What is it that data science recruiters are looking for in an ideal job candidate? Ben Auffarth is Head of Data Science for Loveholidays and joins Wendy on this week’s Would You Data Scientist. Ben talks through what he looks for in a potential new hire, as well as how you can develop after pivoting, and how we can keep AI diverse. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Ben’s advice for someone looking to pivot is to develop your weaknesses. For example if you come from research you should work on your programming and software engineering. Setting a goal and making a plan of how you can achieve that can help you develop. 
• In the current recruitment Ben is doing, there is a wide range of skill sets within the candidates. Some are very strong on the technical side whereas some have better developed communication skills which are also important for therole. 
• All candidates being equal skills and education wise, Ben would look to hire people who show potential, have a great attitude, and show that they are socially interested. 
• How many years of experience you have is a pretty irrelevant thing to have in a job posting. Just because someone has been doing something for longer it has no bearing on the quality of their work. 

BEST MOMENTS

’They needed people doing their data who were also good at programming’ 

‘If you can bounce off each other in a team then you can work so much better’ 

‘Attitude is the most important thing’ 

‘A CV just tells you how well someone can write a CV’ 

EPISODE RESOURCES

Ben on LinkedIn
Find Ben's book here

VALUABLE RESOURCES

linkedin.com/in/ethicalrecruiter
qwerkrecruitment.com
@qwerkrec on socials

ABOUT THE GUEST 

Ben is a data scientist with more than 15 years of research and work experience in England, Japan, Germany, Sweden, and Spain. He gained industry experience working with betting markets, credit scoring applications and natural language processing. He has a record of delivering machine learning and decision models through to production systems. Before switching to the industry, Ben was working on research in machine learning problems, models of the brain, and neuroscience wet lab experiments on learning.

ABOUT THE HOST

Wendy Gannon started Qwerk Recruitment in the middle of the Covid Pandemic to disrupt the recruitment sector with ETHICAL data recruitment and treat everyone with love, dignity and respect. Avid Music photographer of 15 years.

PODCAST DESCRIPTION

Interviewing successful Data Scientists to find out about their journey into Data Science and any struggles they’ve faced to help next generation Data Scientists from all walks of life to access their dream career.

This show was brought to you by Progressive Media