Before I start writing, I wanted to say my experience with the recruiter was very good, but I have to rate it on my real interview experience. And I also applause that they gave me real feedback.
I applied for the job through referral, and got response from the recruiter right away. And the recruiter was very responsive and flexible. I had to postpone my take-home twice, and she had no problem accommodating me.
I got the take-home, scanned through the data and questions, and knew right away that there is not enough information to answer the questions. But it's okay, I am all about being creative and answering questions without enough information. One example, the entire time, they asked you to analyze visitor data, when they didn't even bother to give you 'visitor id' in the data set. So I just assumed they meant web session since the data is about that, and there is not even a 'session id' either, and I had to ask if I can assume the records are unqiue. The last question was the one you really just cannot answer with concrete numbers unless you don't care about the business and make random things up, so I only recommended solutions.
When I got the feedback, I can tell whoever reviewed my work did not like that I said the data provided are not sufficient for answering the question. I pointed it out in my analysis that with the R-squared being so low, the features cannot be used to determine a concrete number they want without additional information, but they still think the data are in the data set. I know I am not the smartest person on earth, but I think they should understand numbers don't lie, and they might have data that they can use but were not offered to candidates. I certainly would not be happy with any recommendation came out of this data set if I were the company leader. BTW, the feedback says 'revenue' calculation when the question was a completely different topic.
I went out of the scope of the data set and came up with some other suggestions by researching their products, because they did ask about how they should grow their marketplace, but those suggestions were deemed as random.
I know my submission is by no means perfect, it's work done in hours (they gave you 48 hours). But dinging someone because the person had an opinion about the data... I am not sure if this is the kind of company I want to work for. Of course, I can misread what they said since not-in-person communication can always cause misunderstanding, just like they might not have fully understood what I said in my submission. This is probably the biggest shortfall of evaluating candidates based on take-home submissions. But again, I think they should realize there is inconsistency in terms of what they asked and what the data can answer.
