A contact from the DFW Job Seekers Network was doing some practice interviewing with me recently and asked what I think is most important in an Business Intelligence job applicant. Since “ability and eagerness to do all my work for me” isn’t apparently a good answer, I decided to give this some thought. Fortunately, I had about an hour available during the first half of the Cowboys-Falcons game, when the Dallas Cowboys weren’t doing anything worth watching.*
It really wasn’t hard to boil down my candidate criteria profile. I’ve hired and inherited enough employees in the past 25 years to know what works. You can and should delve into specifics on each attribute, but when I get the rare chance to add someone to a team, I’m focusing on these areas:
SQL Skill. Way back when I was in eighth grade, the business instructor at my junior high school mentioned that people should start considering typing a basic skill for any job.** Even if your specific BI job doesn’t involve writing SQL code, I want you to have a grasp of it, because that tells me you understand the fundamentals of data structures.
Proactive Attitude: This is huge. First, the successful BI person needs to guide conversations with the stakeholders. You must go to them, learn their business models and success measures, and coach them on what the information model can and can’t do for them. You also have to be proactive with the team, constantly reaching out to understand what your colleagues are doing and educating them on your work. Finally, you have to be self-motivated and proactive with learning, whether it’s new technical skills or related work subjects. Sure, your manager is here both to teach and to arrange teaching, but no amount of meetings and lecture can overcome apathy.*** You have to drive, so in an interview, demonstrate that you are a driver.
Cultural Fit: Anyone who says cultural fit doesn’t matter is either wrong or working with roles where the labor source can be swapped out with little disruption. One person who feels out of place has the potential to turn a well-oiled machine into chaos. In no way does this mean the group has to be homogenous. It doesn’t mean there’s 100% harmony. Diversity and healthy conflict both contribute greatly to an organization’s success. Whether the culture is highly social and friendly or predominantly impersonal and down to business, the new hire has to fit the culture. Of course, new additions can evolve the culture, and that’s often a huge positive in itself, but when I’m interviewing someone, I want to feel that the candidate will fit in with us and we’ll fit with the candidate.
Notice that I didn’t say anything about other technology skills? Experience with PowerBI, SSRS, Hadoop, or R might be important or even required for this job, but they’re still secondary to my top three. Until I know that you’ve got a fundamental skill set, the proactive attitude, and seem to be a strong cultural fit, I really don’t care that you’re the strongest R programmer on this side of the Mississippi. The best developer in the world does me no good if she’s not eager to do amazing things.
There’s a lot more to be said about the next level of team member characteristics, regarding both candidate interviewing and growth of existing employees. I’ll come back to that topic another time, perhaps after the Stars have won the Stanley Cup.
* Which is fine. The Dallas Stars started the Stanley Cup Finals last night with a win in Game 1, and we all know that football is really just acceptable entertainment for when hockey isn’t on.
** Yeah, it was a while ago. I also learned that skill on a manual typewriter.
*** Say what you want about the quality of education, but there’s at least one constant theme from kindergarten through Ph.D. If you don’t show up for school, no one’s coming to your house to shove an education into your brain.
**** I’ve landed (briefly) in a few places where the culture could be summed up quickly as “toxic.” I didn’t fit. So I left.