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Quarterly Hiring Cohort Report
Meta's People Analytics team builds quarterly hiring dashboards to see how each cohort's comp compares to the previous quarter — useful for calibrating offer levels in a tight talent market. Break down hiring by year and quarter: extract year and quarter (Q1–Q4) from hire_date, then show year, quarter, hire_count, and avg_salary of that hiring cohort (rounded to nearest dollar). Sort by year, then quarter. Cohort-style date bucketing is Meta analyst interview bread-and-butter — cohorts are how Meta thinks about literally every metric (retention, engagement, revenue, you name it).
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Schema
employees
| emp_id | name | department | position | salary | hire_date | manager_id | performance_rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alice Johnson | Engineering | Senior Developer | 95000 | 2019-03-15 | 5 | 4.5 |
| 2 | Bob Smith | Engineering | Developer | 75000 | 2020-06-01 | 1 | 3.8 |
| 3 | Carol Williams | Marketing | Marketing Manager | 85000 | 2018-09-20 | NULL | 4.2 |
Expected output: Hiring cohorts by quarter showing salary trends
Hint
Concepts
SELECT Date Functions CASE GROUP BY Aggregation BETWEEN Date Functions + GROUP BY
Practise the topic: SQL practice questions · Date function practice · CASE WHEN practice · GROUP BY exercises
In these company practice sets
Airbnb · Apple · Meta · Netflix · Ramp · Revolut
A SQL Quest challenge matched to patterns reported for these companies — not a question any of them has published.
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