Key Takeaways
Be mindful of the 10 second rule: When applying for data science jobs, it's important that you stand out. Recruiters on average have 10 seconds to read your resume, so it's important to keep it simple and pack the most important information there.
Bring your passion: Creating a portfolio of work and being passionate about the projects you worked on is the best way to bring your best self to an interview. If you choose portfolio projects you are passionate about, it will show in the interview.
Hiring managers test for intuition, not correct answers: When being propped around data science problems in a job interview, it's not important to get the answer right. What's important is that you demonstrate sound reasoning and walk them through your problem solving—this is why good intuition always trumps correct answers.
Key Quotes
Here's something really interesting. It's called The Halo Effect — which is, traditionally, if someone is an attractive person, we think of them as nicer, smarter — all kinds of positive attributes get attributed if you're a good looking person. Now, something similar actually happens when you're passionate in a job interview. If you're passionate about your own project, suddenly you come across not as passionate about just that, but about data science, about the role, about the company and as a person. People just want to be around you. They want to work with you, when you're passionate.
A lot of times, hiring managers are asking questions about problems they thought about for much longer, way harder than any applicants have. So that’s why it’s so important to prioritize having good intuition over finding the correct answer — Kevin Huo
About Kevin Huo and Nick Singh
Kevin Huo is currently a Data Scientist at a Hedge Fund, and previously was a Data Scientist at Facebook working on Facebook Groups. He holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a degree in business from Wharton. In college he interned on Wall Street, at Facebook and Bloomberg. He’s also the author of the DataCamp course on Predicting Click Through Rate with Machine Learning in Python.
Nick Singh started his career as a Software Engineer on Facebooks' Growth Team, and most recently, worked at SafeGraph, a location analytics startup. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Systems Engineering, and a minor in Computer Science and Applied Math. In college, he interned at Microsoft and on the Data Infrastructure team at Google's Nest Labs.
Adel is a Data Science educator, speaker, and Evangelist at DataCamp where he has released various courses and live training on data analysis, machine learning, and data engineering. He is passionate about spreading data skills and data literacy throughout organizations and the intersection of technology and society. He has an MSc in Data Science and Business Analytics. In his free time, you can find him hanging out with his cat Louis.