The ultimate guide to hiring your data team

4 min readApr 11, 2023

The one-stop shop for all your data hiring needs.

Today we launched the ultimate guide to hiring your data team — a labor of love, research, and collaboration to bring together the best insights and wisdom around hiring a great data team.

See the guide here.

What makes hiring difficult?

It’s impossible to underestimate the value of a good team, and while there are many factors that distinguish truly exceptional data teams from the pretenders, it all starts with hiring the right people.

When I’ve hired for data roles, I’ve found it difficult to know if I’m being as effective as I could be. Am I looking in the right places? Do I have too many interview rounds? Am I being fair to all candidates? Are my questions too hard? Too easy?

Add to that anxiety, the feeling of drinking from a firehose when you look at the internet. There are so many articles, slack threads, and contradictory best practices, that it can feel insurmountable to get what you really need to be successful.

So the idea for this guide was born. What if we could aggregate the insights and best practices about hiring for data roles that really mattered in one place?

How the canvas was built

Over the span of a week, I went deep into the world of hiring, specifically hiring for data roles. My research took me across:

43 articles
11 company resources
9 helpful friends
6 Slack threads
4 Github repos
2 Salary surveys
1 LinkedIn post
1 YouTube video

And in the end, a pretty comprehensive guide was looking back at me on the screen.

How to contribute

Ideally, this is a living guide — one that will be just as relevant in 6 months as it is today. In order for that to happen, we’ll need to rely on people submitting suggestions and new resources to be included.

You can send all contribution ideas to taylor[at]count[dot]co 🙌.

Check out the guide

If you’re on your desktop you can see the full canvas here 👈.

If you’re on your mobile or have trouble viewing that (it is a large canvas), then see the screenshots below for all the details, then come back and check out the real thing when you’re back at your computer.