Hiring for Your Data Team? Here’s What You Need to Know
Are you looking to hire a new member for your data team? It can sometimes be daunting to hire new employees, but don’t worry — with the right knowledge and strategy, hiring a new team member doesn’t have to be a challenge. In this blog post, we’ll explain the different ways that companies can build successful data teams, from identifying the right skills and roles required to finding the best candidates for the job. So if you’re hiring for your data team and need help, read on to learn more.
When it comes to hiring members for a data team, there are five key factors that hiring managers need to consider in order to ensure success:
Identifying the Roles and Skills Required for Each Role
It’s imperative to have a clear understanding of the role and skills required when hiring a new role on a data team. Job titles and responsibilities can vary between different companies; a data analyst or analytics engineer at one company could be a data engineer or data scientist at a different company. It’s important to clarify what you need to ensures that the candidates you interview are best suited for their position. Identifying roles and skills for each member of your data team allows companies to quickly find the right person for each role, reducing time wasted in screening irrelevant candidates that don’t have the skills you need. Having clear criteria in place also makes it easier to evaluate each candidate objectively and fairly as well as providing guidelines for developing any necessary training programs post-hiring. By focusing on specific criteria from the start, companies can save costs by avoiding costly mistakes such as bad hires or overspending on the wrong skill set.
Finding Candidates with Relevant Technical Experience
After clarifying on roles and skills, hiring someone with the right skills for their role is essential for success. As such, it’s important for managers to make sure they hire candidates with the right skillset so their team can be successful. Although engineers will always learn on the job, having a solid foundation from the start is very important. For example, if your company primarily uses Apache Airflow, you should not hire someone that does not know python. There is always a learning curve when a new employee comes on board, but learning the use-case vs learning the entire technology are two very different things. Modern data teams are responsible for mission critical tasks and analysis that can change the course of a company, and having professionals on-hand that are experienced in your companies data tools can be a major advantage. The most effective way to find candidates with the right skills is to use job postings and other recruitment methods specifically tailored to finding talent with the specific skills you need.
Assessing their Technical Capabilities
When hiring a new data team member, it is important to assess their technical capabilities in order to ensure you are getting the right person for the job. This requires careful evaluation of the candidate’s skill set and experience with relevant technologies. A good way to get an idea of a candidate’s technical skills is by asking them specific questions about their experience with different technologies or giving them sample problems that require some level of coding or analysis. Many times the only way to truly assess someones ability is a live test, as take home tests are frequently completed by someone else. Beyond the technology, it is also important to evaluate how they approach problem-solving and troubleshooting tasks related to data related tasks. Lastly, references from past employers can provide helpful insight into the abilities of potential candidates. Ultimately, how you assess the ability of a new candidate may vary depending on your specific needs, but assessing a candidate’s technical capabilities before hiring them will help make sure your new team member has all the necessary skills needed for successful employment.
Ensuring They Fit Well into your Company Culture
When hiring new data team members, it is essential to ensure that they fit well into your company culture. This is because the proper implementation of data projects usually requires collaboration and communication between a variety of teams. Data teams are the heart of any data driven organization and rarely reside in a silo. The average data team may work with team members from Devops, Product Engineering, Product Management, Finance, etc. Data teams typically work with lots of people with different skillsets and backgrounds, making a shared understanding of the company’s vision, goals and values vital for success. When data teams are well-aligned with the company’s culture and people, they can help foster an environment of understanding and trust in the data.
Don’t Forget Soft Skills
Many times the interview process for analysts and engineers focus heavily on technical aspects, but successful data teams require a unique combination of technical and non-technical skills. Both are necessary to ensure the accuracy of data and the happiness of stakeholders. Team members need strong soft skills to build relationships across different departments, and it’s important that all data team members possess the soft skills needed to effectively work with their team members, as well as with other teams in the company. This will not only allow your data team to be successful, but can also help facilitate trust in the data they provide; something that is a common challenge in data driven companies with self-serve analytics.
Conclusion
After reading this blog post I hope you have a better understanding of how to successfully hire a new member of your data team. While these steps may seem simple, implementing them can be difficult. As always, hiring and retaining talent can be hard- if you need help finding new members for your team reach out to us at Pivot Computing. We are happy to help.
