Data Science Recruitment for AI-Driven Companies

A data scientist who came through PE Limited’s AI team search and was appointed somewhere else entirely, because the business recognised the fit was stronger in another team.

This search did not end where it started, and that was the point. The candidate came through the process for the new AI team, and during it became clear that their skills and experience fitted a different team in the business better than the one we had been engaged on. Seeing that means knowing a client well enough to look past the role in front of you, and raising it rather than pushing a strong candidate at the brief you happen to be working.

Hired into a different team from the one they originally interviewed for. A year on they are working on high-profile projects, well embedded in the business, and building AI into the products of a market-leading engineering software company.

With the AI Lead and engineers in place, PE Limited added the first data scientist to its new AI team, working on AI inside the product rather than analytics alongside it.

Guildford, five days a week in the office, narrowed the pool the same way it did on every PE search. The harder constraint was domain. PE’s products sit in a specialist corner of the oil and gas industry and there is no pool of data scientists who already understand it, so this had to be someone capable of a serious amount of upskilling, while also being the first data scientist in a function that had not existed a year earlier.

The first data science hire into PE’s new AI function, working on AI built into the products rather than on reporting.