Newsela is an innovative and rapidly growing education technology company focused on transforming the way students learn. By providing engaging, leveled content across various subjects, Newsela empowers educators to support differentiated instruction and enhance critical thinking skills in students.

Joining Newsela as a Business Intelligence professional offers an exciting opportunity to make data-driven decisions that drive impactful educational outcomes. In this role, you will leverage your expertise in data analysis, visualization, and reporting to uncover insights that support strategic initiatives, streamline operations, and contribute to the company's mission of improving education.

With this guide from Interview Query, we’ll navigate you through the interview process, highlight frequently asked questions, and share essential tips to help you succeed in securing a position at Newsela. Let's dive in!

Submitting Your Application

The first step to kickstart your journey with Newsela as a Business Intelligence Analyst is to submit a compelling application that effectively showcases your technical skills and keen interest in this role. Be it through a Newsela recruiter reaching out to you or your proactive initiative, meticulously review the job description and tailor your CV to fit the criteria.

Tailoring your CV may involve identifying essential keywords that the hiring manager might employ to filter applications and crafting a targeted cover letter. Additionally, don't forget to highlight relevant skills and mention your work experiences in the field of Business Intelligence.

Recruiter/Hiring Manager Call Screening

If your CV manages to stand out among the pool of applicants, a recruiter from Newsela's Talent Acquisition Team will reach out to you to verify key details like your experiences and skill level. This phase might also include some behavioral questions.

Occasionally, the Newsela Business Intelligence hiring manager may join the screening round to answer your queries about the role and the company itself. They may also engage in surface-level technical and behavioral discussions.

The recruiter call typically lasts about 30 minutes.

Technical Virtual Interview

Successfully advancing through the recruiter call will earn you an invitation for the technical screening round. Technical screenings for the Newsela Business Intelligence Analyst role are usually conducted virtually, involving video conferencing and screen sharing. Questions during this 1-hour long interview may focus on topics like Newsela’s data systems, ETL pipelines, and SQL queries.

For Business Intelligence roles, take-home assignments regarding data visualization, analytics, and product metrics are often included. Beyond these, your expertise in hypothesis testing, probability distributions, and fundamentals of machine learning might also be evaluated during this round.

Depending on the seniority of the position, case studies and similar real-world problem scenarios may also be assigned.

Onsite Interview Rounds

Following a second recruiter call outlining the subsequent stage, you'll receive an invitation to attend the onsite interview rounds. Multiple interviews, differing with the role, will be conducted during your day at the Newsela office. Your technical proficiency, including programming skills and ML modeling competencies, will be assessed against the shortlisted candidates throughout these interviews.

If you were given take-home exercises, a presentation round may also be scheduled during the onsite interview for the Business Intelligence Analyst role at Newsela.

Quick Tips For Newsela Business Intelligence Analyst Interviews

• Familiarize with Newsela’s Products: Take time to study Newsela’s content and educational tools in depth. Understand how Business Intelligence can be applied to optimize their products and services.
• Be Data-Driven: Newsela’s Business Intelligence interviews focus heavily on providing actionable insights through data. Brush up on your data handling skills, especially in statistics and probability, as these questions can be quite challenging.
• Culture Fit: Newsela values a collaborative and innovative work environment. Practice responding to behavioral questions by aligning your answers with the company's core values and demonstrating your ability to work well within a team.

Typically, interviews at Newsela vary by role and team, but commonly Business Intelligence interviews follow a fairly standardized process across these question topics.

• What metrics would you use to determine the value of each marketing channel? Given all the different marketing channels and their respective costs at Mode, a company selling B2B analytics dashboards, what metrics would you use to assess the value of each marketing channel?

• How would you measure the success of the banner ad strategy? An online media company wants to experiment with adding web banners into the middle of its reading content to monetize web traffic. How would you measure the success of this banner ad strategy?

• How would you analyze the performance of a new feature without an A/B test? As a data scientist at LinkedIn, you need to analyze the performance of a new feature that allows candidates to message hiring managers directly during the interview process, despite not being able to A/B test it due to engineering constraints. How would you approach this analysis?

• How would you measure the health of the Mentions app and attribute engagement changes? Facebook is rolling out a new feature called "Mentions" for celebrities to connect with their fans. How would you measure the health of the Mentions app? Additionally, if a celebrity starts using Mentions and interacts more with fans, how would you attribute the increase to the app versus the celebrity's desire to engage more?

• What would you investigate to diagnose changes in user engagement and email open rates? As a data scientist on the engagement team, you notice that the weekly active users metric is up 5% but email notification open rates are down 2%. What would you investigate to diagnose what is happening?

• Write a function pick_host to determine the optimal friend to host a party based on location. Given a group of (N) friends represented by a list of dictionaries where each value is a friend's name and their location on a three-dimensional scale ((x, y, z)), write a function pick_host to return the friend that should host the party. The goal is to minimize the total travel distance for the group.

• How would you evaluate whether using a decision tree algorithm is the correct model for predicting loan repayment? You are tasked with building a decision tree model to predict if a borrower will pay back a personal loan. How would you evaluate if a decision tree is the right choice? If you proceed with the decision tree, how would you evaluate its performance before and after deployment?

• How would you determine if a new delivery time estimate model is better than the old one? You want to build a new delivery time estimate model for food delivery. How would you compare its predictions to the old model to determine which is better?

• How would you determine which search engine performed better and which metrics to track? You are building a better search engine for Google and want to compare it to the existing one. How would you determine which search engine performed better, and which metrics would you track?

• What are the benefits of dynamic pricing, and how can you estimate supply and demand? Explain the benefits of dynamic pricing. How would you estimate supply and demand in this context?

• How would you design a machine learning model to classify major health issues based on health features? You work for a health insurance company and need to design a machine learning model to classify if an individual will undergo major health issues based on a set of health features. How would you approach this task?

• What is an unbiased estimator and can you provide an example for a layman to understand? Explain what an unbiased estimator is in simple terms and provide an easy-to-understand example.

• What are the benefits of dynamic pricing, and how can you estimate supply and demand in this context? Describe the advantages of dynamic pricing and explain how to estimate supply and demand when using this pricing strategy.

• How would you design a machine learning model to predict major health issues for a health insurance company? As a machine learning engineer for a health insurance company, design a model that classifies individuals based on health features to predict if they will undergo major health issues.

Embark on your journey with Newsela with confidence! Discover valuable insights and prepare for your Business Intelligence position at Newsela by diving into our comprehensive Newsela Interview Guide. Our guide digs deep into the potential interview questions and offers essential tips to help you ace your interview.

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Good luck with your interview journey!