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Technical Tools and Competency Questions

Assess the candidates practical experience with business intelligence and operational tools, their depth of proficiency, and their ability to learn and apply new systems. Topics to cover include which business intelligence platforms they have used such as Power BI, Tableau, and Looker, the duration and level of hands on experience with each, specific projects where they built dashboards or reports, and the candidates role in data modeling and visualization. Also include familiarity with general operational tools such as spreadsheet software, analytics platforms, project management systems, human resources information systems, and other domain specific software. Candidates should be ready to explain tool selection, how they integrated data sources, any involvement in implementation or configuration, examples of key metrics and dashboards they built, and how they troubleshoot or improve existing reports. For junior level candidates, emphasize practical skills such as creating dashboards, designing reports, basic data modeling, cleaning and preparing data, and demonstrating learning agility for company specific systems. For mid and senior levels, assess deeper topics such as automating extract transform load processes, optimizing data models, writing structured query language queries or scripts for data transformation, governance and sharing practices, and mentoring others on tool usage.

EasyTechnical
44 practiced
Explain the differences between Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service (Power BI cloud). Describe scenarios where you would publish to a workspace versus creating and distributing an App, and explain how row-level security and access are managed in each case.
HardSystem Design
50 practiced
Design a single authoritative metric 'active_customer' that must be consistent across Looker, Power BI, and ad-hoc SQL. Describe how you would centralize the metric definition (semantic or metrics layer), implement it for performance (views/materialized), handle backfills, and roll out the change with minimal disruption.
MediumTechnical
54 practiced
Provide a Power Query (M) or SQL approach to detect and deduplicate transactions where customer names or addresses may have minor variations: describe fuzzy matching strategy, ranking criteria to keep the most reliable record, and how you'd flag ambiguous matches for manual review.
HardTechnical
45 practiced
Design governance policies for BI artifacts covering naming conventions, metadata requirements, workspace structure, approval workflows, periodic access reviews, and audit logging. Describe an enforcement approach (automated checks, PR gates) and KPIs to measure adoption and compliance.
HardTechnical
43 practiced
A critical metric is computed differently in two dashboards causing confusion. Explain the cross-functional steps you would take to standardize the metric definition, reconcile historical discrepancies, obtain stakeholder sign-off, and implement the canonical definition across BI tools and reports.

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