181: I Got 285 Data Analyst Applications. Here's Who I Hired.

285 people applied for this data analyst position. Only one got hired. I'm going to walk you through the brutal six step hiring funnel that eliminated 99% of candidates and show you exactly how to survive it. Now, here is what the hiring process looked like for a real data analyst job posting. They got about 285 applicants in about a week, 12. Made it to a phone screen with a recruiter. Seven passed the sequel assessment. Six got an interview with the hiring manager. Four, made it to the final round with the entire technical team, and only one person got the offer. So what happened at each one of these stages, and more importantly, how do you make sure that you're not one of those 284 people who got rejected? Well, let's break it down step by step let's dive into stage one, which is application reviews stage. And in this stage there was 285 applicants, and that's quite a bit, but not uncommon in today's job market. And you remember that only 12 made it to stage two. So what the heck happened in this stage? Well, usually I tell you that the majority of applications are never even seen by the hiring manager at all. Instead, they're filtered by the applicant tracking system or a TS for short. But this hiring manager ensured me that she looked at every single resume. Now, I think this is the exception versus the rule, and it really goes to show how cool this hiring manager is in particular. But that's also why they took the job down after a week when they got 285 applicants. Many companies would honestly just leave this job up for a long time, collecting maybe double or triple the candidates. And honestly, you'd probably have a low chance of being considered if you applied pretty late. And that's actually my first set of advice and that is to apply early. The earlier you apply, the more chance you have of actually getting noticed. Next, I'll tell you that if you're not getting into stage two, which is a recruiter screen, we'll talk about that here in a second. It's likely because of your resume at this point. That's all the company really knows about you. That's all they have on you. So you probably need to change something about your resume. Now, I don't know exactly what that is. There's lots of places you could be going wrong here. But here is a quick checklist to consider. Is your resume a TS compliant? The biggest mistake here I see with like most job applicants is they put tables or multiple columns in their resume, and that's a no-no. A lot of ATSs can't read those properly at all. So you could be getting your resume rejected right away. Next, are you missing keywords? If the job description wants someone with Tableau skills and you don't have Tableau listed anywhere on your resume at all. The a TS will probably auto reject you, but even if you do get past the a TS, the hiring manager isn't going to spend much time on your resume if you don't have those Tableau skills on your resume. In fact, this is exactly what the hiring manager told me. She said, quote, "If only half of applicants have experience with Tableau (which is what we listed in the job description), I'm going to talk to the half with Tableau skills before I talk to the other half with Power BI or Looker. You have to prioritize on the things just because there's a lot of people coming through." So there you have it from the horse's mouth. Lastly, you could just be overqualified or underqualified. If you're too experienced with this role, they'd probably get worried that you're going to get bored and leave in like six months. And if you have absolutely no experience, well, they're worried that you're going to need to require too much training and it's gonna be too much of an investment. And that's really how 96% of the applicants may be including you get rejected. But before you feel very sad and utterly depressed, let me just tell you a secret tidbit that never gets talked about hiring manager said this quote, "Honestly, when I looked at them, probably 70% of the applicant pool could have been successful in this role. So that makes it really hard to narrow down." Guys. Let this soak in for just a minute. You may not be getting rejected because you're unqualified. You might just not be the best candidate. So please, guys, I implore you pretty please do not take these rejections so harshly. I know it's tough. I know it doesn't feel good, but realize often it's saying less about who you are, what your skills are, your capabilities are, and more to do with your resume and maybe someone just had a better resume than you. That's it. Don't take it so personally.

So in stage two, which is the recruiter stage, this is where you're going to be talking to someone from human resources. This person usually isn't super technical. They're not going to grill you on SQL or statistics or anything like that. They're usually checking for things like, is this applicant actually a real human being? Which I know sounds crazy, but it's 2025, you guys, it's very important in today's day and age. There's lots of scams out there. Number two, can this person communicate clearly? Are they able to express themselves thoroughly? Three, do they actually have any of those key skills listed on their resume? Once again, this is nothing super technical here. Just making sure you don't list every skill possible on your resume, even though you know nothing about those skills, that would be a huge red flag. So that's what they're checking for here. Number four, does this person actually seem like they're going to be a good cultural fit? Are there any red flags? Obviously the recruiter doesn't wanna waste the hiring manager's precious time with an applicant that's just kind of a jerk, right? And wouldn't fit in the team anyways, so check in for that. Number five, they wanna make sure that the location and work style that you want to have is a fit for you. If the job description is in person in Houston, but you live in Dallas. That might not work. Or maybe you want to commute three hours a day, I don't know. Uh, or if you're looking for remote work and this job is actually hybrid, it just might not be a fit. So they're checking for that as well. And lastly, what are your salary expectations and do they match what the company had in mind? And this is a big one. If the budget for the role is 70,000 to 85,000 and you're looking for a world that pays like $130,000, it's likely that they're not going to really. Interview you any further. So due to candidates not responding or not having a salary, a location, or work type fit, the applicant pool went from 12 to seven applicants that made stage three.

