How I Found My First Job in Data Analytics
By: Simon Thornewill Von Essen
Tags: Social Media, Data Analytics, Cv, Interview, Job Hunting

How I Found My First Job in Data Analytics

Tips, tricks, mindset and more!

Author’s Note: This post was originally posted on the 2nd of July 2018 and has been reposed here after I shut down the domain.

For as long as I can remember, I have always been anxious about whether I would be able to find a job. While many people might not have anxieties as extreme as mine, they are relatively common nonetheless. The process of finding a job has the notorious tendency to invoke feelings of anxiety and depression because of how the process makes applicants feel helpless while they are at mercy of the judgements of strangers.

This feeling was strongly reinforced in myself while trying to find an industrial placement as a chemist during my 3rd year at university. Over the course of several months I received rejection after rejection which left me questioning my own self worth and whether I would ever be able to “make the cut”.

Ever since that time I have done extensive research into ways in which I could improve my application. I read books such as “How to Find a Job in 30 Days or Less” by George Egbuonu, which helped me to develop the right mindsets, priorities and tactics. If anyone reading this is about to set forth on their own job-hunt then please make sure you read this book, I consider it to be essential reading if you haven’t read something similar already.

Over the past two months, I have carried out another job-hunt and I am relieved to say that it has come to a close. I will be starting as a Junior Data Analyst in Hamburg in a month and a half. After all was said and done, I had received a total of 3 job offers as the result of many interviews. I think it is safe to say that at this point I am at least doing something right. Hence, I want to share what I have learned with the rest of the community so that others can use my experiences to help make this process a little more bearable and to help reassure people that there is a light at the end of this dark tunnel.

Please take care to note that these are simply my experiences, your mileage may vary depending on other factors. The tactics outlined here might not be perfect, and may already be slightly out-of-date insofar as I ignored things such dealing with Application Tracking Systems (ATS) as outlined by Siraj Raval in a recent youtube video. What I outline here is simply what worked for me.

Networking in The Social Media Age

Before talking about the application system I want to talk about the power of social media networking and marketing. If you listen to podcasts such as “Superdatascience” or “Becoming a Data Scientist” then you will know that lots and lots of people have gotten job leads from networking on LinkedIn and blogging about their progress. This advice is echoed by social media evangelist Gary Vaynerchuk, who has multiple books on the subject. However, I feel that Gary Vee’s ideas are best consumed through this youtube or his podcast since he’s such a powerful public speaker and conversationalist.

These days, lots of people spend time on social media but almost nobody thinks that it presents any wider opportunities in spite of the boat-loads of time people spend on these platforms. Gary Vee makes a couple of astute points in order to convince people that social media is rife with opportunity:

Word of mouth is so powerful on social media platforms that the CEO of Facebook had be brought in for questioning because of the role they played in the 2016 american elections. There is no middle man, what you have to offer gets placed directly in front of people who you are trying to reach. Even people with niche interests (such as data science) can gain a large following. It’s free.

Hence, if you are looking for a job then the best thing to do is to start posting as much of what you do online for everyone to find. You do not need to do everything at once from the outset, but make sure that you at least do something even if it is terrible. Although Gary Vee shows plenty of people who have had success using social media marketing, others such as Daniel Bourke also makes for a good real-life example of how social media can bring opportunities to you. (His AMA explains a lot of how he did it.)

You should also consider joining meetups within your local area as well. Not only will you be able to meet and network with professionals in your field and gain advice for how to continue growing technically, many recruiters and HR professionals will also frequent these places looking for inspired people such as yourself. The key when going to meetups is to make sure to be curious about other people and to constantly be trying to provide value.

Author’s Note: In retrospect, meetups are a long-term investment. I did not start to benefit from them until long after this blog post.

Furthermore, meetups are also an opportunity for you to provide value to the community by sharing your experiences, projects and learnings in presentations. You can record these, post them on YouTube and then share on LinkedIn or Twitter for maximum reach and maybe even put a link to your talk at the bottom of your CV.

When it comes to networking, always think about what you can give without expectation of returns. It is about building relationships, which will pay off in the long-term but not immediately. Do not expect results over-night, this is not a get-rich-quick tactic and it is going to take some discipline to pull this off. The same thing goes for influence on social media. However, if you are patient and consistent then you will have found a way to maximise your opportunities. The result of taking the time to post what I write on Twitter and LinkedIn meant that I had a lot of people approaching me such as recruiters and new contacts asking for advice. The benefits of social media are real if you have the patience to execute, and can put you well ahead of the curve.

