In late October 2025 I got an interview for the Home Depot SBA role through a friend's referral, and I'm here to share my rejection report.
Since I hadn't interviewed in a long time, and my friend's strong referral really helped, the process moved really fast — 10 days total 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 minutes. The HR call was mostly information gathering. The HR person was very nice, asked some routine questions about my background and salary expectations, then gave me a rough overview of what the role would involve. Asked me to self-introduce, and briefly asked why I applied to Home Depot.
11/10 — round 2+3, 60-70 minutes. Based on my friend's previous experience, there should originally have been two separate rounds — round 2 should have been SQL + BQ, and round 3 a case round. But because it seemed like an urgent hire plus the strong referral, the two rounds got merged, so I basically didn't prepare for the case at all. The whole thing ran about 70 minutes.
BQ questions: the BQ portion dug mostly into my resume. First, self-intro again. Then the manager got interested in an NLP project I'd worked on before, so they briefly asked about that experience. Then they asked about my other predictive modeling experience, then why I think I'm a good fit, and why BA (since I currently lean more toward DA and have also done some DS before) — why work across different industries.
SQL: the SQL round wasn't live coding. It was more like they pulled out some internal Home Depot code and had you find the bug — a bunch of tables got joined and the resulting table had way fewer rows than expected, and you had to figure out where the error was and why (you really need to explain it clearly). It wasn't that hard, roughly LeetCode easy-to-medium, and the code took up maybe 3/4 of the slide. But since you're completely unfamiliar with the dataset, you need to ask a lot of clarifying questions about it. I also feel like they really care about how well you can express yourself, so your spoken English needs to be solid.
Case (not really a standard case question): they gave me a case about an internal Home Depot mulch product promotion. The promotion currently has a negative margin, so it's taking a financial loss, and they asked whether I'd continue running it. After I gave my analysis, the manager then asked what the reasoning might be if Home Depot decided to keep the promotion running anyway. I feel like I answered this one pretty badly.
Later, through my friend, I heard back from the manager — overall they found my background and BQ answers fairly impressive, but during the case round I wasn't firm about the decision I landed on, and wasn't persuasive. What this team values more in candidates is logical expression and the ability to convince people. Looking at Home Depot overall, I feel like they care a lot about communication and language ability for the BA role — they don't seem to care nearly as much about the technical side.
Finally, I really want to thank my friend for the referral — after getting rejected I actually felt kind of bad for putting them in that position.
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