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    Boston Consulting Group Data Scientist Interview Questions

    Interviews at Boston Consulting Group

    12 Interview Reviews

    Experience

    Experience
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    Getting an Interview

    Getting an Interview
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    Helpful (10)  

    Data Scientist Interview

    Anonymous Interview Candidate
    No Offer
    Negative Experience
    Average Interview

    Application

    I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3+ months. I interviewed at Boston Consulting Group in March 2018.

    Interview

    I interviewed for a data scientist role at the Gamma Group. There were many individual interviews with recruiters, data scientists, a presentation, case studies, etc that spanned about 3 months.

    On the whole, I could certainly understand why they would want to be thorough in their screening, but it's a lot of work on the interviewer and they made little to no accommodations for my schedule. In almost every interview, they would ask for my availability and then email me back later saying they needed to me interview at some other time that was difficult for me.

    The data science project was straightforward but time consuming. They asked a lot of reasonable questions and wanted to see if you could present the topic to someone who was not necessarily technical.

    For the most part, the interviews were straightforward and everyone was nice. The last person I talked to made a lot of strange faces during the video call and seemed to be in a bad mood and had some odd things to say about my personal life, which I thought was rude. This was the case study, but the format was very different from what was presented for practice online and he seemed to have no interest in going through the motions of it.

    Overall, the process is long and most of the work makes sense, but they have little regard for their applicants. One unfortunate interview situation can invalidate the previous six over three months, and that's a lot of your time gone.

    Interview Questions

    • A straightforward but time consuming modeling project with presentation.   Answer Question

    Other Interview Reviews for Boston Consulting Group

    1. Helpful (5)  

      Data Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Neutral Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Boston Consulting Group in April 2018.

      Interview

      The interviewer asked a lot of technical questions for the data science project, which is clearly well designed to include many possible issues in real data set. Need a lot of hands on experience to perform well.

      Interview Questions

      • When does recall matter more, when does precision matter more.   Answer Question

    2. Helpful (2)  

      Data Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in Boston, MA
      No Offer
      Negative Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Boston Consulting Group (Boston, MA).

      Interview

      They messed up stress interview with the technical interview. I was asked to spend several days to finish an analytics case (a very simple case similar those in Kaggle) before the case interview. A junior interviewer from the BCG Gamma in Boston interviewed me. He was obsessed to play a tough 'CTO' of the client, although his understanding of Data Science stopped updating about 3 years ago. Sometime, he just didn't listen. When he realized his arguments were invalid, he was angry. In the end, I felt like that they were probably used the 'case interview' to collect some analytics notebooks for their daily works.

      Interview Questions

      • Your conclusion is totally wrong. It's a waste of time to read your report.   Answer Question
      3. Join the Boston Consulting Group team
      See Our Latest Jobs

    3. Helpful (10)  

      Data Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Negative Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Boston Consulting Group in November 2018.

      Interview

      Took 2 months to get back after application. Sent a data science challenge on hackerrank.
      Given a dataset which we cannot even see properly on hackerrank, build 2 ML models and answer insight related questions within 2 hours. It made no sense. The dataset was in raw form (transaction level data), had to be studied and converted into features and target, split for training/testing and report accuracy. This is not how a data science task can be completed.

      Interview Questions

      • Given a dataset which we cannot even see properly on hackerrank, build 2 ML models and answer insight related questions within 2 hours. It made no sense. The dataset was in raw form, had to be studied and converted into features and target, split for training/testing and report accuracy. This is not how a data science task can be completed.   2 Answers

    4.  

      Data Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in Boston, MA
      No Offer
      Neutral Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Boston Consulting Group (Boston, MA) in May 2017.

      Interview

      I attended a school career fair and got contact information of an employee. So I asked him if he can refer me and he did. I got the first interview and it was an experience interview.

      Interview Questions

      • Describe a project that you have particular interests in, explain what you did and the results.   Answer Question

    5. Helpful (17)  

      Data Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in Los Angeles, CA
      No Offer
      Negative Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Boston Consulting Group (Los Angeles, CA) in August 2017.

      Interview

      initial phone interview, followed by an 8 hour task to analyze a data set and report findings during the next webex interview.

      The problem is that BCG does not respect your time during this process. First, the dataset provided had no 'solution'. They asked me to predict an outcome when the training data showed in every way that it was a randomly selected subset. Second, after providing a technical explanation of the work I did on the data set I was informed that they were simply testing me on presentation skills. I found that the interviewer is likely not interested in critical thinking or problem solving talent. Further, the interviewer refused to provide me with any insight into the data set I was tested with. That shows little respect for my time.
      In short, don't waste your time unless you really want to work with these guys. I don't. I'll stick with real Science!

      Interview Questions

      • Business knowledge and experience. Everything surrounded how well I would fit there line of thinking.   1 Answer

    6. Helpful (23)  

      Data Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Negative Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Boston Consulting Group in July 2017.