Meeting Specifications: Resumes, Cover Letters

Take Job Descriptions with an Ocean of Salt

It is a well documented phenomenon that a lot of job postings have requirements that are higher than what is realistic for one person to achieve without substantial experience. Job postings created by employers (i.e. HR staff who aren’t involved of the day-to-day operations of the jobs that they need to hire for) can suffer from unrealistic expectations due to various reasons;

Not having a strong grasp on what the job entails/requires. Having a long wish-list of “nice to haves”. Purposefully intimidating those who are grossly under-qualified. Searching for unicorns, people who are highly qualified despite being young and inexpensive to hire. Some of your competitions will actually be somewhat experienced or at least appear to be so, inflating expectations.

In order to combat this, you need to keep this in mind when looking at job descriptions. Whenever you read “excellent skills in X” you should keep it in perspective by reading it as “has used X a couple of times and is willing to google how it works”. It is best that you still remain realistic about what you can and cannot do so do not say you can code in C++ when you have never seen the language before and have not used it for a couple of projects. This is a difficult balance to strike because some skills require more exposure than others for competency, but it this is a judgment you are just going to have to learn to make.

During the interview you should ask about the day-to-day operations and what 20% of skills are used in 80% of the work. This should help to assess not only what your job will look like but it will also help to outline what skills that were mentioned were actually important.

There is one caveat that I want to mention, sometimes employers will be looking for candidates who are unicorns and who can solve all of their problems, meaning that you will invariably fall short of expectations when hired. While almost all job-descriptions are “tall orders” to start with, try and keep out an eye for employers whose expectations are far too high. (This will become apparent during the interview stage.)

Submit a CV that you are proud of

I have often submitted CVs that I was not entirely proud of and that I thought did not do a very good job of communicating who I was as a person and a professional. By this, I am not so much talking about the content so much as how you design your CV. (There are plenty of other people who can help you with content such as Udacity.) A lot of people make CVs that follow the safest template possible that would have appealed to corporations back in the 1980s. I am writing this to give you a little bit more creative freedom in this domain.

It is well known in marketing that a lot of time people will decide what products are superior merely on looks alone and while this likely will not be a deciding factor it can do something to capture attention and to stand out from the crowd. Since we are living in <the current year> and not even corporations really enjoy the corporate aesthetic, I urge you to strongly consider not using a template like the shown here.

What should your CV look like? This is up to you. Here is the thing, if you are going to break the mould then you need to be able to design your CV with things such as visual heirarchy and other principles such as gestalt in order to make sure that the changes you make have purpose. For these skills I tend to direct people towards “Storytelling With Data” by Knaflic. Although the principles in this book are used for data analysis, they translate very well for any kind of visual communication you need to make.

For me, the evolution of my CV started slowly by changing the color from black to dark green, using lighter greens for smaller subheadings. As soon as I did that I was able to get interviews for various PhD positions I was looking for during 2017. This year (2018), I decided that I would write my CV using LaTeX which gave my CV a more distinctive look but it was also very easy to edit it as necessary without having to worry too much about the formatting. (In retrospect, this was likely a huge convenience that I took for granted.) I opted for an aesthetic that was more in keeping with modern design choices that we see on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. (Originally written by Posquit0 and also includes a cover letter template.) You do not need to write your CV in LaTeX, but you should choose a template that makes you excited to present it to an employer. As soon as I set myself apart in this way I started to get a lot more attention for interviews.

Aesthetics aside, when it comes to actual content make sure you read that book that I referenced at the start of this post and make sure that you get feedback on your CV. Building these things is a skill and it takes a lot of practice but if you aren’t getting interviews then what else can you do?,

Tailoring Cover Letters to Specific Companies

Cover Letters are an important part of a job-hunt because it allows you to highlight your experiences that you want to make extra clear for whoever is reviewing your application. The structure of my cover letters have the following structure:

A brief introduction about myself

introduction about myself Why I would be excited to work at the company I am applying for

Two paragraphs of tasks I did that speak to their most important requirements (using the STAR method)

Conclusion wrapping everything together

Note that the paragraphs that I have pre-written are the introduction about myself, the conclusion and a number of paragraphs of my most important skills and projects. I have more paragraphs on my skills written that I include in the cover letter, I choose the most important ones to be added. Hence, the only part I rewrite is the reason why I want to work at the company that I am applying for. Even when, companies within the same industry get very similar reasons. Companies are like people, we all like to think we are unique but there are clear trends in what we find interesting.

Note: This is not an excuse to not do your homework! Always make sure you at least read the company website to see if there is anything about you that you particularly like about them. The more genuine reasons you can put in this one paragraph, the better.

You should be submitting resumes at a rate of maybe 1 or 2 hours a day allowing you time to write one or two applications. You can cover a lot of ground that way over time while still writing applications with high enough equality so that it looks like you are making an effort. I would spend the remaining section of your day working on other things such as online-networking and continuing to build your own skills.

