A Senior Data Scientist Job Search by the Numbers
By: Aaron Richter
Tags: Job Search, Job Hunting, Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Data Science

A Senior Data Scientist Job Search by the Numbers

Photo by Sylwia Bartyzel on Unsplash

I recently started a new job as a Senior Data Scientist, and thought it would be a fun exercise to analyze the data about my job search. And to make it even more fun, why not share it with strangers on the internet?

I compiled data about each application and include my analysis below. The data includes companies and job titles I applied to, when I applied, when I heard back (if I did), when interviews occurred, and how each application ended. Some light analysis of this data shows trends in my job search habits, as well as some details of how the different companies handled their talent searches. The CSV file is linked below if anyone wants to analyze the data further!

This is Part 1 of a series of posts about my job search. The next post contains more reflection about what made my search successful and some advice for others doing the same.

First, some background

Hi, I’m Aaron! The end of the story is that I’m a Senior Data Scientist at Saturn Cloud. My role is to help clients utilize our platform as well as create engaging data science content that builds our credibility in the market and educates users about the technologies that we support. This is very different than what a “typical” data scientist (is there even such a person?) does at a company — my role can be thought of as a mix between a solutions architect and developer advocate but geared towards data science. Even so, I believe my experiences here should resonate with anyone looking for a data science job (or any job, for that matter).

I received a PhD in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University where my research was focused on data mining and machine learning for healthcare applications. Prior to Saturn, I was a Data Scientist at Modernizing Medicine, an electronic health record company. I started my career at Modmed as an intern through a referral from my PhD advisor. This was before they had a data team, and I had the pleasure of growing my career along with the team over several years. Because of this, I was searching for a Senior Data Scientist position without going through a single interview in over six years! I did have a lot of experience interviewing people for data roles at Modmed, but was definitely terrified of being on the other side of the table.

For more background, this was the resume I used for my job search and my portfolio website.

Data collection process

I recorded information about all the jobs I applied to and have the data available in this GitHub gist. The collection process was mostly searching through my emails and looking for different events that occurred, then manually adding them to a Google sheet. Sometimes the best data is hand-crafted 😊.

Generally, a company sends a confirmation email stating that your application was received, and then any correspondence for scheduling interviews and such also happens over email. This made it pretty straightforward to trace the progression of my applications. To find these I searched for keywords like “application”, “applying”, etc. I also had a note on my phone where I kept track of the companies I applied to, so I went back through and searched specifically for the company names. Beyond company names and job titles, dates are the most important part of the data, and these were the ones I collected:

Date applied: When I sent the application (or received confirmation email)

Interview dates: Date of first, second, or third interview if they happened

Date rejected: When I received a rejection email (many companies never got back to me, so I assumed rejections for any that I did not receive an interview request for)

Date declined: When I decided to withdraw from the interview process

Date accepted: The date I accepted my new job! This of course is only populated for one entry, otherwise I would be a very busy man 😂.

There can definitely be some gaps in this data. If a company never sent me a confirmation email I may have omitted it from the data, or I may have missed an interview here or there if my searching failed me.

My job search by the numbers

I created a gist of my analysis notebook which is embedded at the end of this article, but first here are the high-level stats and analyses:

Applications sent out: 41

Date range of whole process: 47 days

Rejections: 34 (14 are assumed rejections)

(14 are assumed rejections) Applications where I had at least one interview: 9

Declines (I chose to withdraw application): 6

Most common job titles: Machine learning engineer (6), Lead data scientist (5), Senior data scientist (5), Data scientist (5)

For interviews:

Median time between application date and first interview: 5 days

Most time between application date and first interview: 7 days

For rejections:

Median time between application date and rejection: 12 days

Most time between application date and rejection: 145 days

The plot below shows the progression of each application, with a point for each “event” (application, interview, rejection, etc).

Job search timeline. Dark gray bars without an end point indicate I was rejected after June 30. Light gray bars indicate I never heard back.

The rejection time definitely had the most variability — some companies rejected me almost immediately, some never did, and some took quite a while. I made it to the interview stage for 9 of the roles (orange lines/points), and besides flat out failing Facebook’s coding tests, I felt like I was heading toward getting an offer from the other companies. May 19th is when I accepted Saturn Cloud’s offer (blue point) then withdrew the other applications.

I sent my first application on April 8th, but didn’t get into a pattern of applying to jobs every few days until after April 19th. May 6th was a late night of desparate rapid-fire applications from LinkedIn searches 😬, as better illustrated below:

Number of jobs applied to by day

The whole process took just under two months. It felt like much longer! There was certainly time before April 8th that I spent updating my website and resume, and doing research on jobs. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact date, but it was definitely sometime in March because it was after the COVID-19 lockdown started in the U.S.

Check it out yourself!

The full notebook with my analysis is here. This is just scraping the surface of what could be analyzed from the data, so I would encourage you to look at it more yourself and find some other trends. Feel free to contact me on Twitter @rikturr to keep the conversation going!

Also, check out Part 2 of this series where I dive deeper into my story, reflect on what things were beneficial to my job search, and advice for those who are also in the midst of this journey.