Job Interview Questions
Langfun Tech is hiring an office manager. In their interview, they talk about doing the searching type tasks. Out of the tools: Tableau, Excel, a CRM, AntConc, MaxQDA, and Weka, which would you recommend and why?
- They want to create a map of the US, showing the geographic locations/concentrations of their customers.
Tableau would be the best resource for this situation. Tableau is a software designed to store and collect business data.
2. Langfun wants to keep track of all the people that have called them and whether or not they become customers.
CRM is the best software for this situation. CRM is a flexible and customizable software intended for business.
3. Langfun wants to track how many contracts they have issued over the past year and months, and which of them were for what category of service.
Excel or a CRM would be the best choices. Excel can handle tracking contract counts over time with pivot tables, filters, and charts. It allows easy categorization of contracts by service type and month. If they already use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, it would be the best option. CRMs are designed to track contracts, client interactions, and service categories efficiently, often with built-in reporting tools.
4. Langfun has focus group data from potential customers and they want to analyze it to look for customer preferences.
MaxQDA would be the best tool. It’s designed for qualitative data analysis, making it ideal for processing and categorizing open-ended responses from focus groups.
Which search engine is the best?
1. Pick two search engines to compare such as Yahoo, Google, Bing, or DuckDuck Go.
We chose Google and Bing.
2. Try lexically ambiguous searches, such as China or Washington. What search engine handles your search better? Why? Do you see any clustering?
Bing gave us more information in a consolidated space. Google, however, was less overstimulating and gave a more sleek appearance. For the sake of information, Bing gave a better result. Google exhibited clustering by focusing only on geographical information, while Bing also showed history, etymology, and more.
3. Try a sample search on both pages that is not (or is minimally) semantically ambigiuous. Considering only the top 20 results, which search engine offers better precision? Why do you say so?
We searched, “Where can i buy dr squatch body soap.” Bing offered better precision by showing both online and physical places to buy soap in many locations. Google had repeats of information and less places overall to offer.
4. Is it possible to determine which search engine offers better recall? Explain why or why not?
It would be difficult to determine which engine offers better recall. Knowing recall requires knowing what all potential answers there are, which would be hard to ascertain without a search engine or without a lot of time and resources.