 Hello, I am Alex Freberg and this is the Alex the Analyst Show, the very first episode and hopefully a very long line of episodes. This is something completely different than my other episodes that I put out. Typically I put out one that's four to maybe seven minutes long and it always touches on something data analyst related. And you know, that is where a lot of the people who are watching my channel subscribe to my channel. That is the kind of content that they come for. This is going to be a little bit different, sometimes not always, but it is going to be very tech related. Definitely data analyst stuff is going to be part of it. But also it's just going to encompass a lot more things that my other videos do not. So I'm going to be starting from now doing two episodes or basically two videos per week. This one is very different than my other one. This one is going to be a very long form content, something to listen to kind of in the background. And like I said, it's not always going to be data analyst specific. It is today because I wanted to get a kind of a soft introduction to this new format. I think the people who typically watch my episodes are looking for something more short, a quick bit of information, whereas this is probably going to go a little bit more in depth. Sometimes you will get something out of it, sometimes you will not. It's very long form and so it's very different than my other videos. So I hope you enjoy it. This entire show, this episode is 100% sponsored by all of you over on Patreon. If you were supporting my channel, if you were doing my one-on-one coaching, you guys were making this happen. I was able to get this mic, some of these lights, this camera, all because of you guys because you guys are supporting me. You guys are really what's pushing me to keep going and making videos and I have no plans in stopping. And so if you want to support the channel, there is a link in the description. Thank you guys so much. That means a lot. Now, this is a really good point to say. I just had a cut. That's because I said something super stupid and I didn't want it part of the video. And those are the only times I'm going to really cut out. A lot of these times when I just mess up or don't say anything for a minute because I'm thinking or trying to find something on the computer, I am not going to cut that out. And so if you're used to my quick cuts and my other video and you try to come to this one and it's a little bit different, I apologize. Hopefully, you know, you'll get used to it and hopefully it just makes sense as we get along into this one, which I think is a really good topic. I think that you'll kind of understand the differences between these two. So, all that to say, thank you guys. You guys are awesome. I'm super excited to start doing this because this is something that I really enjoy, which is just talking and hearing myself talk. And so hopefully you guys will just enjoy it as much as I do. The very first topic, which I think is very fitting because this topic was a suggestion from Chris over on Patreon. He's one of, he's a supporter of mine. And so Chris is awesome, really great guy. And he said, he wanted to learn, you know, basically know more about the interview and hiring process from the interviewer's perspective. I think this is a fantastic topic, at least to start it off with because this is something that I get asked a lot. And you know, I am not a hiring manager. That is not my role. That's not my job. But I am in the interviews and I typically am doing the technical portion. I'm much more the tech guy where I work. And so I'm doing the technical portion of the interviews and I collaborate. I help write the job description. I help work with the recruiters to ask preliminary questions. So I have a lot of, I think a unique perspective on this. And so I'm really looking forward to talking about it and letting you guys in on a little bit of the background. And then hopefully give a little bit of tips on how you can kind of get, you noticed a little bit easier or a little faster. So Chris, thank you for that question. I'm going to dive right into it for you guys. I say right into it. It's probably been like five minutes and do this already. But let's get into kind of the background and from the interviewer's perspective how that hiring process works. So just recently we hired a data analyst and a business analyst, I think within maybe about three weeks of each other. And so what I did as part of my role in the hiring process is, you know, I work with my boss who is the hiring manager. And we get together and we say, okay, what skills do we need for this role? And I'll list off a ton of skills that I want because this is going to be somebody I'm working with. This is going to be somebody that is hopefully going to come in and make things easier for everybody, right? You're hiring somebody to offload some of the work that you have kind of pent up in the background. And it's just piling up and you want someone to come in, learn quickly, get up and running and be able to take that work off of your shoulders. And so we're putting together all these skills. And some of the skills that I am typically looking at are things like SQL, Python, maybe R. Maybe they know they're really good at Excel. We need Azure Databricks, Azure Data Factory. The list goes on and on and on. And so I start listing off all these things. Honestly, I have to narrow it down a little bit because there's so many skills that I really