Hiring Data Professionals: The Experiment

Hiring Data Professionals: The Experiment

The Problem

Hiring a skilled data analyst or a data scientist from the pool of candidates could be an overwhelming challenge for many talent specialists, hiring managers and even recruiters.

  • Data and analytics professions are among the most sought-after roles of this decade.
  • This has led to a multiplication of roles and lucrative salaries, a multitude of aspirant applicants pivoting towards these positions.
  • From here, the challenges of identifying the right candidates and testing their skills to see if they are a good fit for the team.

The biggest impact of hiring the wrong candidate is directly reflected in your company’s bottom line. The US Department of Labour has estimated the cost of a bad hire to be 30% of the employee first-year's salary. However, for a data professional it can be as high as 200%!

The Experiment

At Alooba we are all too aware of the problems of hiring good data professionals. This is why we continuously challenge ourselves and what we do.

We believe that CVs are an outdated and inaccurate tool to predict the value of a candidate. CVs are a very subjective way to present information. In fact, It is proven that nearly 85% of candidates lie, to some extent, on their CVs. In addition, manual CV screening is a costly and lengthy process and it is often prone to a wide degree of unconscious biases and discrimination.

So, in order to expose the issues with traditional CV screening, we selected 7 recruiters and had them screen 426 applicants. The results were quite compelling:

  • In the top 20 Alooba test best scorers only one candidate was shortlisted by more than one recruiter
  • In the top 50 Alooba test best scorers more than 50% were not selected by any recruiters.
  • Only 3 candidates were shortlisted by all 7 recruiters, the best of them in the Alooba test ranked only 85th in the total score ranking.
  • The best scorer of the Alooba test was shortlisted by only one recruiter.
  • Only about 10% of all candidates were not shortlisted by any recruiter.

These stats show that manual CV screening can be a tedious and random process, often impacted by human biases and errors. Oftentimes recruiters are lacking the technical knowledge to assess the skills of a candidate on paper. These represent some serious challenges to hiring skilled data analysts which frequently leads companies to hire bad candidates or drag on the hiring process for long periods.

The Solution

Alooba Assess allows you to quickly and fairly assess your candidates in more than 40 skills ranging from data analysis, data wrangling, marketing analytics, visualizations, data literacy, statistics, machine learning, Python, R, SQL, and more.

With Alooba you are able to:

  • Forget the long hours spent manually screening and testing your candidates.
  • Save your company the resources needed to accurately select the most skilled candidates.
  • Reduce the stress of hiring insufficiently skilled candidates.
  • Uncover hidden gems among your applicants which would have been missed with traditional CV screening.
  • Improve your hiring with a skill-centred process aimed at reducing human biases and improving diversity.
  • Delight your candidates by providing instantaneous feedback.

Alooba is helping businesses around the world save money and hire the best candidates to their Data and Analytics team. These days, hiring a good or bad data professional can 'make or break' a business in terms of hiring and training costs. Thanks to Alooba you will be able to strengthen your data and analytics team faster and more effectively than your competitors.

At Alooba we help your business grow, try Alooba for free now!