Business analysis sits between the technical and commercial pools, and is the default early-career entry point at consulting firms and analytics capability centres.
Live from our candidate database
Counted at render time and refreshed every six hours. This is a supply-side view of one platform, not a national labour-market statistic.
Skills present in this pool
Give a vague question deliberately
Ask something under-specified — "is our onboarding working?" — and watch them scope it. Candidates who ask what "working" means before proposing an analysis are doing the actual job.
SQL at a working level
Not certificate level. Joins, aggregation and a window function, applied to a question where they must decide what to compute. This is the fastest reliable filter in the category.
Writing is the deliverable
Requirement documents are writing. Ask for a short written summary of a verbal brief and read it for structure, not style — the ability to organise an argument in prose is the durable skill here.
Key takeaways
- Under-specified questions reveal scoping ability, which is the core skill.
- Working-level SQL applied to an undefined question is the fastest reliable filter.
- Test written structure — requirement documents are the actual deliverable.
Questions
MBA or engineering background?+
Both work, and the mix is usually healthy. MBA candidates arrive stronger on stakeholder framing, engineering candidates on data handling.
Is business analyst the same as data analyst?+
They overlap but the emphasis differs: business analysis weights requirement-gathering and communication, data analysis weights query and visualisation work. Screen for the one you actually need.