Data and Workforce Analyst
Springfield, VA
Summary of responsibilities
The term "Data Scientist" gets thrown around quite a bit these days and for those of you in this field, you know that your work tasks can vary dramatically. The worst thing that can happen is you accept a job offer expecting to develop cool machine learning models but in the end, you just end up cleaning data and doing basic analysis in spreadsheets.
We want to be super transparent about what exactly it is you will be doing.
In this job, you will be working with the agency's people analytics team. People analytics conducts analysis and reports on things like hiring and attrition rates, promotion rates, etc. in order to provide information that will help improve the agency's human capital output.
The responsibilities for this position can be broken up into three primary buckets:
'Answer the mail' analytics
The people analytics teams will receive requests from customers or stakeholders that will ask you for data-based insights into a particular question. Sometimes, the questions are super broad e.g. 'Are my employees performing as well as they should?' and you will have to put on your consultant hat to figure out what it is the customer really wants to know. Other times it will be super specific e.g. 'Has my attrition rate decreased in the past three years?' and you just need to run the numbers and send over an answer.
You will need to not only be good at doing the actual data analysis, but also be able to a) understand what the customer is really asking for and b) answer the question in a way that the customer finds actionable.
Annual Reporting
This is government work and you know the government loves their annual reports. This particular people analytics team has a handful of reports they are required to produce every year. For these reports, the team needs to:
Collect all the data from component agencies (e.g. bug them until they send you the spreadsheets)
Clean all the data (e.g. why did they merge four rows and three columns in this spreadsheet...ugh!)
Aggregate and analyze the data (ummm...why did everyone quit this agency last year?"
Create a narrative around your findings and throw it into a report
This can potentially be boring, but it could also be interesting if you want to find ways to improve how annual reporting is done. If things were manually done via copy and paste in Excel for many years, you could write a Python script to automate the data cleaning and take a task that took a month and compress it into a few minutes. You will be given the space to do something like that.
Long-term futuristic cool data science stuff
There is an initiative with this team to build out robots that will just do all the data science at this agency.
Just kidding, but there are opportunities to work on some initiatives to modernize the way people analytics is conducted.
For example, there will be opportunities to build out Tableau dashboards to replace some of the endless, repetitive PowerPoint that get generated. There is some talk about building some predictive models regarding employee performance and churn. There is also some desire to find a way to build some data warehouses that will make reporting a lot easier in the future.
You will likely have to take the initiative to implement some of these projects but if you are proactive the agency is receptive.
Desired candidate qualifications and experience
Most government contractor position descriptions read like a contracting officer who is risk averse wrote it and it rarely details what requirements are actually relevant.
I'd like to be more realistic.
General traits
Broadly speaking, the person in this job needs to be:
NOT a socially awkward weirdo: There is a consulting element in this role which means you will have to work with customers and stakeholders. You won't just be crunching numbers in a cubicle in the basement.
Willing to figure things out: If you are the type of person to Google things you don't understand or watch YouTube videos to help you solve tricky technical problems, you will be successful in this role. The team uses a wide range of tools and you won't know all of them, so being able to learn them via self-instruction will be very helpful.
Specific skills and experience
To be successful in this job, you will need to have a decent amount of data analysis experience. You don't need a technical degree and you don't need people analytics experience specifically.
Experience with a range of analytical tools: Excel of course, but SQL, Python, and Tableau would be great. If you know SPSS or other tools that is great too.
Consulting skills: You will need to be able to effectively work with and communicate with customers and stakeholders. Many are not technical or data-savvy so you can't just throw the data at them without any explanation.
How to apply for this position
If you are interested in this position and would like to apply, here is what you can expect:
You will need to e-mail me at dale@custom-analysis.com with the subject line "People Analytics" and a resume.
We will set up a quick phone call to chat. This is mainly so I can learn a bit about you. Very informal. I will also answer any questions you have about the role
If you are still interested in moving forward, I will send you a data analysis assessment exercise without a strict deadline.
If you did well enough on the exercise, I'll reach out to discuss a job offer!
I always hated interview processes that involved multiple rounds of behavioral interview questions with different employees.
You will only be speaking to one person (me, Dale, one of the founders) and I am only trying to figure out if you are not a weirdo and if are technically competent enough to perform the job.
How to apply
Send an e-mail to dale@custom-analysis.com with the subject line "People Analytics" and attach your resume. That's it!