want. Not skills that I probably need, right? Because I probably don't need somebody who knows Azure Data Factory, but it's really nice to have. And so if that made it on the list, that may not be something that is a deal breaker, which is something that I think is good for everyone to know is that just because you see 10 skills on a resume or on a job description and you don't have all 10 of those skills, I would still say apply for that job because if you're really good at SQL and you're really good at maybe like Power BI or something like that, and they have those two core skills on there. If you get into the interview and they obviously they liked your resume, they got you in for an interview. If they liked your resume and you have the core skills that they're looking for, maybe not all the supplementary skills that they're looking for. If you have those core skills, they still might hire you. And so just a quick tip there. So we put together these skills and then we kind of write out the job description, which is what do we do on a daily basis? What are some of the things that I'm hoping that the person we hire has? So for the job that we were hiring for it, somebody knows, I work on the ETL side of things. So the extract to transform load process, getting the data in, modeling it, cleaning it up, that's the kind of stuff that I do now. And I want someone who has those skills. I want someone who already knows that type of work, who has healthcare knowledge. Like if you didn't know, I work in healthcare, I work in pharmaceuticals, multinational global company. And so I want someone who already has some domain knowledge in that area. And so when we're writing this job description, those are the kinds of things that we list. We want someone who has healthcare experience. We want someone who has healthcare domain knowledge, who understands what CPT codes are, ICD codes, all the jargon that you'd only really know if you've worked in it. So that's what we put in the job description. So after we get our job written, we bring it to HR. I don't bring it to HR, but my boss brings it to HR. And she says, here's what we want. And then HR cleans it up. Really, the only cleaning that HR does is to make sure that the verbiage is right. They add a little bit of their own stuff with legal stuff at the bottom of the description. And then HR will put that on like LinkedIn, on our own, you know, we have our own proprietary website or however you want to say that, our own website that has jobs available. And we post it everywhere. And then we start getting resumes in. Now, the resumes don't actually come to our company. We have an exclusive deal with a recruiting company. And so I think it's really interesting to know the process behind this because I did not know this when I was in the job market looking for jobs. So how this works is, especially with a company as large as the one that I work at, they will work with a specific recruiting company that is, and sometimes it's department by department, but I will say the ones that we were working with, the ones that we had been working with for years and years and years. And so one second, let me check something. You know, we had been working with them for years and years and years and we had built relationships with their representatives, with the recruiters themselves. And so we knew them, they knew us. And that's typically how it works at a lot of companies. Even when I was at my last job, which is a much smaller company, had about 50 people, they knew the recruiters that they were working with very well. They had been hiring for them for like three years or the first three years of, of when they were in business. And so, it's good to know that because when you're working with just one recruiter, they may not have access to all of these companies. And so something that I did when I was first starting out was I worked with a ton of different recruiters because different recruiters have access to different companies. Super important to know, something that I did not know when I was first starting out. But now that I'm on the hiring team, I understand that. And so I recommend people who are working with recruiters, which I highly, highly recommend, people who are working with recruiters, they should work with several recruiters, not just one recruiter, because one recruiter is really only going to have access to what their company has access to. They don't have access to every single company or every single job out there. They're working for and they're contracted through very specific companies who hire them. And that's how that works because when they, when the recruiter finally gets someone into that position, they make commission off of that and then they get paid. So that's something that I think is really important to understand just how the, how the relationships are built, excuse me, between an actual company and between the recruiting agency. Right. So people are applying, lots of people are applying, you know, for the jobs that I've seen, you know, they can go upwards of 500 applicants on just like LinkedIn. And so that's a lot, a lot of people, they have automated processes that filter your, your resumes for the one that one second, something that is important to know is I am filming this at night and I have three children. And so if one of them wakes up, I may have to run and go help them really quick and come back. That might be a cut. One is fussy right now. And so if he does wake up, I will run and