A CV Isn’t Enough To Land You A Data Science Job
By: Kurtis Pykes
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Towards Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning

A CV Isn’t Enough To Land You A Data Science Job

How To Be a More Attractive Data Science Candidate Beyond Your Resume

Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

Introduction

Off the back of my last post, Getting A Data Science Job is Harder Than Ever, I received lots of responses on my LinkedIn regarding how to be more attractive to employers.

I am in no way a specialist when it comes to getting Data Science jobs, but I am very fortunate to have access to many people that have jobs as Data Scientist, people that work in the hiring space as recruiters, and managers that review hundreds of applications every day.

Many may disagree, and I hate to break it. A CV is simply not enough.

Me being extra by tracing the origins of the word Curriculum Vitae (CV), I found it’s a Latin phrase which translates loosely as “the course of my life”. In other words, a CV is great for summarising experience, achievements, and individual skills. The initial summary of your life may result in interest being shown — in the form of an interview (or whatever stages the company takes) — however interest doesn’t necessarily always transcend into attraction.

To make the distinction between the two terms clear, I’ve defined interest as the curiosity to methodologically assess whether one is suitable to make a long-term investment into, and we have defined attraction as the indication of a physical or emotional desire to be close to someone — in a business sense this would mean that whoever is hiring for the job wants you on their team.

In hopes of landing my next gig, I’ve been in conversation with various people to consider methods of enhancing myself to make me a more attractive candidate to employers, hence increasing my chances of landing a more desirable role, and here are 2 common ideas that come up:

Contribute to Open Source

Contributing to open source is a great way to instantly gain more attraction from employers because it tells them exactly what they can expect from you if they were to hire you.

Here is a simple fact about the modern era (maybe it’s exclusive to technology jobs but I am unsure), wherever you apply, given they like your resume, what’s followed is a google search.

You want for the first thing that comes up on Google when your name is searched is to do with Data Science.

The nature of open source naturally pushes us to the edge of our comfort zone. Whether it’s fixing a bug in the scikit-learn framework, Creating a beginners guide for Tensorflow/PyTorch, or deploying your own Machine Learning API, contributing (and contributing consistently) instantly makes us more attractive to employers because it displays 3 major traits that any employer would want:

You are curious

You are a learner

You are determined to improve/a self-starter

Gone are the days when we simply write in the summary section that “I am a curious person and enjoy learning”, these things are practically inferred when we actively contribute to the community, as we are seen as one who wants to advance the community.

Note: A common way of contributing to Open-source is with a well documented project

Network

It’s likely your ideal job would have hundreds of other people applying, and just like you, they believe they are well suited for the role, hence capturing the companies attention is one of the most important hurdles to overcome when searching for jobs.

I love how Jeremie Harris put it:

“So a job application isn’t just a contest of skill: it’s also in large part a contest for bandwidth.”

Building genuine relationships with people is great because if they were to refer your application to their company, it is much more likely to hold more weight over someone who submitted their application through the easy apply on some jobsite.

I personally believe the best way in is often through someone who is already working at the company you are interested in applying for, especially if you can skip the resume screening step altogether — this is how I got my last gig, I am talking from experience.

Before Covid changed the world, meetups were my go to — Even when I had a job I’d go to meetups, not because I was searching but because building your connections and developing relationships is important in any industry. Consequently, I am primarily on LinkedIn which I am now realising isn’t so bad after all.