The Changing Landscape of the Data Talent market – A 360 Degree Talent Journey

Omnis Partners recently held a round table with a group of highly experienced leaders in Data. Based on these discussions and a range of further interviews please find our insights that relate to hiring and the wider talent market.

As a background, despite its relative infancy, Data is now a mainstream matured market, ubiquitous across all industries having exploded about a decade ago.

The surge in demand for data professionals, especially during the “great resignation,” led to a period of extensive hiring. In hindsight there were instances of significant over-hiring during this period, which has sharply corrected in the last 24 months.

These excesses were partly fuelled by cheap money, and partly by exuberance over the potential of Data Science.

During this high growth phase many technology led recruitment firms built Data talent teams to meet the demand from across their client bases.

The 2022 slump in hiring, the increased cost of capital and the need for organisations to show or increase profits, has led to a significant re-think of the role that Data plays, and the operational structure of Data teams.

1. The role of CDO is becoming less clear. Teams have shrunk and fragmented and there is a trend to migrate engineering into the CTO. There has been an uptick in offshoring data functions. This is in part cost management, but also the evolution and decentralisation of the data team. This is a fluid trend with no obvious outcome.
2. Internally there are battle lines being drawn for ownership of data across the leadership functions.
3. The Data Science market is fragmenting, from broad and multi-faceted, to more focussed and nuanced. The term Data Science now has echoes of the term “Big Data” in that it means many things to many different groups. From customer insight to LLM and beyond.
4. There has been a significant downsizing of Data teams across all industries, but most particularly in the start-up / scale-up space, leading to a substantial increase in highly capable individuals in the job market.
5. Meanwhile the rate of development in Data technology is presenting a challenge to those who are out of work to remain relevant.
6. In most cases existing teams are now stretched to capacity and the veil of hiring freezes is starting to lift. However roles are very specific, and the bar for hiring is high.
7. Recruitment processes have lengthened reflecting both a buyers’ market and nervousness around hiring.
8. The explosion and subsequent contraction caught talent partners by surprise and both internal and external suppliers have substantially downsized to reflect the dwindling market. Recruitment firms have either scaled down, or merged with more general IT, their Data recruitment functions, and internal talent teams have been reduced or removed.
9. Vacancies are returning in organisations that have illustrated the value in Data, for example those whose b2c models respond well to recommendation engines and customer profiling, or for whom Data provides quantifiable ROI rather than “prettier dashboards.”
10. We have identified a few areas where Data remains relatively untapped, in particular Private Equity is turning to data to look for efficiencies in deal origination, due diligence, and portfolio management. But volumes are low, and the experience needed is very specific.
11. As suppliers to the market, we are currently seeing significant candidate availability and combined with a tightening of hiring guidelines, our role as recruitment partners is to support clients in precisely identifying the needs of the role, shaping our search and hiring process, and focussing on targeting key individuals, as well as navigating large volumes of active candidates.
12. Throughout our conversations the recurrent theme is value. Value creation and unlocking value are the phrases du jour. This is a pan-industry narrative. Data must equate to value.
13. Diversity is upper most in the minds of hiring managers. For example, women make up around only 25% of Data team composition and there is a desire to address this imbalance. We are being briefed on roles and tasked with supporting key DEI hiring initiatives as well as reporting our own DEI data.

With so many of the larger talent and recruitment firms having shrunk their Data teams, or abandoned the market we return to a point of more limited expertise and capacity on the supply side.

Data remains a highly complex and highly evolutionary market, that is well suited to more experienced and more agile recruitment firms. Having entered the market in the early 2000s when very few talent firms had any understanding of how to tackle the data market, and to now return to a position where the roles are complex, nuanced and scarce, and there are fewer suppliers, we appear to have completed an interesting 360 degree journey.

As the market evolves and with the emergence of AI it is unlikely to remain subdued for long as organisations seek to unlock the opportunity of AI, and dare we say, the value of data.

Omnis Partners is a boutique and highly experienced talent firm that understands the market dynamics and remains agile enough to respond to evolutionary change. If the above is resonant then please do drop us a line to see where we can support your hiring challenges.