💯 Prepping for analytical interviews

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A few of our students are interviewing for analytical roles (e.g., Data Analytics, Product Management) — I’m sharing some preparation tips today that should be helpful if you’re in the same boat.

Generally, you’ll encounter analytical interview questions for most business roles across elite companies (marketing, sales, operations, business development, etc.). Companies want to test how fast and how methodical you can think.

Analytical questions can take the form of market sizing (‘how many YouTube ads are served per year?’) or strategy (‘how can we increase number of users by 10%?’).

A few quick-and-easy preparation tips that should immediately be helpful in tackling theses questions.

1. Memorize basic numbers beforehand — you’ll be nervous enough as it is during the interview; make it easier on yourself by having certain numbers readily on hand that you can plug into your analysis.

• Generic numbers — world population, population of Singapore (or country / region the role will be in), average size of families (note key differences — e.g., ~3 in Singapore vs. ~5 rest of Southeast Asia), average life expectancy, etc.

• Role-specific numbers — let’s say you’re applying for Google Search; know figures like number of Google Search queries per year broken down by platforms (phone vs. computer), general trends in number of queries, query differences versus competitors, etc.

2. Leverage rules-of-thumb — these are numerical patterns that allow you to quickly get to an answer without calculating from scratch.

• E.g., noting a company’s average profit margin and weaving that into your analytical answer (“…..thus, we’d be looking at a profit improvement of $1M for every $5M revenue increase, given LVMH’s ~18% profit margin”)

• E.g., quickly calculating a company’s projected revenue or user base given a rate of growth (“…..thus, if we grew the business at 26% year-on-year, we’d be sitting on $80M in annual revenue in 3 years vs. $20M now”). Note: I’ve seen cases where the interviewer literally has to pause here to calculate himself/herself, only to find you’re right. Subsequently, they’re super impressed how you calculated numbers like this so fast. Unless you’re a math whiz, rule-of-thumbs are the true champion here. In this specific example, the financial rule-of-thumb is this: 15% year-on-year increase = double every 5 years, 25% = triple every 5 years; 26% = double every 3 years, 44% = triple every 3 years.

Hope the above is helpful. If you’re going for interviews with an analytical bend in the coming weeks, let me know if there’s anything that you’re worried about. Happy to support and help out if I can.

Best,

Vincent (LinkedIn)