How I’m building a job board for Data Analysts, Update #04 - for April 2023
Hi all,
on Dec 19th I launched DataAnalyst.com - this is the fourth update.
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
1. General Observations
Stats
DataAnalyst.com is celebrating being live for 4 months, and we’ve brought over 1,100 hand curated data analyst jobs onto the site - all of them including a salary range.
There’s now 918 people subscribed to the newsletter, and I can’t thank you enough for your support and for joining us on the journey.
While in March we’ve seen just about 3,000 visitors, in April the site grew to over 5,000 monthly visitors across 26,000 pageviews, and we’ve been able to register approximately 4,000 data analyst applications being started from the site!
This bump is primarily to Google finally taking the site seriously, and after 3 months of sending us no visitors, the site has finally started ranking (for “data analyst jobs” search), gaining impressions and clicks, overall accounting for about 20% of this month’s visitors.
Super happy to see this, as having multiple channels is crucial to long term growth and protecting the site and traffic from algorithm updates.
SEO game is still a very new topic to me, so I am grateful to couple of people who reached out in previous comments, sharing tips and low hanging fruit for me to address.
Ongoing challenges - shifting focus to cover United States only for the time being
As I was mentioning over the last 3 months, I am worried that I am not able to effectively cover the UK market any more. Why? Starting with lack of salary transparency, but also the market is largely being operated by recruitment industry, resulting in lower number of direct company listings.
As a solo-founder, prioritization on which activities I spend time is crucial, and since I am committed to my approach to only have job listings with salary posted, I decided to pause my coverage of the UK market for the time being.
All in all, I simply realised that I wouldn’t be able to consistently add quality data analyst jobs for the individual market, which would eventually lead to poor job seeker experience.
As the site grows, I will look to expand the team, and eventually have more bandwidth to cover the UK and other international markets.
I certainly hope that DataAnalyst.com will still be able to provide value even to out-of-the-US data analysts - be it with market insights, expert interviews, or with guides and other education material that we have in the roadmap.
Slow and steady - building partnerships
Something that I have touched upon in my update last time - we still haven’t had any paid posts published on the site. Over the last 4 months, there’s been very little done to reach out to HR departments of companies and to educate them about DataAnalyst existence, and our proposition. The primary reason is that I’d still like to see the traffic numbers improve, so when I do speak to those accountable for hiring, I could build the case of us being able to bring them qualified leads, much easier.
In March, I was super excited to share the news that we’ve been cooperating with a data startup (an alternative to Snowflake that’s fast, simple to use, and open source), to bring them qualified candidates, and to help them build out their data team.
Well, in April, I witnessed first hand the power of community, of bringing people along on the journey and putting yourself out there.
Huge shout out and thank you to Maggie who writes the Data Storyteller newsletter, which she sends out every couple of weeks. Not only she highlighted DataAnalyst.com to her audience few times, but when a hiring manager from Michelin reached out to her about promoting a job, she connected us instead. Fast forward, and over the next couple of weeks I’ll be speaking with Michelin’ talent acquisition team, and figuring out a way how Data Analyst can bring qualified candidates and help them build out their data teams.
This is another huge milestone toward the overall goal - to continue developing trusted partnerships with organisations, to bring more expert interviews, and data analyst job opportunities on our site, for all of you to learn from and explore.
Some fixes
I’ve integrated a “Search by Anything” filter into the job feed - you can now search by company name, location (including the state), industry but also a specific role focus - just try it! (Warning - it’s highly experimental).
2. Data Analyst Job Market Insights
As the amount of job opportunities on the site grows, we’re utilising the data available to bringing you the fourth (April) edition of Market Insights - a deep dive into the data analyst job market, where we can have a look at the job openings and provide you all with insights on the latest hiring trends for the past month in the US market
With the insights I’m trying to bring answers to questions such as: Which industries are hiring the most? Are we seeing any salary increases? And what about the remote working trend?
I can totally see that at least at the start, this will not be extensive enough to highlight any trends, but I do believe that doing this on a monthly basis, it is something that will provide value over the long term to those looking for roles - the more data points we collect, the more insights we can uncover.
For the US, April edition, you can see the full report
3. “Day in the Life” - a series of interviews with data analysts sharing their experience, thoughts and advice.
The next edition of our “Day in the life of a Data Analyst” is out, and this time we spoke with Elijah, who’s currently working at Humana.
We chat about his experience, as well as dip our toes into what seems to be on the mind of pretty much everyone right now: Is AI/Chat GPT a threat to data analysts?
Golden gem - his advice for those aspiring to enter the industry:
“Build portfolios. This is especially important in the absence of a college degree. With or without a degree, a portfolio is the best way to prove you have used SQL, Tableau, etc. in an applied context. This step is incredibly important. Don’t skip it.”
Highly recommend reading the full interview
Things in the pipeline
- New data analyst jobs, added daily
- Actually launching the weekly newsletter with the pick of best jobs directly to your inbox (yes, I know…)
- Monthly US data analyst market insights
- Improving the overall site experience (this one is a never ending activity)
- Continuing to bring you Data Analysts across their experience levels, to share tips, tricks and their thoughts
- Tested a feature that would allow visitors to report an expired job posting - it broke, trying to find a fix
3 ways you could help
- Looking for a new challenge? Check out the website - I’m adding new jobs daily
- Looking to hire a data analyst to your team? Do you know anyone looking to hire? Shoot me a message at alex@dataanalyst.com, and I’ll upgrade your first listing for free!
- As I mentioned, we have an ongoing “Day of a Data Analyst” series. For those of you who are open to do an email based interview about your data analyst career journey, please just send me a message and we’ll organise something - would love to get you featured and share your experience with our readers!
If you have any questions, concerns, come across glitches - please just reach out, happy to chat.
Thank you all again, and see you in a month.
Alex