Stage three is the technical assessment part, and this is where the team is actually looking at your technical capability. They're trying to get a feel for your technical skills. Now, most of the times these technical assessments are in Excel, sql, or some other coding language., Because these tools are used the most in industry, but also because they're the easiest to evaluate skill quickly and in a standardized way. For our hiring manager in particular, she chose SQL because it's one of the core skills to the team and it's really easy to test for. Now, I will say I've seen a lot of entry-level roles, have more of a take home assessment that you can do in like a 72 hour window than doing like a pressured test. And I'm a big fan of the take home assessments because they're a lot less pressure. These technical assessments can be really scary and high pressure because it's like taking a live test that may or may not determine your salary for the next decade of your life. That isn't fun, right? So with all that pressure aside, what can you do to perform well in this stage and get past it? The number one thing you can do is practice. Like you guys, there are so many different data interview practice platforms out there that you can try and it's a cliche, I know, but practice makes perfect. Now you might be wondering, well, what do I practice, what might be included in this particular SQL assessment? And for this one in particular, they asked two questions. Number one was a group by question, and the other one was a little bit more advanced and it was a window. Function question, sql. So make sure you know both of those. Uh, but luckily or maybe less lucky and more skill for our candidates, all seven of them actually passed the SQL assessment. Uh, but one candidate did end up taking on a different offer and bowed out. So we're moving into step number four with six candidates.

So in stage four, we are now down to six applicants, which is crazy from 2 85 to six, and this is the hiring manager round here. The hiring manager is meeting you face-to-face for the first time. So you're going to be doing some pleasantries, some small talk, and then some background questions. Uh, and then eventually you're going to be getting into more of the problem solving questions like, for example, what's a cool project you've worked on before, either at work or in your portfolio? What would you do differently in that project? Maybe like what type of data would've been helpful for making decisions? Hey, how do you use data in your personal life? These are just some examples of questions they may ask. In this stage, our hiring manager dropped two of our six remaining candidates from six. To four. And the reason, well, the hiring manager felt that two of them had a bit lower data visualization and data exploration skills than the remaining four. That's just from those questions that we talked about earlier. The best way to not get left behind here in the dust is to make sure that you have an awesome portfolio, projects, and multiple if you can. The hiring manager told me that they don't have to be big projects or use millions of rows, but if you can make them novel and personal to you, that would be really good. And so I made an episode recently on the five Best Project Ideas that you can start today if you're just getting started. So you can watch that on a YouTube card up here or in the show notes down below if you don't know how to get started. But once again in this interview, you're just gonna try to be yourself. Just try to explain not only the what, but the why. Think out loud and try to show that you are a go-getter. So those four candidates are now entering what we call team interview, and that is stage number five.

The fifth stage is the technical team interview, and this is where the hiring manager and herd team of two senior analysts went through some more technical questions. It's almost like a combination of the hiring manager interview and the technical assessment. Put together. So they'd probably ask you things like, Hey, explain a project you've worked on step by step. So that's very similar to the hiring manager, but it'll also focus more on your thought process. Well, why did you choose this instead of that? So if you chose to do a calculation in sql, well, why didn't you just do that in Tableau? Why did you choose that way? And hey, how did you end up deciding that this honestly shouldn't be that scary at this point. They already like you a lot. They've already invested a lot of time in you, and that's because you're a great candidate. They're just trying to figure out which of the four candidates left is the best fit for the team. And after this, well, it's the last stage, and that is the hiring decision. At this point, the hiring manager and her team get together and collect scorecards of the team, interview each interviewer. Gives a score based on how technical you are with SQL and with Tableau, but also how good of a problem solver are you? How clear of a communicator are you? How weird are you? Just kidding. Hopefully you're really normal and at this point our hiring manager was able to narrow it down to two front runners that scored slightly higher than the other two. So after cutting 283 other candidates, how did the hiring manager go from first to second place? Well, honestly, she flipped a Coin Hez Candidate One tails. Candidate two. Nah, just kidding. She went to candidate who had a closer domain related to the company's industry. You know, both candidates, they were both great at sql. They could write good SQL code. Both candidates could create awesome dashboards in Tableau. Both candidates were pretty clear communicators, and both candidates were pretty fun to talk to. They could get along with the team. So what was the differentiating factor? It was, well, what have you done previously? What do you know about this domain? What do you know about this industry? What do you know about our company, what we actually do? So to all my career pivoters out there, I hope this gives you hope, and I hope it gives you confidence because it should what you studied in school, it can be really helpful. The job that you are leaving, that you've had for the last 10 years, it could honestly give you the edge in the end. So that is my advice to you guys. Your domain matters if you land an offer, celebrate it. You've earned it. If you don't get the offer, just know that you are close and move on. Don't get depressed. Don't dwell on it. It's not the end of the world. I promise. Your next offer is right down the road.

So there you have it, the full data hiring process with tips on how to pass each stage. If you want a copy of this diagram or you just want me to explain it via text, I'll have a link in the show notes down below where I'll send you all of this and hey, if you enjoyed this video, hit subscribe. Keep going, you guys, you've got this, I believe in you.