Data Science Recruitment Tips - First Contact - Wyatt Partners

Data Science Recruitment Tips – First Contact

Data Science Recruitment Tips

Hiring Data Scientists can be tough in today’s candidate driven market.  The best individuals will be constantly approached and have many suitors for their employment.

Most of the best candidates step back from the noise.  They take themselves off social media & other sourcing channels partially or sometimes even completely.  Through a mixture of bad hiring experiences & poorly targeted approaches they are very sceptical of anyone they don’t know speaking to them about a career move.

The initial contact you have with an individual can be make or break as to whether you can even get him or her to a first formal interview.  The first 5-10 minutes are crucial, arguably the most crucial part of the whole process.  If your Top Candidate wants to end the call after 5-10 minutes and says they’ll go away and think about it then you’ve probably lost them.

The individual in the hiring committee who makes this initial contact (be that an internal recruiter, headhunter, HR Leader, Business leader etc) must be able to speak their language and have empathy with their working life.  A poor initial call or email can really detract from a company’s brand and lose you any chance of moving that candidate forward in the process.

Here are a few data science specific recruitment tips to ensure that you make this initial contact a successful one:

  1. Understand how Data is being used at your organisation and what strategic value it is driving.  The best candidates will want to understand this very quickly and if you can’t answer this sufficiently they will move on quickly
  2. Ideally have specific figures on hand to show how data is driving business results
  3. Be aware of what platforms and tools your company is using to enable Data Science
  4. Make sure you are able to articulate reporting lines in the company and exactly where Data Science sits in terms of the companies organisation structure.  This is often crucial to whether Data Science projects fail or succeed and the best candidates will want to understand this
  5. Be able to talk confidently of companies training programs for Data Scientists
  6. Understand the background and achievements of the leaders of the Data Science functions in the business.  The best candidates will be attracted to leaders with a strong track record of doing valuable and technically advanced work

 

If you can talk confidently on all of the above to a prospective candidate it will give you a huge advantage over other companies in the race to bring that individual to the hiring table.

Happy Hunting!

Get more Data Science Recruitment tips here – click here

Jobs for Data Scientists / Data Scientist jobs here – click here