then I will come back and then you'll just see the cut and just know that, you know, I got kids, that's going to happen. So it is what it is. Thank you for understanding. But that's another reason why I might cut in something like an episode like this. And wouldn't you know it? Right when I say that, he wakes up. So let's jump right back into it. You know, you send your resumes, they get automatically filtered out sometimes. So your resume sometimes won't even reach an actual person who's going to look at your resume. And to me, that, that, that's really tough. And I think that if you don't understand the skills that you need, you're just going to get filtered out most of the time. And so, you know, if you have the right resume and it's formatted properly, and it has the right skills, it's going to get to a real person who's going to kind of skim it really quickly and say yes or no. And then another person looks at it. So once you get through that initial stage of submitting it and it gets it through that initial process, it does go to an actual person. That person typically is just somebody who's reading hundreds if not thousands of resumes every single day. And it passes it along to probably the either like the representative or a recruiter who's going to reach out and call you. And after they call you, or once they call you, they're going to ask a lot of follow-up questions that me as somebody who is on the hiring team has asked them to ask. Right? So when we're working with a representative, we say, okay, we're trying to hire another data analyst. We want to know, you know, do they have experience with healthcare? How much? You know, do they know SQL? We're looking for SQL server specifically, but if they don't know SQL server, that's totally fine. We're just if they do, that's kind of like bonus points. You know, ask them this technical question. It's a very broad technical question. The recruiters that we work with do have technical knowledge of the stuff that we work on. So it's not like some random person asking you a SQL question. But they ask the basic questions that we need just to get them through the pre-screening. Because then we don't want to go in as somebody who's working, I don't want to take an hour of my time or half hour of my time and go interview somebody that doesn't know super simple stuff that we are looking for. Right? We only want to interview candidates that have real potential. And so if you're getting a phone interview from like a hiring manager or like the team, that typically means you made it all the way through the pre-screening, you know, you have kind of what we're looking for. And this is just now, you know, the first interview with the hiring team, I will say is probably the most important one. You know, obviously the second round interview or the final interview typically is the second round. You know, if you get to that one, that's I guess more important. But, you know, this is the most important one after you get to the recruiters. And it's so important because it's the very first impression that you're going to put on potentially your colleagues, maybe your manager or your boss. And that's a lot of pressure. You know, so I just wanted to stress that, you know, make a really good first impression, you know, be outgoing, be confident, really talk to the skills that are relevant to the job. You know, in way long ago, I don't feel bad about talking about this one, but there was somebody who kept talking about data science. And, you know, they kept talking about the machine learning side of things. They kept talking about, you know, statistics and probability and regression analysis and all these things. And I'm like, hey, look, it is fantastic that you know those things. You know, I know we are a data science team, you know, but at the same time, you know, those do not apply to this job. We are not using machine learning algorithms, models or anything. You know, we have an entire department or an entire team aside from ours that is doing that work. And so it just it was a huge like, you know, obviously this guy does not understand what this job is going to be doing because you just talked about completely random stuff. The entire interview, that made no sense. Terrible impression. You know, and so from a hiring perspective, we're looking for somebody in the interview who knows what the job is about, who can talk to the skills that are relevant to that job, not other jobs that they think might be useful. And it's really good to know if they have the right skills and they can talk to those skills, talk about how they use those skills. And something I really like is when somebody can say, you know, I'm a sequel person. I'm sure you know by my channel how much I love sequel. I've used every single type of sequel or every, you know, version or kind of sequel that there is. I am just a sequel server fanatic. So if somebody can talk to how they know sequel, T sequel, how they use it, you know, that gets me excited. I'm like, you know, in my mind, I mentally bump those that person up a little bit. Obviously as a candidate, you may not know that. But if you speak specifically to the skills that you are good at and that you think are relevant to the job, just that might be something that triggers, you know, in the interviewers mind while you're doing it. Give me one second. So you make it through the first interview, you ask really good questions at the end. And you get passed along. Now from the interviewer's