7 Questions to Ask When Interviewing A Data Analyst Candidate

A data analyst role requires a mix of data sense, business sense and technical sense

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How do you usually interview a data analyst candidate? In this article, I’ll share some of the guidelines and areas you can focus on when interviewing a data analyst candidate, together with some guiding interview questions. These serve as pointers to aid with your interview.

First, what does a data analyst usually do?

Before we go into how to interview a data analyst, first we need to define the job scope of the data analyst.

Generally speaking, depending on the actual role, the data analyst will do a few things:

1. Extract data and build recurring reports for different business users.
2. Perform exploratory analysis: extract and look at the data, organize them, and try to draw meaningful, actionable insights from these vast amount of data.
3. If the company doesn’t have a data engineer, the data analyst sometimes will have to act as a data engineer, writing custom ETL scripts to extract and move data into data warehouse.

Important Skills of A Data Analyst