Analyze Trends to Diagnose Decline in Job Applications
Overview
This question evaluates a data scientist's analytical competencies in causal diagnostics, funnel and segmentation analysis, experiment interpretation, metric instrumentation, and hypothesis prioritization.
LinkedIn
Jul 12, 2025, 6:59 PM
Data Scientist
Technical Screen
Analytics & Experimentation
16
0
Diagnose a Week-over-Week Drop in Job Applications
Scenario
A job marketplace observes that its daily application count has declined week-over-week.
Task
As the analyst on call, outline the analyses and actions you would take to:
- Diagnose why application count dropped.
- Identify likely root causes.
- Recommend short-term mitigations and longer-term solutions, including experiments.
Clarifications and Expectations
Make and state minimal, reasonable assumptions if needed. Your response should cover:
- Metric and scope clarification, and initial data-quality checks.
- Funnel analysis from traffic to completed applications.
- Segmentation (e.g., channel, geo, device, user cohort, job category, apply path).
- Recent releases/experiments, guardrail metrics, and rollback/holdout checks.
- Seasonality and external/competitor factors.
- A prioritized action plan with hypotheses and proposed experiments.
Solution
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