Data Scientist: Scraping Glassdoor Interview Reviews
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It’s a situation that we’ve all experienced before. The excitement of securing an interview for a promising job opportunity along with the preparation that follows. In such situations, there are many resources that job candidates can utilize, but in the humble opinion of this data science fellow, one stands out above the rest – Glassdoor. With this is in mind, I sought to scrape interview reviews for 3 of the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) companies. For the purposes of this exercise, Amazon and Apple were omitted due to interviews pertaining to logistical (i.e. warehousing for Amazon) and retail (i.e. Apple Genius for Apple) roles being commingled with broader interviews.
As an aspiring data scientist, the question that I sought to answer were the following:
- How difficult is it to interview at Facebook, Netflix, and Google (FNG)?
- What is Data Science recruitment like at FNG?
- Is there any seasonality in hiring?
- How did successful interviewees perceive their experience? Unsuccessful interviewees?
Please join me in this data analysis to uncover insights about the recruitment process at FNG.
Scraping Method
In order to scrape the data utilized in this analysis, I used Selenium to scrape components of an interview review on Glassdoor. Key elements of reviews scraped totaling over 20,000 rows are as follows:
- Company: Company Name
- Title: Role that is being interviewed for
- Date: Date of interview
- Offer Status: Whether an offer was given (offers given can be accepted or declined)
- Interview Difficulty: Categorical variable indicating interview difficulty (1: Easy, 3: Average, 5: Difficult)
- Interview Experience: Categorical variable indicating overall experience (1: Negative, 3: Neutral, 5: Positive)
- Application Overview: Review written by the interviewee]
How difficult is it to interview at FNG?
To best visualize the difficulty, this violin plot shows how interviewees perceived the difficulty of their interviews. Overall, it appears that for Facebook and Netflix, the difficulty appears to be normally distributed with most interviewees agreeing that their interviews were of average difficulty.
For Google, we see a different story, a left skew, indicating that more candidates found their interviews to be of the average / difficult variety.
Having said this, one thing to note here is the thinner width of the Netflix violin, which when juxtaposed with its peers may indicate that the findings of this exercise as they relate to Netflix may not be significant due to a smaller sample size.
What is Data Science recruitment like at FNG?
For self-serving purposes, the next logical question that comes to mind is to understand how data science recruitment is for FNG. The quick answer from analyzing interviews with “Data Scientist” as the title is simply that yes, it is more challenging to get employment as a Data Scientist. Data science offer rates at FNG are lower than total offer rates for all companies, with both average difficulty and average overall experience being a mixed bag.
The most interesting figure shown above is the average overall experience for Netflix (1.89), which appears to be significantly lower than that for Facebook (3.55) and Google (4.11). However, this figure may not be indicative of the truth as Netflix’s dataset size is significantly smaller than that of its peers.
Is there any seasonality in hiring?
Moving along, the next mystery to solve is whether there is any seasonality in hiring. Through grouping interviews by month, we can analyze the offer rates. To determine whether there is a “hot” time for hiring for FNG.
For Facebook, we see that hiring stays relatively constant across the year with hiring rates oscillating between 20% and 35%.
For Netflix, we see a similar story, albeit with hiring rates oscillating between a slight larger range.
With Google, we see a different trend with hiring spiking at September and December. Perhaps this can be accounted for by the theory that hiring occurs most before the holidays and new year.
How did successful interviewees perceive their experience? Unsuccessful interviewees?
The final question to ponder pertains to whether candidates that did and did not receive offers viewed their experiences differently. We can see that for FNG, with the exception of Netflix, overall experience ranges primarily lie in the positive experience range. What we can conclude from this notion is subjective, but it is my view that the interview process is a two-way street. Not only are companies interviewing candidates, candidates are also interviewing companies. Thus, making it in the best interest of both parties to put forth their best impressions.
Conclusion
All in all, the insights gleaned from this web scraping exercise can be summarized below:
- Most candidates find interviews to be of average difficulty (Google is an exception)
- Securing a job as a data scientist is less generally more challenging.
- For Google, it may be advantageous to recruit in September and December.
- Interview experiences tend to be more positive in general.
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