I reviewed a job post for a Business Analyst

I review a job post for a Business Operations Associate and share my thoughts on the company, the requirements for the job, and the company's unique hiring practice.

Transcription

I saw something interesting today. Today I saw a job post on LinkedIn for a Business Operations Associate. Now, on the look of it, it wasn't too fascinating. But once I started digging in further, that's where I saw that technology has come a long way. So let's jump to the job description, the job post. We'll talk a little bit about the company, what they do, what's the makeup of the company, what they're looking for, and finally, what I thought was really interesting about how they're interviewing for this position.

All right, so the company is called Mine, and the job is posted by the Co-Founder and VP of Operations. And Mine is a furniture technology and interior design startup. So they further mention, "We partner with the largest home builders in the US to turn their model homes into shoppable furniture showrooms and helping their home buyers tackle the daunting task of furnishing a new home."

So I saw that Bennett shared an article some time ago from the Pulte Group, and it looks like they're partnering with the Pulte Group to actually furnish model homes and allow customers that are going in to look at the model home to actually purchase that furniture on the spot. I believe they do that with QR codes, so there's a direct link to where you can buy that piece of furniture. Really interesting business model.

Okay, so they're looking for a business process and systems aficionado, business operations associate. So before we dive further into this, just want to look at the makeup of the company. So this is their LinkedIn page. Furniture, home furnishings, about 28 employees in Sausalito, California. So you've got Bennett here at the top, junior operations analyst, procurement, procurement, technical lead. So obviously you've got buyers. You also have IT folks that are doing the development, data analysts, marketing, UX, store operations. So they might have some type of storefront. Tech, senior front end developer, interior designer, interior designer, head of design. So very interesting in terms of their current makeup of the company.

So we're seeking a passionate business process and systems aficionado, business operations associate, they'll work closely with the head of operations and leaders of the primary business units. Procurement, we saw some people in procurement, design and sales and store ops to improve and document their processes and the systems in which they operate. Always thinking about bubbling up the right KPIs to the proper stakeholders. Okay. All right. So we'll continue on. Improve, standardize, and document detailed internal workflows and processes across our primary business units. So from this sentence, it seems like they are a startup, and some of the things that are happening in procurement, design sales, store operations, things might be falling through the cracks because they don't have detailed documented workflows of how things need to be done.

I think this also becomes a challenge when you start adding new people to the team. There's churn, people leave, things get lost, things don't get repeated the next time out. So really important to standardize and document things that are happening in the business, especially these kind of three main verticals of the company: procurement, design sales, store ops.

Okay, so that's not enough for this role, I imagine, so this is where they start to look at analytics, and this becomes more of a business analyst function. So I'll continue on. Second bullet point. "Build the internal tools, dashboards, and trainings to help team members do jobs better and train faster." So what is missing from this? There are three main functions. You've got IT and some type of analytical horsepower. I think I did see a data analyst that's part of the team, but actually somebody to dive into the data, build dashboards and figure out what insights can you derive. What things need to be trained on, what do we need to reinforce?

Okay, so the next bullet point says it right here. "Become the most informed person at the company about our operations systems stack and be involved in critical build versus buy versus improve decisions." So seems like they're a tech-enabled company, so they might be constantly making the trade-off, do we allocate resources to build technology? Do we buy something off of the shelf? That might be some SaaS product. It might be some enterprise product. Or do we do that in-house? So that's kind of the build, improve versus the buy decision. And then finally, "Deeply understand the core KPIs needed to accurately track and report on each business unit." So classic business analyst. I think that's kind of the last three bullet points. And then the first bullet point is really thinking about business process and how can you understand the current state of the business and maybe also map out the future state.

So I won't go through these, but I would like to share how they would love for you to interview. So obviously, this is a LinkedIn job post. They're no longer accepting applications, by the way. So you apply on the LinkedIn platform. And then they've layered in an additional step in the interviewing process, which I thought was really interesting. They use the service called myInterview. And what you see here on the right-hand side is a short introductory video of Bennett. So Bennett goes on to say what needs to happen during this pre-interview screening process. And what myInterview actually does is they ask a series of questions to the candidate that might be interested. And I think this is interesting for numerous reasons, because from the hiring standpoint, they can look at these videos. They can get a sense of the candidate. They can understand what their motivations are by asking questions.

It's not live. There's no direct feedback, but it gives the hiring team the opportunity to see who they're talking to and ask them questions that they might ask at a traditional job. Things that they will ask are, "Why do you want to work here? What attracted you to the job?" And so forth and so forth. I won't go through the exercise, but I thought this was really interesting. And it allows you to do a couple practice sessions and retakes if you mess up. So it's not to getcha, but it's more to get a sense of who you are. So the company's name is called myInterview that actually implemented this or that has this service. So I'll link to it in the description if you are interested in checking that out. So just wanted to give you an inside look into a job post that I came across for a business operations associate and my take on what's required, who would be successful in this role and all that good stuff. So thanks for watching. I will see you next time.

Thanks for watching another episode of Xcel with Xavier. I've got new episodes coming out every Thursday morning. Please don't forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel to receive notifications of new content. Thanks again, and I hope to see you again next time.