case study before talking to a recruiter
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Pretend you’re responsible for pricing on Lyft’s ride-scheduling feature, and you’re launching a new city like Toledo, Ohio.
The prevailing rate that people are used to paying for rides from the airport to downtown (either direction, one way) is $25. The prevailing wage that drivers are used to earning for this trip is $19.
So you launch with exactly this price: $25 per ride charged to the rider, $19 per ride paid to the driver. But, it turns out only 60 or so of every 100 rides requested are finding a driver at this price.
(While there is more than one route to think about in Toledo, for the sake of this exercise you can focus on maximizing net revenue over 12 months for this one route.)
Here’s your current unit economics for each side:
Drivers: Drivers have around a 20% monthly churn rate. When paid the prevailing rate drivers do roughly 100 rides/month.
Riders: Each rider requests 1 ride/month on average. Churn is interesting: riders who don’t experience a “failed to find driver” event churn at 10% monthly, but riders who experience one or more “failed to find driver” events churn at 33% monthly.
You’ve run one “naive” pricing experiment so far: when you reduced Lyft’s take from $6/ride to $3/ride across the board for a few weeks, match rates rose nearly instantly from 60% to roughly 93%.
So, what do you do?
Let’s assume you can’t charge riders more, and you’re tasked with maximizing the company’s total net revenue for Toledo for the first 12 months after launch.
The core question is: how much do you pay drivers per trip, and for which trips? Your goal is to maximize net revenue for the next 12 months on this route. As you think through the question please write out any assumptions you made when coming to your conclusion.
This scenario is very similar to some of the marketplace pricing and liquidity problems the Clipboard operations and product team works on day-to-day. We’re diving deep into the numbers and we have a bias toward action. We have real fun finding answers to these sorts of questions. :)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
ride-hailing platform pricing question, same as everyone else's
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Clipboard in Jun 2025
Interview
After seeing several pages of negative reviews about Clipboard Health, I decided to test things for myself. I submitted a completely fake resume—literally a PDF of cabling instructions. Despite that, I was invited to complete a case study.
The case study wasn’t simple busywork either. It involved analyzing a spreadsheet with over 2,600 rows and 12 columns of data—something that would easily take half a day or more to do right. Out of curiosity, I had AI generate a report and submitted it just to see if they actually reviewed the work.
Less than an hour later, I was rejected. There’s no way a real person read or meaningfully evaluated the submission. It just confirmed what I suspected: Clipboard Health appears to be collecting unpaid labor under the guise of a hiring process.
What’s worse, they don’t provide any feedback on what you supposedly did wrong. You give up several hours of your time for a task that benefits them, and they can't even offer a sentence of critique in return.
Combine that with how their own website tells you to ignore the negative Glassdoor reviews (a huge red flag), and it really starts to feel like a scammy operation. Even people who claimed to be hired by them describe poor communication, inconsistent expectations, and a lack of clarity.
Bottom line: steer clear. Clipboard Health seems more interested in getting free work than in hiring people fairly.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They gave a 5 page word doc and over 2600 lines in excel to create a case study that was more than a days work.
I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Clipboard (New York, NY) in Jun 2025
Interview
First, you fill out a basic form. Then, you’re asked to complete a detailed assessment involving a big dataset and case analysis. Unfortunately, they don’t appear to review submissions. I received an automated rejection email, and my analytics showed the assessment was never opened.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They didn’t ask any direct questions; just assigned a detailed assessment involving a dataset and case analysis, along with a blog post about their internal practices.
The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Clipboard in Jun 2025
Interview
As all the other ratings mentioned, a case study came back as the next step. I don't mind this on principle as it is a skill-based assessment, though the way it is presented gives little direction on what they want, and there's no question or defined problem. They just throw 19 MB of data at you with some explanations on how the system works, and what columns are there. After spending a day and a half on figuring out what I could just to understand the scope of the data, I drilled down into what I felt was interesting since there is no guidance in the case. Five days later, I got the generic "thank you for completing the case study, but we will not be moving forward and we will not tell you why since we want to give more people the opportunity to do the same case."
They should have given more clear objectives to the case so I would not have invested so much time into it, or given me feedback so I could have at least learned something from the effort put into this job application.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Complete this "case study" which is just raw data and no objectives besides find something interesting.