7 Must-Haves in your Data Science CV | by Elad Cohen | Towards Data Science 5/8/22, 3:52 PM
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Managing Riskified’s Data Science department entails a lot of recruiting —
we’ve more than doubled in less than a year-and-a-half. As the hiring
manager for several of the positions, I also read through a lot of CVs.
Recruiters screen through a CV in 7.4 seconds, and after recruiting for
several years my average time is pretty fast, but not that extreme. In this
blog, I’m going to walk you through my personal heuristics (‘cheats’) that
help me screen a resume. While I can’t guarantee that others use the same
heuristics, and different roles will differ in the importance of each point,
paying attention to these points can help you conquer the CV screen stage.
Additionally, some of these heuristics may not seem fair or could
potentially overlook qualified candidates. I agree that talented Machine
Learning practitioners who don’t invest in their CV could get rejected with
this screen, but it’s the best tradeoff considering the time. Remember, a
highly sought after position may attract a hundred or more CVs. If you
want an efficient process, the CV screen has to be quick.
Here are the 7 heuristics used to quickly screen your Data Science CV:
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7 Must-Haves in your Data Science CV | by Elad Cohen | Towards Data Science 5/8/22, 3:52 PM
I’m going to quickly run through your CV to look at your previous positions
and see which are marked as ‘Data Scientist’. There are some other
adjacent terms (depending on the role I’m hiring for), such as ‘Machine
Learning Engineer’, ‘Research Scientist’ or ‘Algorithm Engineer’. I don’t
include ‘Data Analyst’ in this bucket as the day-to-day work is typically
different from that of a Data Scientist and the Data Analyst title is an
extremely broad term.
If you’re doing data science work at your present job and you have some
other creative job description, it’ll probably be in your best interest to have
your title changed to a Data Scientist. This can be very true for Data
Analysts who are de facto Data Scientists. Remember, even if the CV
contains descriptions of the projects you’ve worked on (and they include
machine learning), a title other than Data Scientist will add unnecessary
ambiguity.
Additionally, if you’ve undergone a data science bootcamp or full-time
masters in the field, this will probably be considered the beginning of your
data science experience (unless you worked in a similar role earlier, which
will warrant questions at a later stage).
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Ideally, I’d like to read what you did (technical aspects) and what the
business outcome was. There’s a lack of technically savvy data scientists
who can talk in business terms. If you can share the business KPIs that
your work impacted, that’s a big thumbs-up in my book. For example,
indicating your model’s improvement in AUC is alright, but addressing the
conversion rate increase as a result of your model improvement means you
‘get it’ — the business impact is what really matters at the end of the day.
Compare the following alternatives depicting the same work with a
different emphasis (technical vs business):
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a. Bank loan default rate model — improved model’s Precision-Recall AUC
from 0.94 to 0.96.
b. Bank loan default rate model — increased business unit’s annual
revenue by 3% ($500K annually) while maintaining constant default
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What’s your formal education and in what field. Is it a well-known O-$$-.
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or Dean’s list. Since Data Science is a wide-open field without any
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7 Must-Haves in your Data Science CV | by Elad Cohen | Towards Data Science 5/8/22, 3:52 PM
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into the field and based on your education and timing, I’ll figure out which
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one you probably took. Hence, the timing helps understand your story —
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I’ve seen some beautiful CVs (I’ve saved a few of these for personal
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inspiration) but I’ve also received text files (.txt) that lack any formatting. &/"H+3/?+")"1)&)"23,+-&,%&V
Working on your CV can be a pain, and if you’ve chosen data science as
your endeavor there’s a good chance you don’t enjoy creating aesthetic
designs in your spare time. Without going overboard, you do want to look U($F 32/2"& V0%2(0& E$-B 6/0((0& !0%8/4J ,(0?& R#-"2
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for a nice template that enables you to get everything across in limited
space. Use the space wisely — it’s useful to split the page and highlight
specific sections that don’t fall under the chronological work/education
experience. This can include the tech stack you’re familiar with, a list of
self-projects, links to your github or blog and others. A few simple icons
can also help with emphasizing section headers.