perspective, we interview a lot of people. So, you know, typically at least at the beginning, you know, through the, what do I say? What did I call it earlier? Through the pre-screening, where at least pre-screening, the recruiters are pre-screening at least like, you know, 30, 40 people and then they're passing along maybe five. So out of the 500 applicants, just on LinkedIn, you know, let's say it's a thousand applicants, you know, maybe 50 make it through, 50 get to the pre-screening, out of those 50 gets narrowed down to about five. So, you know, a thousand down to five is a very, very big jump. Just because a lot of those get completely thrown out, they may be fake accounts or, you know, just completely different positions that we obviously don't want. So down to five and the five people are the ones that we are going to actually interview. So we're going to interview each of those five and we try to fit them in kind of compact because, you know, maybe we try to get them all done in a week, which can sometimes be very difficult with a full schedule. And when we were in person, you know, it's even more difficult because you're having to interact with everybody. I think, you know, since we have been working remotely and we have been hiring people remotely, I think it's actually easier to schedule that stuff. That's just my opinion. But anyways, you know, we want to get all of them really close together because if we spread it out by three, four weeks, if we like someone at the first week, and then we interview the very last person like three weeks later, the very first person that we like the most may have already gotten another job. And so we want to make sure that we kind of give a very small buffer between the first interview and when we want to do callbacks for the second interview or the final interview. So, you know, typically when we say we'll call you back, we, at least for me, we mean we'll call you back probably around next week. Like within a week, maybe a week and a half, you know, more than that is it just, you know, maybe something went wrong. We had this reschedule and interview or something. But, you know, if you on your side, if you're on the interview interview side, and you're not getting callbacks, that's that could be why or is taking a long time to get callbacks, that could be why. So, you know, then we bring in, we talk about it, we have a full meeting discussing each candidate, the pros, the cons, and we lay out maybe our top two. So that, so, you know, a thousand down to 50, down to five, down to two. And we bring those two in and then we ask really more in depth questions, a lot more specific to their skills, a lot more, maybe even more advanced technical questions. One thing that I didn't talk about was, you know, there typically is a technical portion of a data analyst interview. And that's the part that I do. I love doing that stuff. I love talking about it, asking about it, seeing how people think about the problems and give me an answer. And they're typically different than how I would do it, which I think is really, really interesting. If you can think of something better way that I can do it, you know, I'll be impressed. And so, you know, that's just something I didn't mention earlier. But, you know, in that process, you're going to get technical questions. And in the second round interview or the very last interview, you're going to get probably even more technical questions. It's just normally how it is. After that, again, we have a meeting. We have a meeting to discuss those two candidates. After those two candidates, we make a final decision. And, you know, we extend the offer. The offer extension is, you know, goes through HR as well. So, HR knows about it. And then, you know, you get extended the offer. If you accept, we start that whole process of onboarding and hiring and setting up times to come in. You know, we schedule software and computers and hardware and all this stuff to be bought or sent to us for that position. And then you get the job. I mean, it's as easy as that. It's super simple, right? It can be a very long process. From start to finish, it could be a month. You know, between that first interview and that second interview, it could be, you know, two, three weeks. And so, you know, every company is different with time frames. But that's typically what I found. And so, that is kind of the entire hiring process. That's, you know, it's long. It's arduous. It sucks because you sometimes are interviewing at 10 different places. But, you know, hopefully, eventually, you get the job and you land that dream job that you really were hoping for. I took a poll a while back asking, maybe not even a while back like last week, asking what I should do as segments of the show. I'm going to start off really slow. I think I'm going to add a lot more segments throughout the show. And that'll just come with time. This is the very first episode. But the very first thing that you guys wanted me to do was give me a second. You guys wanted me to highlight a question from a subscriber and answer it. So, this one comes from Arcane Knight. It says, you don't have any plans of changing companies every few years because Fortune 500 companies have annual raises and good opportunity for advancement, question mark. What are your thoughts on changing jobs every few years in general? I think this is a really, really good question because I have a friend who works in Silicon Valley, has changing jobs all the time, a company