Finally, I have met students who are very set in knowing a company inside and out, knowing all their values and everything else. There is value in knowing a company just like it is value to tailor your CV and cover letters for the ATS, just make sure you do not tunnel-vision and waste time here. For the machine-learning experts among my readers, It’s possible to “over-fit ” to companies and it seems to me that all companies are searching for similar keywords and will have similar values. I think it is ultimately not worth it until you reach the interview stage and even when it still wont be the deciding factor. Employers are first and foremost interested in your skills, so at this stage do just enough to know the company and what they are looking for and focus on what you can do for them instead.

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Before I round off this section, I should mention that MOOCs are something that people are sceptical about because they are so new. Part of the reason why I created this blog is to document how MOOCs have helped me change careers from chemistry into Data Science. I will make a blog post detailing this further, but the basic verdict is that as long as you have a university degree -the more advanced the degree the better- then people interpret this as someone who is self-motivated. Note that companies are like people and will have different points of view about MOOCs and even between varying platforms.

Author’s Note: Since this article has been published. Mark Meloon has since done a survey about people’s attitudes towards MOOCs and I’d recommend checking that out.

Applying for Jobs

Lower Your Expectations to Increase Opportunity

A lot of people enter a job hunt with a search that is far too constricted. When I was studying chemistry, I would have been searching specifically for a chemical industrial placement lasting a year. Naturally, I did not realise how much this restricted my choices. As I was searching for a data science position a year later, my options widened substantially. This is because Data Analytics/Science can be done in a wide variety of fields! A friend I know wants to find a job in AI, but he narrowed his options by tunnel-visioning on computer vision which limits him quite a bit. Another friend I have is limiting himself by only staying within the city where he already lives. Do not limit yourself like this and make sure to widen your scope as much as you realistically can!

Ofcourse, each person has their own list of constraints and deal-breakers when it comes to searching for a job. However, when searching for a job it is important to keep an open mind as to where your skills can be applied. As an example, instead of laser focusing in on Data Science/Machine Learning, I was also prepared to do Data Engineering, Python Development, Business Intelligence and things such as that. Given that I am European, I also was happy to travel throughout Europe. (My scope was Germany, The UK, The Netherlands and Switzerland, while keeping an open mind towards the nordic countries as well.) All of these things meant that I had a lot of choice when it came to writing applications. This can create the opposite problem where you have too much choice, but I think that is better than being strapped for choice.

Just remember, do not search for unicorns/perfection just as employers should not expect perfection from you.

Oragnise Your Search & Where to Look

You should organise your application process by using software such as Google Docs, Evernote or Trello. This way you can keep track of the applications you have sent and gives you a concrete idea of your response rate, when you have interviews, etc. It is also good as a place to keep track of interesting job posts that you see around and about as well as a wish list for companies that you have yet to apply to.

There are various places to find jobs these days. It is really not as difficult as it once was by needing to check the local newspaper. You can always try looking on individual company websites for job positions that might suit you. Otherwise, here is a short list of platforms that you fan use for finding job posts:

LinkedIn

Indeed

Glass Door (Also good for job reviews)

Monster

Stack Overflow (For those who can code)

Stepstone (German)

Tips for Applying to Companies Multiple Times

It is well known that when a company becomes large, then it has a hard time communicating with itself. (Anyone working at these jobs will know what I mean.) Often, companies that operate within multiple countries have branches that do not talk a lot with each other. This means that if you are applying for a company that is on a larger scale like this, applying to each of the branches separately can help your chances. This strategy actually helped me to secure two interviews at the same company, one in The Netherlands and the other in Germany.

Once again, have common sense then you apply this tactic. I am not telling you to apply at every single position at a company, spamming people is never the answer. However, lots of people who work at Facebook and Google are people who were dead-set on getting a job there and applied multiple times over the course of their careers. You should usually wait 6–12 months before applying again after being passed over in each country so that you give yourself time to grow and become a better candidate.

An interesting thing that happened to me is that some chemical firms would not give me a second glance as a chemist, but once I applied as a data scientist at the same companies then I would suddenly get a call back. Once again, this is why it is important to consider various positions and not to restrict yourself too much. You can be more picky once your career gets going and you have a network to rely upon and such.

Interviews

Pay attention to Verbal and Non-Verbal Ques

If you have made it to the interview stage then in my opinion you’re already 80% of the way to finding your next job. The reason for this is that in order to get an interview in the first place you already need to be on the right track. The deciding factor here is being able to get indirect feedback on where you go wrong. Sometimes the people who are interviewing you will let you know what they are thinking about you but you can also get a good feel for how what you are saying is landing. Doing this can give you an idea of areas for further practice and consideration.

