AnalyticBridge
Data Intelligence, Business Analytics
Lack of analytic talent: myth or reality?
Recruiters consistently complain about the lack of great analytic talent. In this post, we explore causes and remedies.
Causes:
- University curricula outdated, not teaching skills for the corporate world, such as text mining, programmable APIs and automated decision making, data harvesting, social network or news feeds optimization
- Top analytic talent has realized that job interviews provide low ROI, compared with other activities such as starting your own company: the process is very slow, and sometimes interviews are perceived by top talent as a way for the hiring company to get free expert consulting
- Employee blacklists hit top talent more than below-average candidates, because top talents are more likely to receive multiple offers and thus decline some offers, and as a result, get blacklisted. When a top talent thinks he has been blacklisted by a company, he will never accept an interview again for that company.
Remedies:
- Don't automatically discard candidates that don't have a University degree: their skills, learned on their own, are sometimes more up-to-date.
- Prove to top candidates that your hiring process is very fast. Don't assume that top candidates are necessarily very expensive: some of them are very financially smart and have managed to survive the recession quite well, and may ask lower compensation to win against competition.
- Offer paid interviews: the candidate has to make a 2-hour presentation in front of 20 employees and will have to ask very real business questions asked by a panel of experts. Offer $3,000 for the interview, and you will get great solutions for your business problems, and maybe manage to attract and hire a top expert. It's a win-win situation, no matter what the outcome is.
Notes:
- Big job boards (Dice, Monster, Hotjobs, Careerbuilders) have all but scared top talent: candidates only receive spam from them, such as insurance salesman or work-at-home scam opportunities. At best, these job boards "email alerts" send irrelevant job ads. You won't find top talent on these job boards anymore.
- The situation is likely to get worse before it gets better: the best of the best are starting their successful small business in our current post-industrial revolution. As big businesses continue to shrink and need fewer new employees (particularly in US), the outlook should become better.
Views: 209
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Theresa Doyon on -
There is a fourth remedy: Fire the recruiters.
I was recently looking for work after leaving an employer that dissolved its centralized database analytics team, preferring to use traditional market research for corporate-wide KPIs, with the various lines of business outsourcing their analytics to the agencies providing the strategies being measured (think conflict of interest).
With some notable exceptions, the recruiters were incompetent, rude, or unethical. Most didn't know understand the role descriptions, lied about the roles (e.g., one role maxed out at $60k, not the $120k he claimed), were non-responsive, copied my LinkedIn profile and put me up for roles without ever talking to me, or claimed I was unqualified because I was allegedly paid less than my male co-workers.
And of course there are the recruiters who want nothing to do with unemployed analytics professionals.
I don't respond to recruiters who call or e-mail anymore, unless they are one of the few who genuinely maintained a relationship with me over the years and did try to help me my find an appropriate role when I needed one. Now I help them, forwarding opportunities to the appropriate people qualified for those opportunities. The stark reality is that most of us now hear about opportunities through our professional networks, which rarely include the recruiters famously spamming every job board and open LinkedIn group.
If companies want talent then the hiring managers will have to get out of their corner offices and start networking with the talent where the talent is - conferences, certain LinkedIn groups, AnalyticBridge, and Twitter.
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Permalink Reply by Vincent Granville on -
Also: home owners not able to relocate due to being underwater, and companies reluctant to accept telecommuting.
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Permalink Reply by Kenneth Kuhn on -
From the perspective of someone who knows he has analytic talent and would be happy to go for unpaid interviews, I'd say there is an overemphasis on the reputation graph and prior experience in very similar jobs. How about talking to the applicant that excelled at Uni or in past analytic jobs, instead of just whoever has experience with your favorite software or knows someone at the company. This could be related to your cause 1, or Theresa's complaint about incompetent recruiters.
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Permalink Reply by Miles Garnsey on -
I'm in a similar position. I'm at uni doing a (somewhat) quantitative degree and seeking experience in some sort of analytics role to see if I want to move further in that direction. However when I applied for an incredibly basic and simple statistics focussed role, I was told that I didn't have enough experience.
It only would have taken me about one day to learn their processes inside and out, but they weren't prepared to take on someone who didn't know exactly what to do from the start in that role. If companies won't be prepared to take a chance with someone who has related but not identical skills, then no one's ever going to get the experience they need to become good analytics professionals.
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Permalink Reply by challapalli sudhakar on
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lack of talent is less compared to the requirement. If a candidate is found with the capacity of analysis he may be recruited and properly get trained so that the analyst will be useful to the company. Also age should not be considered AND lot of people are available in different educational institutions in India. Their services can be utilized by getting connected with them on net and make them to work from India/.
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Permalink Reply by Ayyappan Thangaraj on
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Wonderful article!
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Permalink Reply by Vincent Granville on
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The complaint about lack of talent is ridiculous. Dozens of experienced candidates with proven success stories and lower salary requirements [than MIT or Stanford graduates] compete for each opening. You can check these stats yourself when you apply for such jobs via LinkedIn. Time permitting, I'll produce stats to prove my point. Indeed, we also get dozens of great candidates ourselves when we advertise an internal position. Some data science positions have 100+ applicants.
My comment is posted in response to the Wall Street Journal Revenge of the Nerds: Tech Firms Scour College Campuses for Talent.
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