Riddle me this, riddle me that. Who’s to blame if you can’t find the right match?
The candidate, the recruiter or the company?
Hello friends!
To understand this article, let’s first do the exercise of reading this Twitter thread:
Ready? Now tell me, who needs to change?
a) The candidate
b) The recruiter
c) The client company that asks for unicorns and pays for kittens
I receive messages, both from professionals looking for jobs, and from those responsible for hiring or recruiting talents. Honestly, I don’t have the time to make — free — recommendations to the all of them about what they should improve at this time. That’s why I wrote this post; half joke, half anecdote.
Recommendations for the candidate:
Tune your CV according to what that company claims to need. I know, many job offers ask for too many things — we’ll touch on that topic lines below — just make sure to emphasize the technologies or knowledge they require. For example:
- X years of experience in data visualization with Power BI or similar.
So you should put something like:
- Company 1: I used Power BI to visualize data on ABC and be able to show that we must do XYZ…
If you don’t have experience with that specific technology within a company, something you can do is give a talk or workshop in a community explaining that topic.
Data Engineering Latam It is the largest community of data professionals and enthusiasts in Latin America and we are always receiving volunteers to create content in different formats (articles, workshops, etc.) as long as it is in Spanish.
Recommendations for the recruiter:
Here we need to make a list:
- Learn about the different roles.
- Make the difference between developers and data practitioners. Avoid mixing potatoes with sweet potatoes. Also, avoid labeling everyone as part of IT because— surprise, surprise — IT refers to the IT department. Those of us who work in data can become part of a specific functional area such as Marketing, Sales, Campaigns, Credit Cards, Loans; or belong to an area of its own, such as Data or “Data & Analytics”. In fact, many times we have conflicting interests with the IT department since they don’t let us work. But that is material for another article.
- Do not write a message/email to a potential candidate on Linkedin or WhatsApp saying “you would be a great fit for this data engineer position” and nothing else. Stop. By doing that, you’re just wasting everyone’s time. What you should do instead is list the details in the following order: remote or on-site? Is this opportunity valid for any part of the world, or just inside Latam or just for a specific country? What is the tech stack?
- Do not send technical challenges without having clarified the previous point.
- Do not interview or ask to solve conding challenges if you do not have real offers. That is, do not do that just to feed your database. Bad recruiter! Shame on you!
List the details in the following order: remote or on-site? Is this opportunity valid for any part of the world, or just inside Latam or just for a specific country? What is the tech stack?
Recommendations for the company:
Candidates with experience in certain technologies are hard to find. Technological advances are occurring at a very fast pace. In the world of data, asking for someone with 10 years of experience in X technology is to attract candidates with obsolete knowledge. Most likely that X can be replaced by Y.
For example, Apache Hadoop and Apache Hive were hot in the 2010s. Today, As a result of asking someone to do something for us with these technologies, technical debt is generated and that could lead to the dismissal of everyone (including your position as a decision maker).
Put together your job description with the help of an expert.
Another aspect to consider is compensation. Under the law of supply and demand, scarce knowledge must be valued more. To give some examples:
- How many programmers know javascript and how many know scala?
- How many engineers know AWS and how many know GCP?
- How many, in addition to being good in the technical part, have good communications skills?
With that being said, let’s now talk about master’s degrees. Do you really need someone with a master’s degree, MBA or PhD? It’s not that it’s bad to have them in your ranks, but, in general, university programs lag far behind technological advancements. Partly because of the bureaucracy of these institutions and having to create materials and courses on data and analytics topics. In the end, everything new is discussed inside communities and social networks.
In the end, everything new is discussed inside communities and social networks.
So, should I avoid those professionals?
Not so much like that. If your business has a very strong component of innovation, having someone with a PhD is good for you.
Do you have more recommendations? What else would you advise a candidate, a recruiter and/or a company?
Thank you for reading! How about another article?
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- Spanish version of this post here.
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