In late October I got an interview for an HD SBA role through a friend's referral, so let me share how it went (spoiler: I got rejected).
Since I hadn't interviewed in a long time, but my friend's referral was really strong, the process moved super fast — a total of 10 days to get through 2 rounds of interviews (actually 3 rounds, since the hiring manager decided to merge round 2 and round 3).
Timeline:
10/27 — submitted my resume through the referral link
10/30 — got an HR call, 20 min. This was mostly information gathering. The HR person was very nice, asked about my background, salary expectations, those kinds of routine questions, then gave me a rough overview of what the role would do. Asked me to self-introduce, and briefly asked why I was applying to HD.
11/10 — round 2+3, 60-70 min. Based on what my friend had gone through before, there should have originally been two separate rounds. Round 2 was supposed to be SQL + BQ, then round 3 was case. Because it seemed like an urgent hire plus a strong referral, the two rounds got merged into one, so I basically hadn't prepared for the case at all — the whole thing was about 70 minutes.
BQ questions: the BQ part was mostly digging into my resume. First I had to self-introduce again. Then the manager got interested in an NLP project I'd done, so they asked a bit about that piece of experience. Then they asked about my other predictive modeling experience, then why I think I'm a good fit, why BA (since I currently lean more toward DA, though I've done some DS work before too), and why I've worked across different industries.
SQL: the SQL part wasn't live coding — it was more like they pulled some internal HD code and had you find the bug in it. A bunch of tables got joined together and the resulting table had way fewer rows than expected, and you had to figure out where it went wrong and why (and you really need to explain it clearly). Not too hard, roughly LeetCode easy-to-medium, and the code took up maybe 3/4 of the length of the slide? But because you're completely unfamiliar with the dataset, you need to ask a lot of questions about it. I also feel like they really care about how well you can communicate, so your spoken English needs to be solid.
Case (not really a standard case question): they asked about an internal HD mulch product promotion case — the promotion currently has a negative margin, so it's taking a financial loss, and they asked whether I thought they should keep running it. After I gave my analysis, the manager kept pushing and asked, if HD decided to keep the promotion running anyway, what the reason for that would be. I feel like I answered this case pretty badly.
Later, through my friend fishing for feedback, the manager's read was that overall my background and BQ answers were pretty impressive, but during the case I wasn't very firm about the decisions I made, and wasn't very persuasive. What this team seems to value most in a candidate is logical expression and the ability to convince other people. My overall impression of HD is that for the BA role they really care a lot about communication and language ability. They actually don't care that much about the technical side.
Finally I really want to thank this friend — after I got rejected I almost felt bad for putting them through this.
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