goes under or they get a new job every year making a lot more money than I make. I am sure of it. But that to me, I just personally don't like that. I'm someone who, I have a wife and three kids. I'm somebody who is committed and once I'm in it, I'm in it. And so, I think that might just be a personal thing. I will say that you will eventually probably have to change jobs in order to advance. The job I'm in now, I fully plan on staying for a long time. But previous jobs were kind of stepping stones to get to where I am today. And so, I think especially at the beginning of your career, it's totally fine to kind of hop around and get experience here and there in order to move up quicker. But I personally, yes, I work at a Fortune 500 company and so we get annual bonuses, we get annual raises. There's lots of big, big perks to working at a large company. And they give even bigger incentives to working there a long time. So, if you're working there five plus years, you get even better incentives. And I want those incentives. My family would love those incentives. So, for some people, I think it might be the right thing to do. Others, I don't. It definitely depends on where you are in the country. Like, if you're in Silicon Valley, that's very common to switch around jobs all the time, even at high levels. If you're working in a small town, it's going to be much more difficult to hop around jobs. If I were to give any recommendation or, you know, my thoughts on what you should do is I think that it's very acceptable to at least stay at a job a year, a year and a half, even two years before looking for your next job. And I don't think that's a long term by any means. I think that's a very good timeframe. So, I would recommend at some point switching jobs to advance your career. But I do recommend staying somewhere, find somewhere that you really like that you get paid well and try to stay there long term, especially if you can get as lucky as I was and work at a Fortune 500 company, where they're going to offer you lots of bonuses and lots of incentives to stay. That is the kind of place that I think a lot of people want to end up. And so, yeah, that's kind of my recommendation. You know, I'm super excited about this. I don't know if you guys are super excited about it. Maybe that's just because I'm the one doing it. But I'm super excited about doing this show and making it better. If you didn't notice, I was supposed to be in my new setup. I bought a desk, a chair, lights, all these things. It was 105 degrees in Texas today. And so, my garage, which is where I have my setup, is extremely hot. I think I might have to put in like a fan, like an AC unit or a fan or something, because it is so hot out there. I just could not shoot. It's supposed to be cooling down super quickly. Right now, it's obviously the end of August. In September, October, it starts to get a lot cooler. And some nights, it's like 80 degrees in there. It's really nice. And I will be shooting out there. Some nights, it won't, and I'll be shooting in here. Eventually, I will be in there full time. So, I really look forward to actually using the space that I already have set up, because it's really, it's a lot nicer than I think this. But with all that being said, I'm super excited just to actually be doing this, because I've always wanted to do the long form content, just ramble and talk about nonsense. And you guys have to listen to me. Well, if you choose to, you guys actually don't have to listen to me. But if you choose to, if you just put it on the background, I'm glad that I have the ability to do this. So, again, I just want to give a huge shout out to everyone who is supporting this channel, the subscribers, the people who just watch every week that I put out a video. You guys are what's making this channel grow. And you make the community better. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. Reach out to me via email with questions. Everything is, especially LinkedIn and email. I will respond to you eventually. Sometimes I get super busy, but I do my best. But thank you guys for watching. I really, truly appreciate it. This is something I'm super excited about. This is the very, very, very first episode of many episodes to come. Send me your thoughts on this format. This is completely new to me, so I need to hear from you guys what is good, what's bad, is the lighting bad? Am I talking too quickly? Let's think. Is the audio bad? I bought this microphone. It better sound good. What else? Do I need to dress differently? Do I need to format things differently? I want to hear your suggestions. Whether they are horrible and I completely ignore them or they're really good and I use it and I give you a shout out because I do need help, believe it or not. I need help with these things. It's new. It's just new for me. So, your feedback is super appreciated. You guys are awesome. I look forward to you guys watching this. Like I said, two a week is a huge commitment and so I hope I can continue to just put those out, put out good content for you guys and just continuing to grow this channel and grow the community that we've created. With that being said, thank you guys for watching. I truly appreciate it. Like, subscribe, all that stuff. If you're new to the channel and you got all the way into this video, then kudos to you. I hope that you come back for more. You guys are awesome. Have a good night. Well, it's night here but have a good day. I will see you next week. Goodbye.