      Interview

      Screen with recruiter. Massive take home technical case, followed by a video interview where I presented on the case (the interviewer was not especially familiar with the case). Was told I'd be proceeding. That was followed by a frantic attempt by BCG to schedule more interviews for me (including an in-person). I gave them availability, and then they stopped replying to my emails. A couple of weeks later I got a form rejection. That stung a bit--the take home case was about 8 hours of work, and to not get thanked for my time after they selected another candidate (I presume, given the job posting is gone).

      The case is basically a Kaggle problem, except you're supposed to make a presentation for a mock client. The case is kind of silly -- it's a churn problem with standard modeling issues -- categorical data, missing values, noise, a poorly defined objective, a poor data dictionary, etc. The data appeared artificial, and modeled decently but only with non-linear techniques--it looked like they had created the data that way (there was a massive gap between performance of linear and non-linear models, far above what you would see in a real dataset). They also set some traps in the questions they asked you, where you really need to think about what's useful to the client rather than answering an academic problem.

      Interview Questions

      • The annoying take home case (see description)   1 Answer

    7. Helpful (13)  

      Data Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 10+ months. I interviewed at Boston Consulting Group in April 2018.

      Interview

      Data Scientist at BCG Gamma.
      Round 1 (Remote):
      - Technical Homework Case + Presentation to Consultant.
      - Classic Strategy Consulting Interview consisting of a business case and fit part
      Round 2 (On site):
      - 2 Partner interviews, could contain business cases, much of it was cultural fit
      - 2 Principal Data Scientist interviews, each contained a technical case.

      Interview Questions

      • Can you explain how this algorithm works? Estimate the cross-sell potential for this client. Take me through one of your projects.   4 Answers

    8. Helpful (18)  

      Data Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Employee
      Accepted Offer
      Positive Experience

      Interview

      I applied online for a Data Scientist position with BCG GAMMA.

      Initial phone interview with Recruiter, followed by 3 rounds of interview.

      1st round - I was given data for a homework case a week in advance, and had to present the findings to a Principal.

      2nd round - 2 interviews. One with a Project Leader, and other with a Principal.

      3rd round - 2 interviews. One with a Principal, and other with a Senior Partner.

      All interviews were for 45 minutes. Around 10 minutes of behavioural questions, 25 minutes for a case, rest to ask questions.

      The whole process took 4 months.

      Interview Questions

      • Behavioral questions probing about fit   11 Answers

    9. Helpful (6)  

      Data Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in London, England (UK)
      Declined Offer
      Negative Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3+ months. I interviewed at Boston Consulting Group (London, England (UK)) in January 2019.

      Interview

      The overall process is: HR Telephone Screen, Technical Case Interview (Homework) with Presentation - 1st round, Consulting Case Interview - 1st round and Final round in the Office.

      In this case I will focus more on my personal experiences coming from a tech background.

      HR is nice and they are responsive during the process, however they seem to be flying high with applicants using the BCG brand name so there’s a pipeline of candidates. (It took them 4 months to schedule/reschedule the 1st round so I guess HR rocks!)

      Cons:
      1. The BCG brand name comes with the ego and attitude from its people. This is quite evident in the interview process. One of the interviewers was quite arrogant, egoistic and racially biased, when confronted - unapologetic.

      In general, interviewers are meant to push you to work harder and test your logical thinking to gauge your true ability. However, this interviewer was a perfect example of those with big titles but no manners. 2 minutes into the interview process, he asked about myself and motivations on applying, after handling that well, he picked up on certain answers to dig deeper into my prior experience. He rudely interrupted every single sentence I said during the fit questions. The tip off point was when he insulted me for my prior technical experience questioning the choice of technology stack. He did not trust a single word I said, and since he was rudely interrupting he missed half of my answers. For example, when I asked what you do at BCG Gamma “We work on cases just like the homework case and charge high fees for that” or when he decided to probe my prior experience by asking “Why would you use this framework, it should only be used for xyz (because I’m saying so!)”

      10 minutes into the interview and I am appalled at how rude this interviewer is, so I decide to confront his actions. He dodged that twice and insisted we move on. The arrogance shown by the interviewer led me to disconnecting the phone call without presenting my homework case and withdrawing from the interview process. There’s similar reviews on this forum of such behaviour, I wonder if the interviewer reflects a similar behaviour to clients or has a split personality. 40 hours of hard work without any appreciation or acknowledgement in the bin. This was raised to HR but they seem ignorant as they have a pipeline of candidates willing to work in such conditions, they claim the interviewer was just “trying to have a conversation” and they have no recordings of the conversation so they trust what the interviewer says.

      2. The work they do is mostly PoC’s, there’s no tangible end-to-end transformation work as GAMMA is a practice set up primarily to lure clients into signing off data analytics projects. If you are really good at it, the tech firms are the best place to be. GAMMA is way below the top tier tech firms and hot startups list in terms of standards.

      Suggestions to BCG:

      Take action on interviewers regardless of their titles or academic credentials, this person should have been let go a while ago for the horrendous behaviour and the countless interviewees who have suffered because of his actions. You might end up becoming the next Uber, it only takes one scandal!

      Hope this helps someone avoid a trap

      Interview Questions

      • Q: Can you tell me why you would be a good fit for BCG?   Answer Question

      Reasons for Declining

      Withdrew due to toxic interviewer

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