Some time ago, I’d been in hiring mode for a business analyst for my team and “had a few thoughts” that I have kept in draft form for some time. As this is now an ex-company/team, I feel okay writing about it, but am somewhat lazy about changing present tense.
How I think the process should have worked:
- Hiring manager (me) transforms needs into requirements.
- Human Resources (HR) discusses it with me then initiates a search.
- HR is the gatekeeper, protecting the interests of the company and doing first-level screening. Potentially-qualified candidates are forwarded to the me for review.
- If there’s interest, HR will set up a meeting between the candidate and me.
- If the results are positive, an interview may be scheduled with an extended group.
- If the results are positive, there is a verbal discussion of terms. If an agreement is reached, a formal offer is generated.
- Employee and employer have a productive relationship
How it actually worked:
- Hiring manager transforms needs into a list of requirements.
Having been on the job-seeking end, I have seen too many job descriptions that ask for the world but don’t necessarily need that. (Hadoop is a great example.) I felt it was important to produce an honest job description, including representative tasks, general expectations, and a list of some of the tools we used.
As we are a small company, every fun analysis is offset by an equally necessary, self-preservation task beyond the expected, reasonable charter. For example, the IT guys are Open Source zealots whose souls cannot be sullied by direct contact with Microsoft products. They foist maintenance onto the help desk engineer, who has an equal likelihood of completing the task as he does fucking something up on our production system. Because the sales-driven perceives only “vital data is unavailable for reasons outside our control,” we have to be on top of things.
Thus, my job description looked
Key Responsibilities:
• Provide data-backed, actionable insights to non-technical, business-savvy users. For some reason, recruiters send me business intelligence developers from Microsoft who want to sit in a cube coding all day. That isn’t going to fly. Our customers love us because we actually give a shit and will go talk with them. It’s in our interest to understand what their needs are so we can deliver the right thing.
• Create reports, automation and dashboards for Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Sometimes our stakeholders want gauges and pie charts. That’s okay. We will make them look good.
• Validate data for accuracy, completeness, and conformance to business rules. Test your code and hypotheses.
• Help the data science team ensure systems continue to exceed expectations. We have to do things that don’t fit into a tidy bin. CEO think we should cloud everything? No problem, we’ll scope that out and give her trade-offs so she can make a sound decision. Taxonomist making an inconsequential change to a small part of the web site, demanding we tell him whether it’s improved the user experience? I will, respectfully, provide a gentle, Uranus-level summary of statistical significance, politely refusing to sign off on any analysis that I do not feel is supported by data.
Qualified candidates will have effective communication skills, a strong work ethic, and enjoy digging into data. Specifics qualities include:
• Patience presenting analyses to and answering questions from the business. Again, we’re a small company. The consumers of information are frequently non-technical. We are – that is why they have us around.
• High attention to detail. Wait for it…
• Inquisitive, with good problem-solving skills. These two seem redundant with a data person, but are pretty essential. I give candidates a quiz based on actual problems we’ve solved and ask them to make their own supportable conclusions. I know, OMG, it’s actually germane to the role!
• Excel pivot tables, filters and charts. Familiarity with descriptive statistics. This was intended to weed out the Hadoop crowd.
• 2+ years’ experience writing ad hoc SQL queries. I was originally going to leave this out assuming “every analyst has these skills,” but holy cow, there’s a lot of skills-fudging. More on that later.
• Ability to accomplish assigned work with minimal oversight. I’ll gladly mentor, but I have neither the time nor desire to micromanage you. This was actually a deal-breaker for a promising candidate.
• High attention to detail, like noticing this bullet item appears twice. And, yes! we have the Jim Carson Easter Egg(TM). Those of you who know me know that it is a character flaw that I cannot resist adding something. It’s not just to mess with HR, either.
• Willingness to occasionally work outside of normal business hours. Sometimes our system needs maintenance out of hours. Not a lot, because I don’t want to do it, either.
Were I to summarize this in three bullets:
- Don’t be a jackass.
- Show some initiative.
- Have some basic analysis skills, but an interest in learning more.
To set the expectation that we are not a large data shop, I included a list of the tools I use day-to-day just to give folks an idea that we’re kind of scrappy:
Technologies we use:
• Microsoft Excel; Microsoft SQL Server, reporting (SSRS) and OLAP (SSAS); MySQL; python; Visual C#; git; Jira; regular expressions; command line utilities (grep, sed, uniq, sort, bash, scp); R; Tableau Software.
What I found early-on were the recruiters just keyword matched. I’d hold some recalibration meetings, then eventually they’d “get it” and the candidate pool would be a slow trickle.
In the three hiring cycles, I’ve looked at over 550 resumes, phone-screened/met for coffee (my preference) 40, and brought in fifteen for interviews. In filling this position, I looked at 74 resumes, phone screened/met for coffee with 24, and brought five in for interviews. Themes emerged:
- Buzzword bingo. The job description was deliberately written to avoid that, but when the final copy was sent, that’s what the recruiters focused on. “Blah blah blah Tableau Software – check!” A lot of the resumes I received early on were for people coming off of 18 months of contracting gig at Microsoft and looking for a dev position.
- Candidates looking for any job.
- Lying on their qualifications. Candidate says they have five years of SQL, but cannot write a join.
- Human Resources Flameout. The week I was having four candidates in, my HR person disappeared.
- Human Resources (HR) discusses it with me then initiates a search. HR is the gatekeeper, protecting the interests of the company and doing first-level screening.
All Star is a staple of Seattle’s booming tech community, using top talent to forge long-term partnerships with higher education institutions across the nation. All Star helps hundreds of thousands of students looking to change their lives through education find the resources they need for success.
We pride ourselves on our accountability and flexibility. Team-players who can also work autonomously to accomplish large and small tasks are what make All Star employees valuable and unique.
Our focus on our employees through team-building initiatives, great benefits, transportation assistance and all-around fun is reflected in our attitude and our Seattle space located just steps from the Pike Place Market. Here, you’ll work in an Agile environment on challenging projects with lots of autonomy—or with as much team involvement as you can handle.
Come join a company that cares about its employees and city, with opportunities for paid volunteer days off, clothing and toy drives for the community, and tuition reimbursement for continuous learning. At All Star, we are employee-owned, so your voice is heard through collaboration and a culture that works hard, continually strives to stay ahead of industry trends, and celebrates its successes.
Our customers are non-technical, which means it’s paramount we take the time to understand what their business needs are. They aren’t statisticians. they don’t know what to ask. They like us because we’ll take the time to explain data to them in terms they can understand. Sometimes they want gauges and pie charts — that’s okay.
I created a job de
The first task was to create a job description, as input to the HR department. They will start their own fiction-writing exercise (“We’re awesome sauce”) and boilerplate (“Equal Opportunity Employer”). blurbs, before unleashing it on their personal rolodex of hired guns, aka, friends who are recruiters or someone who’s cold-called them. In creating the description, I was trying to convey the set of personality qualities that I felt would be successful in this role. Let’s break that down, shall we? Text in green, intent in black:Tips for candidates (phone screen):
At a minimum, you should type our web site into your browser.
It is perfectly fine to find me on LinkedIn, but try not to be creepy.
The Interview
Please, come with questions. Really good one: “How does your business you make money?” “What is needed to be successful in this role?”
Unless I ask you for a piece of information requiring you to access your phone, leave it in your pocket, ideally in airplane mode. I don’t bring any electronics to our interview because I am giving you my undivided attention. (Checking it between interviewers is okay.)