The Allstate interview process has been hands down one of the best I've gone through, and I have interviewed and received offers from some of the best tech companies around.
What transpires very clearly from the process is that they know exactly what skills are important in a Data Scientist to Allstate and every step of the process is designed to probe those skills. That is in contrast with many tech companies where you might end up doing NLP and machine learning, but most of the interview questions focus on figuring out if you are smart through puzzles, abstract programming questions, or theoretical probability questions.
Allstate wants data scientists who can solve applied machine learning problems, use SQL, hack through a problem with Python or R, and present results to decision makers.
The interview process touches on all of those things as follows:
-take home problem: given a toy dataset, answer a few question and present results in slides (to be discussed over the phone with a couple of data scientists). Hacking skills- checked. Presentation skills- checked.
If you pass this round you go onsite:
-detailed presentation of a ML project of your choice and Q&A from a panel of data scientists. Presentation skills- checked.
-SQL and Python coding: very typical SQL questions with toy tables, joins, group by, having, where... Python questions were framed as "given this code, tell me what the function does". Coding skills- checked.
-Hypothetical ML problem: given a problem, describe how you would go about things like feature engineering, cross validation, measuring performance... at each step adding more detail and asking more in depth questions. ML- checked. Quantitative mindset- checked.
Done. A week after the onsite I got an offer.
Not only the process is a pleasure from the candidate perspective, but it also gives Allstate a chance to make their staff shine (which is import because as a candidate you want to know the real person you'll work with).
Recruiter was super nice and the only person from leadership I talked to came across as someone with strong quantitative mindset, which I love to see because far too many companies (especially in insurance) tend to have non technical people at Director and above levels.
Great job Allstate!