My team is in the process of hiring a data scientist. We are a small team and have very limited prior experience in conducting on-site technical interviews.
Our current plan is to provide candidates with a workstation, a prompt, and a data set. Then, we want to ask them to do some machine learning tasks.
The prompt will be fairly open-ended, and the goal is to see what they can do with the data as well as assess their coding skills.
However, since we don't have much technical interview/hiring experience, we don't know if it is typical or makes sense to allow interviewees to use the internet to potentially look for solutions. Allowing them to use the Internet can potentially assess how candidates use a variety of resources to solve problems under time pressure (and in real work situations, they will use the internet to find solutions anyway). Not allowing for internet access on the other hand, I suppose, can test how candidates solve problems with limited resources.
Any suggestion/advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!