Demand is very high for data scientists right now and if your company cannot compete with the big boys for data talent, there may be a few ways to skirt that problem.
Alex Woodie wrote this article on hiring data talent for Datanami:
Go Down Market
One potential way that companies can address the problem is to stop looking exclusively at top-tier universities for data talent, says Correlation One, a company that helps companies find data scientists. While excellent data science prospects can be recruited out of Ivy League schools like Harvard and Yale and top-tier public schools like NYU and UC Berkeley, with the acute shortage of data scientists and the ridiculously high salaries, companies would do well by themselves to consider graduates from a range of other schools.
Use Better Tools
Data scientists are essentially one-man (or one-woman) bands: They possess all the requisite skills for establishing, building, and implementing at-scale data analytics programs. But just as AI software threatens to automate many jobs currently performed by white collar and blue collar workers, the data scientists’ job itself is also being targeted by software automation. In particular, the rise of automated machine learning, or “AutoML,” tools raises the possibility that companies can reach their data science goals without employing an actual data scientist (or at least not employing as many of the high-priced unicorns as would otherwise be required).
Hire It Out
If widening the breadth of your data science talent search and up-skilling analysts into “lite data scientists” doesn’t do the trick, there’s one other foolproof method for getting the data science expertise you absolutely need: outsource it. According to a recent software development report, the pool of talented IT professionals in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and Romania is growing quite quickly at the moment. “While the US and Western Europe are facing the shortage of tech experts, Easter Euproean tech talent pool is contiously growing,” says Andrew Pavliv, the CEO and founder of N-IX, a Ukrainian company that provides data science services, among a wide range of other services.
