#195 The best practices for building and retaining excellent data teams, revealed. With Talent Insights Group Director, Ben Le Gassick, and Associate Director, Patrick Choy

From skills shortages to remote working, keeping data professionals happy and comfortable in their roles is a rapidly evolving challenge. This week on the podcast, Talent Insights Group Director, Ben Le Gassick, and Associate Director, Patrick Choy, are our special guests as we delve into the problems organisations face in attracting and retaining the best people.

The talent shortage means that many employees feel overworked and overwhelmed. Meanwhile, while remote work has become standard and expected, making sure that people continue to feel engaged and connected within their teams and organisation is important to avoid attrition within teams. 

On the podcast, Patrick and Ben discuss solutions to these pressing problems. It could be as simple as understanding the strengths and interests of each individual data scientist, and ensuring that the work meets their personal and professional goals. Another best practice is to leverage contractors intelligently to supplement the permanent staff. It’s also important to consider how to keep the data scientist engaged once the application that they were working on has been deployed and the workload shifts to maintenance. Many data scientists leave a role after a year simply because maintenance work isn’t as engaging, so what is the solution there?

And, finally, Patrick and Ben also share their thoughts about what employees like to see in a leader. People are attracted to great leaders and even willing to follow them from one company to the next. So, what can an organisation do to make sure that they are the ones with the great leadership team?

Tune in for these insights, and many more, about the opportunities and challenges in recruitment for data roles in 2022 and beyond.

We will be covering this topic in more detail at Advancing AI Sydney with our awesome community. To join us there in person register with the earlybird discount at: https://www.datafuturology.com/advancing-ai-sydney

“We really need to actually connect it with what's driving them, what are the underlying motivations, you know, is there a certain purpose or mission that they'd like to be a part of, you know, where the technical work that they're doing with data, then plays a significant strategic role in getting to those outcomes.”

WHAT WE DISCUSSED

00:00 Introduction
02:29 What makes a company attractive to the talent that's out there? And how can we get the organizations to be able to have greater sway with people?
08:46 What should organizations look to be offering more of, essentially?
12:51 What are some things that leaders could address to help reduce the attrition and ensure sort of more longevity in enrols?
15:21 What do you see from your perspective as some different models that people could consider around managing time, and being able to deliver more.
19:18 Any other creative models that people could consider getting through a humble work or this period that is extra demanding and tough to get people in?
21:14 Any tips on how to make the best use of contractors while they're engaged with the organization?
25:40 What type of team structures are you seeing in the market? And have you seen any shift recently?
29:51 Any pathways that are unique to the insights or analytics people?
36:19 Any tips on the interview stages?
46:35 What does it look like from the candidate's perspective?

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

• It's not a case where everyone wants 100% remote work all the time. We are hearing it from the market that quite a lot of people do want to have that component of getting connected to their stakeholders to understand their pain points, working with their data peers as well because a lot of the time it's cross-functional teams in our space, not just one person doing everything.

• Understanding, the strengths and weaknesses and gaps and opportunities in your team really open up how you can then keep those people engaged, understanding what opportunities they might be looking for, internally, before you go and hire someone immediately onto a new project or to do a roll that might have been a great promotion for them.

• You can open up talent pools that way by again, looking inwards first before going out to market.

• Companies and candidates and businesses are getting more mature. And they're demanding impact and outcomes from data and analytics, it's no longer okay to really go off and do R&D and then produce nothing after 12 months. And so there will be more product manager roles, and I think they're more attractive as well because people see that's where the top talent is gravitating.

• It's not the old days anymore, where you can kind of sit back and have an interview panel, and it's one-sided where we're offering you a job, you should just be thankful and answer all of our questions.

• It’s really pivotal that the interview process is the biggest source of information to the market, about who you are, what you're doing, your culture and how you do it.

• You know, the worst thing that businesses can do at the moment, has that poker face and just run through 20 questions, and there's no, there's no engagement. They wonder why that person didn’t want to come back for a second interview.

• It often results in making a bad choice, or going through a lot of interview rounds and processes, but then actually thinking, I'm not quite sure I really wanted to move in the first place. I think that the big tip at the moment is start the process, be really clear on why you're looking for a new role.

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