When Should I Hire a Data Scientist?

Data scientists are one of the most in-demand employees in the world. They are expensive, hard to attract, and require a lot of trouble to embed into your company. But, this raises a question, if they’re so much trouble, why do most large companies are constantly on the lookout to hire data scientists and data consulting services? This is a crucial question that most medium-sized and large business owners should have a comprehensive answer for. 

If you don’t, you definitely should read this article — we’ll go over some of the most common reasons businesses decide to hire data scientists. This is very important for you to learn because if your business has any of these problems below, you can get a lot of added value and significantly improve your business by hiring a data scientist. 

Do You Face Challenges Managing and Categorizing Data?

Getting a handle on the data your company produces, carefully categorizing it, and ensuring you get every vital piece of information from it possible is crucial for a significant portion of businesses out there. 

Especially as the amount and the variety of data companies are storying is ever increasing and now include audio, video, location, demographic etc. You need a complex, robust system to analyze the data, store it efficiently, and categorize it into relevant sections while allowing you to search, delete, and extract information from the records. 

This is far from a trivial task, however, and many of the ready-made solutions out there don’t have the ability to truly be able to handle the diverse array of information medium-sized companies produce. They’re often inadequate, don’t support certain types of data, and the reports they generate don’t truly fit your use cases. 

This is why you might desperately need a custom solution that truly answers all your company’s needs and saves you time and money in the long run. The person that can design and effectively operate such a solution is none other than a data scientist. 

After giving the data scientist the specifications and requirements of what exactly you need, they’ll be able to program the solution for you with relative ease (unless, it is really intricate for a large company, in which case, you might even need a team). The solution will help you manage, store, and analyze all the specific data types you want. 

Shortage of Skilled Labour – Needing Automation of Work Processes?

Labour shortages can be really difficult to overcome — before COVID hit, unemployment rates in the US and the UK were incredibly low, and you either had to pay a ridiculous amount for labour, especially skilled ones. This was even more exasperated in certain locations and localities within both countries. 

So, if it is impossible to hire or very cost-prohibitive, what’s the answer here? Well, study after study shows, when labour becomes too expensive, a large number of companies resort to automation to fix their labour shortages — this seems to be the universal, correct response to labour shortages. 

The price of automating processes of your business don’t fluctuate with labour prices substantially as prices of labour do, and this is why it might be much more appealing to automate parts of your business instead of hiring new employees when the price of labour goes up. 

Hiring a data scientist can help you automate various processes in your business. This includes data transcription, analysis, submission, storage, and much more. These are all processes ripe for automation, especially when the price of labour is high. If you find yourself in such a situation, then it is definitely recommended to try to look into automation and see if it is applicable to you and your business. 

Needing to Predict Complex Customer Behavior?

If there was a tool that allowed you to predict the behaviour of your customer and prospects with perfect accuracy then it would mean your business will literally never fail. This is because you would always know how to adapt your business, change in response to changing customer behaviour, and introduce new products that will sell like hot cake. 

Businesses have tried to predict how your customers will respond to changes in their services, modifications in their products, and introductions of new services/products for centuries now. Some of the most common tools used before the digital age were case studies, surveys, etc. Although these are still in use today, especially by large companies, there is a much more cost-effective and reliable way to predict behaviour nowadays. 

And, you guessed it, it is data science and analysis. By crafting complex, advanced algorithms to work with tens, hundreds of variables, your company can do an amazing job predicting very complex behaviour. This isn’t just theoretical either, there are many companies out there that are doing it right now. 

For example, Wall Street uses data science to predict the behaviour of other investors and improve the performance of their portfolios. Automated AI drivers also use data to predict how pedestrians will behave to reduce incidents. These are just two examples of a long list of uses that are becoming more prevalent in the business world. 

If you can think of something similar in your business, then you definitely need to look into hiring a data scientist to help you. The job is highly specialized and complex, and you definitely can’t do it without an expert (or experts).