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This week I was, as part of an interview process, given some
writing prompts that I rather enjoyed responding to. Ergo I
have shared my answers below. Hopefully you enjoy reading
them as much as I enjoyed writing them!
Question #1: Share a time when you were confronted with an awkward situation
that could not be resolved in one step, but instead required patience and
perseverance to overcome.
o Situation you faced
I had an employee who was not a US citizen, although he'd lived here since he
was 10. He was fresh out of college and let his papers expire, so he was unable
to continue working for us.
o Task / Action you took
I had to fire this employee, even though he was a great asset to our team.
He was embarrassed and penitent for having put us in this situation.
With company permission I told him we would help him get his papers in order.
I encouraged him to take the time he wasn't working to learn something new.
I worked with the vice president of our company over human resources to get him
legal help to fix his status.
Once his papers were back in order I rehired him.
o Result of your Task / Action
This employee was able to continue to contribute to the company and our country
rather than being deported to a place where he didn't even speak the language
anymore.
Question #2: Share a time where you were given a job that required a lot of
attention to detail to get done, but were not given a lot of structure or
guidance on how to get it done. How did you react at first and then how did
you get it done?
o Situation you faced
When I started at Experian I was given an Oracle database of browsing histories
associated with IP addresses which had been purchased from ISPs around the US
and told to create a model to behaviorally target ads.
o Task / Action you took
I had no experience with SQL, so I got a book on Oracle's flavor of it and
started reading and playing with the data.
Coming from the physical sciences I was liberated from causality in the sense
that the model I was building was based only on correlations in the data, but
this was a hard pill to swallow and I had to trust the people I was working
with that useful results would follow.
I dug into the data and figured out how to write queries that would yield the
likelihood of certain types of websites (after figuring out how to classify these)
being visited after others by different segments of the population that allowed
for the targeting of ads.
o Result of your Task / Action
I was awarded special recognition by the company for my work on behavioral
targeting.
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