How I’m building a job board for Data Analysts, Update #01 - for January 2023

Hi all,

on Dec 19th I launched DataAnalyst.com - this is the first update (hopefully many more to come).

Want to make sure I document the journey, and keep myself honest, so each month I will be making a post about the statistics, progress, some thoughts and what are the next steps I want to be focusing on.

Early stages vision is to become the #1 job board for data analysts - hand-picking interesting data analyst job opportunities across industries.

Where I would like to see this going - my long term vision, is building a community of aspiring and professional data enthusiasts. A place for those who love data to collaborate, share, learn and develop their careers.

So, let’s dive right in.

Statistics

General observations:

It’s hard to find jobs with salaries - atrocious in Europe, US is better due to salary transparency laws in certain states, but even then we’re looking at a range bigger than King Kong’s first dump of the day.

UK is much more “Recruiter agency” driven - most of the data analyst jobs are being posted by a 3rd party, rather than directly by companies’ own HR.

As I’m hand picking jobs from various sources, noticed a lot of jobs which have had 100+ applicants are being reopened - what does that mean? Not enough quality candidates in those 100? Are companies just hoarding CVs?

Thoughts:

Overall I’m pretty happy about the progress so far, probably actually exceeding my expectations. Even though my initial announcement (19th Dec) mainly attracted my friends / colleagues, the site is getting some traffic through direct type-ins, Twitter and LinkedIn engagements.

What is more important for me is that I can see visitors spending time on the site, clicking through job posts, and some are actually coming back to check out what’s new.

Something that’s annoying me (and most likely also is annoying visitors to the site) is that currently the site is very much US focused, there’s no doubt about that. Multiple factors in play - from agency postings in the UK, job being posted in local language, to absolute lack of salaries available in the EU. This obviously has a trickle down effect - imagine you’re looking for a data analyst role in France, confirm your filters and you’ll see one job - well, that might be an extra job you haven’t applied yet, but if there aren’t further quality enough listings being added over the course of the week, you’ll extremely likely not to come back.

Could that be solved by posting jobs without a salary - yes, it probably could and it would definitely increase the amount of jobs posted for a certain country, on the other hand, I hate not knowing what the salary range is when applying myself.

Another option would be only focusing on the US market in the initial stages, but I am really not sure how I feel about that.

The site is still extremely fresh, so will monitor behaviours for the first 3 months and make a decision then.

Things in the pipeline:

• Monthly Data Analyst jobs Hiring Insights - which industries are hiring, salary trends
• The complete data analyst guide (how to become a data analyst, career path, responsibilities and skills…)
• Day of a data analyst (people in the industry sharing their journey)
• Launch the newsletter - honestly this should be much higher on my to do list, but really out of my depth to automate it
• Start reaching out to HR / job posters directly

So, there are 3 ways you could get involved:

• Looking for a new challenge? Check out the website - I’m adding new jobs daily
• Looking to hire a data analyst to your team? Shoot me an email at alex@dataanalyst.com, and I’ll upgrade your first listing for free!
• I’m in early stages of creating a “Day of a Data Analyst” section - if you’re open to do an email based interview about your data analyst career journey, just send me a message and we’ll organise something.

If you have any questions, concerns, come across glitches - please just reach out, happy to chat.

Thank you and see you in a month.

Alex