Data Analyst at League after 80 applications: the take-home was the differentiator

I applied to about 80 roles over two months, and League was the only company that responded with a take-home before any call. Most of the applications went through job boards. I'd built a small spreadsheet to track them, partly because I knew I'd lose count otherwise, and partly because I wanted to look back later and see whether any of it was working. The honest answer was: not really. About 12% of applications got an automated rejection within 48 hours. About 6% got a recruiter screen. Most of the rest just disappeared. League's take-home arrived in week six of the search. It was a pleasant surprise. Most companies that don't reply for two weeks then ask for forty-five minutes of pleasantries before they'll talk about the actual role. League just sent a real anonymised dataset, asked four questions, and gave me a week to send back the answers in whatever format made sense. The dataset was patient appointment data. A few hundred thousand rows, a handful of dimensions. The questions weren't trick questions. They wanted to know whether I could find the obvious thing first, whether I'd notice the less obvious thing after that, and whether I'd write up my findings so a non-analyst could read them. I spent two evenings on it. ↓