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As the mission is to create and maintain a community of excellence, any promotional material that is shared with the community must be held to the same standards. Of particular importance are job postings. This document aims to clearly lay out the standards by which these should be held and the process that should be followed before posting a job opening.

Job Postings

We want our students to have access to as many quality job openings as possible. While we cannot guarantee that every job that is advertised to the students actually ends up being high quality, we can define some standards by which to filter those that have a low likelihood of being high quality while simultaneously encouraging those that are high quality. These are the minimum qualities that a job posting must have in order to be allowed to be advertised to the students:

• Someone other than the manager actually doing the hiring must be able to vouch for the quality of the team and / or the organization
  • This person is called the guarantor
  • This person must be able to explicitly recommend the working environment as a good one in which employees are treated fairly and given interesting work.
  • This person must be in a position that actually qualifies them to recommend by already being a part of the team or organization
  • This does not need to be a large amount of text but simply an explicit statement that this is a good place to work
• The job description must be appropriate for the audience
  • If advertising an opening to the students, the students must actually be able to quality for the job. Job postings requiring 5 years of experience working with big data and Spark is not appropriate.
• The job description must be a job description
  • A list of technical requirements and a couple of meaningless slogans such as “data science rock star with full stack and DBA experience needed to help us change the world!” are not acceptable
  • The job posting must clearly identify responsibilities, tools to be used, where they will fit into the organization, when they will be expected to start, and the interview process
• The following questions are answered:
  • How will the projects I work on align to business goals?
  • Who will I be working with, and who would I report to?
  • How is success measured in this role?
  • What is the nature of the data I’ll be managing?
  • How does the data science team collaborate with other departments?
  • How is data collected at your company?
  • What toolset do you use, and are you open to using new ones?
  • What kind of tooling do you use to manage and interact with your compute resources?

Approval process

It should not take more than 2 days to get approval to post the job opening and in most cases less than 24 hours.

• Send an email addressed to sam@lisbondatascience.org and nobody else from the guarantor that contains
  • The job posting itself or a link to the job posting that can easily be transcribed into a wiki page with basic formatting
  • An explicit recommendation regarding the quality of the team
• The job posting and guarantor message will be checked to ensure that they follow the above guidelines and if it does, it is considered approved in a response to the original email.

Upon approval

An academy instructor will distribute the job opening to the students by

1. Updating the job openings wiki page with the contents of the job posting as well as the guarantor’s recommendation
2. If students wish to get put in touch with the guarantor, they may request so with an email to sam@lisbondatascience.org and they will be introduced via email with the guarantor
3. If the job posting is closed for any reason, it should be removed in a timely fashion

An example

Zé wants to hire a data scientist for his team and he has a job posting already written up and available on his company’s website. Since he is not allowed to be the guarantor because he is the person doing the hiring, he will ask an existing member of the team named João to be the guarantor. João agrees and so he writes an email to sam@lisbondatascience.org with the following text:

=====================================

Hi Sam,

Firstly I would like to say that you are probably the coolest data scientists ever - like the Kendrick Lamar of Data Science.

Secondly, my boss Zé is hiring junior data scientists and we would love to be able to advertise this opening to your students! I’m on the team that the new hire would be a part of and as someone who has been on the team for over a year I can say that it’s a great company and a great team to be a part of. I feel very comfortable personally recommending this as a place to work.

Thanks,

João

=====================================

Sam then reviews the job posting and verifies that João actually exists and hold the position he claims and approves the advertisement.

It is then posted to the student slack and Ana sees it and thinks it is an interesting place to work but she has heard that management can be a demanding and unfair and that the pay is not great so she decides that she wants to talk to the guarantor. She emails sam@lisbondatascience.org and asks to be put in touch with the guarantor. Sam puts them in touch by email and she finds out that although many teams do have the problems she had heard about, they are all in different departments but the data scientists have great management and are generally shielded from the unfairness that the rest of the company has a tendency to experience. So she fills in an application, tells Zé that she is a graduate of the LDSSA and 2 months later she is happily working with Zé and João in a blissful land of candy canes and unicorns.

And they lived happily ever after.