finding a balance between the time at the screen and the camera. Continuously, sticking your eyes to the camera is also not recommended as aspirants should have a glimpse of the recruiter for assimilating whether they are happy with the answers.
Professional clothing
Although it is not a face-to-face interview, aspirants must wear formals from top to bottom, as you may have to move for pulling documents if the recruiter asks for. Therefore, you should never take a chance and opt for proper attire.
Other interview etiquettes
Being prepared in advance is crucial as a delay in the interview schedule can impact negatively. Therefore, punctuality is important for making the most out of the time allotted for the interview. Besides, following-up with a thank you note to reaffirm your excitement about the position will demonstrate your interest in the job, which can earn you brownie points.