This feedback creates a virtuous cycle that allows you to become a better candidate. The problem with the application phase is that you get very scant feedback meaning that people can get suck for reasons that are not apparent to them. However, sometimes getting feedback so directly can also deflate your ego a bit and help cement a feeling of hopelessness. If you have a particularly bad interview where you come off very poorly by accident (it happens) or you make a mess of answering the questions, then it can feel like you are bashing your head against a wall even if you are doing well. Do not let negative experiences capture the center of your attention, always try to focus on your successes even when human negativity bias makes that incredibly difficult. (This is a weakness that I have as well, it is really easy to knock the wind out of my sails.) Ultimately, the feedback that you get during interviews are what make it the easiest part of the process so play close attention to your interviewers and what they say. You gain experience being interviewed and even about the types of questions frequently get asked and your best responses towards them.

Do your homework and ask questions

This is also the ideal time to get to know the company a little better. Try to look not only at their website, but make sure also to read their Wikipedia page if they have one and to follow them on social media (i.e. Twitter) to see what the company is working on and is proud of.

Once again, in my experience, the time spent on the company is relatively small beyond the basic details. You should use this time to inform yourself of some questions that you want to ask them. While I was interviewing, I had 9 “stock questions” that I could ask while taking notes of questions that came up during conversation. Having 3 additional questions that you have from researching their background should give you more than enough firepower to interrogate them when it is your turn to grill them. My stock questions are as follows:

In what way are you innovating for your customers to keep up with disruption? What projects would you want me to help out with exactly? What does your data strategy (i.e. data quality) look like? (80% of your time as a data scientist is spent on wrangling, good data strategy minimises this.) What sort of technology would I have access to? (Once again, a natural question for someone who does a lot of programming.) Are there opportunities for training or to visit conferences? (I highly value this.) What are the interviewers experiences of the company? What does the “company culture” look like? How does the company expect to grow over the next couple of years? Where are the priorities at the moment? What are the next steps? (Always finish up with this.)

Yes, I have all of these questions in a diary so that I can ask them at every interview. Once again, I find that most interviews do not actually let you ask more than 2 questions due to time constraints, but I find that preparing your questions means that you often start asking them during the flow of conversation, which is why I keep so many handy.

Interview Mindsets to reduce pressure

A lot of people can feel like they are under a lot of pressure when having an interview either in person or over the phone. This is natural because you are being evaluated by a stranger but also because answering questions in a way that makes sense for other people takes a lot of mental energy. This can cause people to cramp up and respond in ways that can sound unnatural and forced.

Being someone who listens to a lot of podcasts such as the ones mentioned towards the top of this blog post, I eventually found that it was easier to think of interviews as podcasts where two people are discussing the interviewees experiences to an audience that is interested in hearing every word helps to take the edge off. There are a lot of rules when it comes to interviews such as the STAR/CAR method which makes the experience robotic and inauthentic. Instead, I prefer to just answer questions as stories with the structure of having a problem, working towards a solution and a resolution. (Once again, see the book “Storytelling with Data”.)

The important thing when interviewing is to remember that having confidence is important. Talking like people do during interviews helps to make that confidence and to engage with your interviewer. Just relax, focus on the present and just answer the questions as they arrive.

There will always be a next interview

Finally and leading on from my last point, if you mess up horribly and you give the wrong impression then there will always be a next interview. Once you have secured your first couple of interviews, then they will just keep coming. (For better or worse, if you get stuck at the interview stage then it is its own kind of purgatory.) It is still possible to tunnel vision and get attached to certain applications but at the end of the day you need to remember that there are a number of positions that you can still apply for. Even in fields where things are more competitive, having what is called an abundance mindset can help to make confidence and to keep calm under pressure. Remember, sticking-points for certain companies will be glossed over by others. Focus on the “macro” instead of obsessing over the “micro” of individual interviews.

Conclusion

The more competitive a field is, the more you need to find ways to set yourself apart. In the past this was done by getting a university degree, now it is considered baseline. So now you need to think of things you can do that supplement that. Right now, very few people are using the techniques I have outlined above. People underestimate social media, try to appeal to corporate aesthetics with their CV, do not think it is worth using MOOCs for fear that it wont get taken seriously, underestimate how much employers value strong skills (technical, social or otherwise), tunnel vision on knowing a single organisation inside and out, do not take ATS into consideration and waste a lot of their potential by constraining their options.

Be different. Allow yourself to break the mould and to become an individual who grows at any cost and is willing to challenge the status quo without being unnecessarily rebellious, that is the kind of person that it seems to me that industry is looking for at the moment. Finally, make sure you give value using social media. It is an investment that is likely going to pay off in the long run if you are diligent and make things that are actually good. Engage, network and do things that are up to date with <the current year> and let go of the advice from decades past.

I hope that this post helped you to open your mind to the possibilities a little bit. Make sure you check the resources that I have cited, they will be invaluable in helping you to understand what I have said. I wish you the best of luck for the future!