Hiring experts say that when tech firms fail to recruit the data science talent they say they need, it is often because they don’t really know what they want.
Alison DeNisco Rayome writes that companies should be able to refine the job description better in this article from TechRepublic:
“I’ve never been a fan of the data scientist title,” said Meta S. Brown, business analytics consultant and author of Data Mining for Dummies. While it makes sense for managers who need a separate title for a particular job description to work with HR, the constant hype around the title today has created some of the problems companies have filling positions, she added.
“We’ve pushed the idea that data scientists are something different from any kind of analyst who ever existed before, and are somehow magical and better,” Brown said. “It has led to a lot of people wanting to be this magical better thing, and a lot of organizations imagining that there’s something that is unrealistic that can solve all their problems.”
“The data scientist title is certainly a sexy one,” said Kristen Sosulski, clinical associate professor of information, operations, and management sciences in the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, and author of Data Visualization Made Simple. “However, it is a general title that can encompass a variety of responsibilities and require a diverse set of skills.”
Other titles that might be more descriptive of the actual work involved in data science professions include data analyst, business analyst, data engineer, or analytics lead, Sosulski said. More senior titles include head of analytics, head of data, and vice president of analytics.
Part of the problem is that managers often write data-related job descriptions without fully thinking through the needs of their organization, Brown said. “Very often, these jobs that no one can fill are signs of either imagination or desperation or a little of each,” Brown said. Recruiters have come to Brown looking to fill a data science position, she said, “and they send me a requirements list that range from reasonable to completely imaginary.”