Many candidates use 1–5 stars or bar charts next to each language/tool
they are familiar with. Personally, I’m not a big fan of this approach for
several reasons:
It’s extremely subjective — is your ‘5 star’ the same as someone else’s ‘2
stars’?
They mix languages with tools, and in the worst cases with soft skills
— saying your ‘4.5 stars’ at Leadership isn’t helpful. As a strong
believer in a growth mentality, claiming to max out a skill (especially a
harder to quantify and harder to master soft skill) feels very
presumptuous.
I’ve also seen this approach abused even further by taking the subjective
measures and turning them into a pie chart (30% python, 10% team-
player, etc). While this was probably supposed to be a creative way to
stand out, it demonstrates a lack of basic understanding behind the
concepts of different charts.
Here are two examples of CVs I’ve found visually appealing, with details
blurred for anonymity.
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7 Must-Haves in your Data Science CV | by Elad Cohen | Towards Data Science 5/8/22, 3:52 PM
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7 Must-Haves in your Data Science CV | by Elad Cohen | Towards Data Science 5/8/22, 3:52 PM
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There are two types of variety I look for:
1. Type of algorithms — structured/classic ML vs Deep Learning. Some
candidates have only worked with Deep Learning, including on
structured data that could have been better suited with tree-based
models. While there’s no problem per se with being an expert at DL,
limiting your toolset can limit your solution. As Maslow said: “If the
only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a
nail.” At Riskified we deal with structured, domain-driven, feature-
engineered data which is best dealt with various forms of boosting
trees. Having someone whose entire CV points back to DL is an issue.
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7 Must-Haves in your Data Science CV | by Elad Cohen | Towards Data Science 5/8/22, 3:52 PM
2. ML Domain — this is usually relevant in two domains that require
much expertise — computer vision & NLP. Experts in these fields are in
demand and in many cases, their entire career will be focused on these
domains. While this is crucial if you’re looking for someone to work on
that field, it’s typically a bad fit for someone to work in a more general
data science role. So, if most of your experience is in NLP and you’re
applying for a position outside the domain, try to emphasize
positions/projects we’re you’ve worked on structured data to
demonstrate variety.
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This can generally be broken down into languages, specific packages
(scikit learn, pandas, dplyr, etc), clouds and their services (AWS, Azure,
GCP) or other tools. Some candidates mix this up with algorithms or
architectures they are familiar with (RNN, XGBoost, K-NN). On a personal
note, I prefer that this revolve around technologies and tools; when a
specific algorithm is mentioned it makes me wonder whether the
candidate’s theoretical ML knowledge is limited to just those specific
algorithms.
Here, I’m looking for the relevance of the tech stack — are they from the
last few years (a positive sign that the candidate is hands-on and learning
new skills), the breadth of the stack (are they very limited to specific tools
or are they familiar with quite a few things) and the fit with our stack
(how much will we need to teach them).
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Is there something you’ve worked on that you can share on GitHub? Any
Kaggle competition or side-project can be very helpful, and enables
looking at concise code, types of preprocessing, feature engineering, EDA,
choice of algorithm and countless other issues that need to be addressed in
a real-life project. Add a link to your GitHub and Kaggle account for
interviewers to dive into your code. If you don’t have much experience,
there’s a good chance you’ll be asked about one or more of these projects.
In some interviews I had, the candidate didn’t remember much about the
project and we couldn’t develop a conversation regarding the choices they
made and the reason behind them. Be sure you brush up on the work you
did or keep it out of the CV. Similarly, make sure you present your best
work and you’ve put enough time and effort into it. It’s better to have 2–3
high-quality projects than 8–10 medium (or lower) quality.
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If you’re looking for a new data science position, take some time and go
through the points in this article. It’s fine if you can’t check off all of these
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7 Must-Haves in your Data Science CV | by Elad Cohen | Towards Data Science 5/8/22, 3:52 PM
marks, but the more you can, the better. Hopefully, these tips will help you
stand out from the crowd and pass the CV screen with flying colors.
Good luck and happy job hunting!
Do you have a different approach when screening Data Science CVs?
Please share in the comments section below!
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