The problem we solve
Finding qualified data scientists to fill your job openings is hard; finding the very best talent who can take large quantities of formless data all the way to value-adding insights and business optimization is harder.
Recruiting processes for data scientists tend to do a poor job in the technical screening portion, often failing to weed out the resume boosters and to give the most talented candidates a fair chance to showcase their strengths.
The problem gets worse when the company adopts an inflexible model that offers no choice to candidates, requiring all to go through an inflexible technical assessment process typically based on one of the following:
| Test | Downside | |
| Whiteboarding or live coding exercises | Favor candidates who perform well off-the-cuff but penalize equally skilled applicants who tend to experience a mental block during this type of assessment. | |
| Unpaid take-home exercises requiring 4+ hours to complete | Turn off candidates who are being chased by other employers as well as high-caliber but time-poor professionals for reasons like having care responsibilities. | |
| Walkthroughs of past projects | Exclude competent candidates lacking free time to prepare to present their work or who don't have a relevant project to share. |
Are you trying to build a team that is satisfactory but unexceptional, or are you trying to assemble a high-powered group comprising the very best talent you can hire?
If you want to stamp out mediocrity and hire the people who will deliver the highest value, the last thing you want is a rigid recruiting process that discourages nontraditional high-potential candidates to apply.
How we can help
Beal Projects administers well-calibrated take-home exercises that only require 30 minutes to complete and provide an objective understanding of the level of technical skill and skill potential each prospect hire has.
Is a 30-minute take-home exercise sufficient to prove a candidate is fully equipped for the job?
Even though it has shown be a great indicator of a candidate's technical abilities, fully proving one's technical expertise is not the goal of this exercise. Instead, the objective is to help identify high-quality talent that are likely to outperform other candidates in the tasks they're expected to tackle on the job.
Our promise is to help you advance in your hiring process people who already have the technical skills you need along with high-potential candidates with less or different experience who can quickly fill their skills gap with minimal on-the-job training.
What if a candidate refuses to do the test?
It's true that not all candidates like take-home exercises. However, in our experience most applicants welcome the opportunity to work on a well-designed problem when the time investment is small and they can work on their own schedule and without the pressure of someone looking over their shoulders.
Having said that, the goal here is not to require all your viable candidates to complete the take-home assignment.
Rather than striving for consistency, a much more effective approach is to customize your recruiting process to reflect different circumstances. For example:
- For candidates who don't necessarilly meet some of your requirements but come with a strong referral or a nontraditional background that could add to your team's diverse perspectives and benefit your business in different ways, the opportunity to go through a pre-screening process via a 30-minute take-home assignment can create a win-win situation.
- For applicants who have all the right credentials and/or come well-recommended by an employee you trust, it makes sense to wait and only ask the top finalists to go through the take-home exercise if their technical competency couldn't be established through other reliable means.
What is included in your services?
- Take-home exercise design. Each candidate's coding & analysis assignment is based on a standard real-life project scenario that matches job requirements but gets further adapted to reflect individual candidate backgrounds. (While much more time-consuming and non-scalable, this process allows the candidate to present their capabilities without the "lottery" imposed by a fully standardized assessment process.)
- End-to-end test administration. We take care of everything, from setting up the environment and simulated data for the take-home exercise and sending the instructions to individual candidates to reviewing each submission, having a 20-min follow-up conversation to probe their answers and understand the candidate's thinking, and preparing a short evaluation report for the hiring manager.
What kind of assignment are candidates given to complete?
Depending upon the role you're recruiting for, the 30-minute take-home exercise may address all or some of the following abilities:
- Write code to manipulate structured and unstructured data (for data scientists, coding skills don't have to be at a world-class level but should be good enough; for data engineers and machine learning engineers the bar is set higher).
- Unlock value from data by asking second-order questions and reframing business problems.
- Find a story in a data set and provide a coherent narrative about a key data insight that connects to the business world.
What do you mean by "each exercise is tailored to reflect job requirements and candidate background"?
This is better explained by an example.
Imagine that you're hiring for a generalist data scientist role. The individual is expected to work on a variety of projects, from customer segmentation and forecasting demand to transaction fraud detection. One of your top candidates may have a background in fraud detection while another has experience in customer segmentation. Rather than forcing both to work on the same take-home exercise that randomly favors one kind of knowledge and experience over another, our approach allows each to demonstrate their individual skills and skill potential using the domain they're most comfortable with.
Aren't take-home exercises an open invitation to cheat in order to get ahead?
Our team has been reviewing data science take-home coding tests for years, and has never found it difficult to separate the people who do some mechanical copy pasting without knowledge on the subject from those who use online resources like ChatGPT and Stack Overflow as strategic tools to find answers to coding questions or explore a problem space while still reasoning by themselves.
Every candidate who go through the take-home exercise is invited to a synchronous follow-up conversation to walk one of our experienced interviewers through their thought process. At that stage, candidates with a perfect submission may receive a lower evaluation than a candidate who failed to complete the exercise but did a good job demonstrating skills and potential in the assignment and follow-up discussion.
Isn't it unfair to submit candidates to different technical assessment experiences?
It's an illusion to think that asking candidates the exact same interview questions and performing the same technical assessment in a rigid sequence of steps will level the playing field.
If you provide the exact same take-home assignment for everyone, you'll:
- Give some candidates a leg up (those who happen to have worked on something similar recently vs.those whose past projects are significantly different in terms of business or tech requirements).
- Risk excluding from consideration outstanding nontraditional candidates who might become your next best hire despite not really fitting the mold.
Companies that decided to give a chance to nontraditional candidates based on other valuable characteristics such as self-direction and a strong desire to learn often uncover, through our 30-minute take-away assignment, talent that has superior technical and problem-solving skills relative to applicants with a stronger resume.
By customizing the assignment to match individual circumstances, we help recruiters and hiring managers see beyond first impressions and create a more diverse candidate pool that embraces the best technical skills regardless of what a resume says.
We have internal talent who can create our own take-home exercises. Why hire Beal Projects to manage this process for us?
If you're happy with the quality and outcomes of your technical assessment process, and your technical experts don't mind being burdened by the laborious and time-consuming activities to design and apply short, effective take-home exercises, this service may not be for you.
If, however, you are frustrated with a hiring process that only attracts garden-variety technical talent capable of achieving modest goals, and want to expand/diversify your talent pipeline, this could be the missing step to ensure you hire the people with the best skills for the job.
What about other critical success criteria for hiring top performers, such as creativity, the ability to work collaboratively, potential to learn new skills?
Our offering, alone, will not ensure you'll be able to hire (or retain) high-performing employees, but will help you improve your candidate pool and dramatically reduce the risk of hiring data scientists who don't have the potential to succeed in your open role.
Do you offer this service for other roles besides data scientist?
At the moment, we're only working with companies interested in hiring for the skill set we have in-house, for which we can confidently design and evaluate tests.
That means that in addition to job openings for data scientists who work with structured and unstructured data, we are only supporting some data engineering, machine learning, and LLM prompt engineering roles. If you're interested in hiring for a data role you aren't sure we cover, get in touch and we'll give you a yes or no answer without trying to sell you something we don't currently support.
Avoid hiring mistakes and improve your ability to find hidden talent with our effective and diversity-enhancing technical assessment approach.
In a competitive landscape where challenges keep changing and data never stops flowing, the winners will be the companies that capitalize on the potential of data scientists who may not check every box but have valuable skills that can be enhanced through on-the-job training and a unique potential to deliver results.
To learn more ore about how Beal Projects is helping organizations hire top thinkers that excell on data science and data engineering work, write to .