How to Hire the Right Data Scientist or Analyst
By: Nikita Goldovsky
Tags: Data Science, Editors Pick, Analytics, Interview, Hiring

How to Hire the Right Data Scientist or Analyst

Hiring is one of the most crucial components of having a high-performing team, yet hiring managers often still rely on intuition rather than preparation.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Hiring is one of the most uncertain and risk-laden parts of an organization. It’s no wonder then why companies exert so much effort and resources to get it right. Hiring the right person can yield transformative results, while hiring the wrong candidate can end up being a waste of company resources, doubly so when factoring in your time.

When it comes to hiring data professionals, hiring the right person is that much trickier because you need to evaluate potential candidates on their technical, behavioral, and critical thinking skills.

An additional challenge in hiring a data professional is that the needs constantly change and evolve and ideally your candidate should be able to evolve with the needs of the business. For example, you may be going through a period where you think you don’t have the data in an organized fashion and need someone who can structure it. Tomorrow you may need dashboards. The day after, you may need advanced analytics or someone who can present data to non-technical users. And so on. As a result, finding individuals who are able to evolve with the business and take on different responsibilities is worth the time investment it takes to do properly.

However, even though managers working with data tend to be fairly methodical and evidence-based, when it comes to hiring, many still rely on their intuition and knowledge of their business, assuming that they’ll “just know when a candidate is the right candidate for the position”.

Overconfidence can be a killer.

You can minimize the risk of a bad hire by considering the following three hiring pitfalls:

1. Unconscious bias

The human brain has a limited amount of energy each day to expend. Consequently, we delegate as much thinking as possible to subconscious thinking, which requires less energy. Without this capability we wouldn’t be able to function very well. Imagine having to focus on every decision each time you drive to work like when to press the gas pedal, when to turn, how quickly to approach the stoplight. In reality, we sort of just drive on autopilot — that’s your subconscious behavior guiding you.

In social situations we do something similar when we apply a filter of social, cultural and personal experience to evaluate others. Forming a judgement about a person based on clothing, age, accent, or other factors is really difficult not to do, even if you’re genuinely trying to be a fair person. When assessing candidates it’s important to methodically prepare for your interview and to structure the interview process in a way that minimizes this unconscious bias in favor of objectively assessing the person’s thought process and behavior.

2. Poor evaluation criteria

This is essentially not knowing what you’re looking for. You may generally know that you want to hire a data analyst with SQL skills but have you thought about how to assess those skills? What if the candidate has limited technical skills but really great communication skills? What if they have great SQL skills but are very averse to interpersonal communication? How will you evaluate the person’s impact on the culture of your team? It is important to identify what characteristics you are looking for and how you will evaluate those characteristics upfront to avoid indecision after the interview process.

3. Short-term thinking

You may know what you need, but another common mistake is assessing candidates through the lens of short-term challenges. As I mentioned before, data needs fluctuate. You may be going through a period with a specific data challenge now but what about in 12 months? If you solve your current issue, will this hire still be the right fit? It’s important to think about broader themes and whether the skills you’re looking for will have broader application beyond the immediate pain points you face.

How to Optimize Your Chances of Landing a Great Hire

To avoid falling into the traps of unconscious bias, poor evaluation criteria and short-term thinking it’s important to consider the following four competencies of a good hiring manager.

1. Preparation

Preparation for an interview is more than reading a candidate’s resume and preparing a list of questions that you googled the night before. Preparation means thinking holistically about the process and what you want to discover during the interview process.

The first part of preparation is making a list of hard and soft skills you want the candidate to have. Ranking them is another good idea that will help you reflect on what is a must have and what is a nice to have. Having an upfront understanding of what your are looking for from this hire will be important once the cacophony of opinions about the candidate start coming in. If one person has really great Python skills, another person is an amazing critical thinker, while a third is an outstanding team player, do you have a point of reference about how each of those values align with your priorities?

The second part is having a methodical and thorough interview process. This is covered in the next point in more detail but in general its important to have an understanding of what you want you want to assess and how you want to assess those characteristics.

The third part is communicating effectively with other employees from your organization who will be helping out with interviews. It’s important that everyone understands what is being sought in this hire and that each interviewer has a similar set of standards on how to evaluate candidates. Having a checklist ready and asking for notes will be tremendously helpful.

2. Interview structure

How much emphasis you place on behavioral, technical, or critical thinking skills is somewhat up to you, however, I think it makes sense to have as much information about your candidates as possible when making a decision.

Even though it takes more time, I would suggest structuring the interview process in a way that gives potential candidates an opportunity to demonstrate their abilities with respect to technical, critical thinking and behavioral skills.

One structure that works well is to pre-screen candidates, then conduct a behavioral phone interview, followed by an online skills assessment and either an online or in-person case study. The last step is to conduct an in-person panel of interviews that combine behavioral and critical thinking questions.

To test technical abilities, there are many platforms out there like Hacker Rank, Test Dome, and Data Camp that allow companies to assess the skills of interview candidates through their pre-made assessments.

In terms of case studies, you should have some datasets from past projects that you can share with candidates to wrangle, analyze and present. I would pick a problem that has somewhat of a well-known answer within the company. What may seem intuitive to you won’t necessarily be to someone new to the company. Meanwhile, knowing that there is a specific resolution will help you ask targeted questions to candidates that would help assess their ability to incorporate new information in updating their assumptions.

For behavioral questions, make sure you have a list of characteristics that you are looking for and questions that adequately assess how the candidate exhibited these characteristics in the past.

3. Effective Interview Panel

To remove your own personal biases, it is imperative to involve a diverse panel of peers in the interview process. Involving people from different parts of the data organization, the business, and backgrounds will help draw in different perspectives that you might miss. Communicate with your panel what skills you’re looking for and the questions you plan to ask. 5–8 people is generally a good amount of people for your panel.

I also recommend to interview candidates as a group or in pairs. While this is a little more intimidating for the candidate at first, it actually makes for a more engaging interview and prevents the interview from going down irrelevant tangents.

4. Note-taking and Checklists

If you engaged team members to help assess candidates, it is imperative that expectations are set beforehand and good notes are taken to either confirm or reject the candidate’s ability to meet those expectations. Once the interview is over, it’s helpful when you are able to assess the fit based on reasoned explanations rather than vague feelings. It’s more impactful to say “I didn’t think the candidate showed enough empathy skills when their biggest example of empathy was talking about walking their family dog” rather than saying “I just didn’t think they were passionate enough”.

Conclusion

Being a methodical hirer can play a major role in your personal success as well as the success of your team and organization. To optimize your chances of hiring a great fit, remember to avoid the pitfalls of unconscious bias, short-term thinking, and poor evaluation criteria. The way you do that is by being prepared, thinking about the overall interview structure, creating checklists and having an effective interview panel. Like with everything else in life there’s no guarantees that you’ll get it right, but, with a system in place, your great-hire rate is bound to shoot up.