Home Assignment — How to Plan, Research and Execute with Success

After posting 4 articles at LinkedIn, I decided to move it to ‘The Times of Israel’, where I can have a bigger reach. In order to keep all my posts in one place, I decided to repost these 4 articles that I wrote and had them, until now, exclusively at LinkedIn.

The following post was my first blog post in my life! I hope you enjoy reading it!

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I decided to share my most recent experiences of looking for my next job in Israel. There are 2 main reasons: 1. To provide current and future job seekers in Israel with useful and practical information. 2. To demonstrate to hiring managers and/or HR staff my thought process and approach on how to sell the unsellable (you’ll understand when I’ll explain the task). This is my first article, so I hope you enjoy and please leave feedback so that I can improve and/or provide other content!

Soon after making Aliyah I got an amazing job at Netafim as a PMO and Strategy Business Analyst. What set me aside from other candidates was the fact that I am fluent in 3 languages, and the relevant job experience I had gained in my home country (Brazil), so hiring me was an easy decision… Ah, and I also had the support of Gvahim (I wrote more about Gvahim in a second post), Nancy Gonen, who was allocated as my HR Consultant and Oded Israeli, who is my mentor. Unfortunately, after 2 happy years, my division was transferred to Mexico post-acquisition, and I was left to look for my next challenge!

This time, the job seeking process has been different to the first; Most of the companies that I apply for an open position, ask me to complete a home assignment/assessment as part of their hiring process. Since my main skills are data analysis, project management, and strategic planning, they usually ask me to prepare some kind of market overview and market analysis for their specific product. The home assignment I’ll share with you in this post was very general and more open to interpretation and required creativity. If you’re a job seeker, you probably won’t receive the same exact home assignment; however, I believe that the approach I’ll share with you about how I created the presentation, can assist you with your next home assignment.

So, the task was: “send a 3-5 slide presentation describing how you would sell ice to an Eskimo. Creativity is important. This presentation should be in English, formatted professionally, and be fairly detailed.” They gave me 5 days to send it over.

To read about the 8 steps that I took to create the presentation, and to download it, please, click here.