The business intelligence analyst field is one of the fastest growing career opportunities in the United States, with an 14% projected job growth rate for the next ten years. This means that many additional businesses will be hiring business intelligence analysts, and there's a great chance you'll want to hire one yourself soon.
Follow these 4 simple steps to make sure you hire the best candidate for the job.
Step 1: Have a thorough understanding of your business goals.
Have a thorough understanding of your business goals (and know how you’ll measure success). Before you start hiring for anything, it’s crucial to have a good-to-great understanding of what you want to achieve, and how you’ll measure success in that regard. Knowing these things will help you define the role, what skillset the BI analyst needs to have, and what sort of experience they should bring with them.
Now is also a great time to get out of your own head and invite others—especially your customers—into the conversation. If they could create the ultimate toolkit or product that would solve all their problems, what would it look like? What features would it have? And if this toolkit or product existed right now, how would it make their lives better? Understanding these things will help shape your company strategy as a whole.
Step 2: Clearly outline the responsibilities and expectations of the role.
Now that you've identified the types of skills and experience your ideal candidate should have, it's time to work on another important piece of the puzzle: outlining exactly what the role will entail.
You'll need to clearly communicate what responsibilities will fall under this position. Who will this person report to? How many people will they be managing? Do they need any programming or technical skills? What are the day-to-day tasks they'll be responsible for? You'll need to think carefully about these details and make sure they're aligned with departmental expectations.
Step 3: Define your business intelligence analyst hiring process.
As a hiring manager, you'll want to create a checklist of each item that needs to be completed so you don't lose track.
Set a timeline for each step of the hiring process.
Be clear about communication and expectations for each step.
Stay organized and on schedule.
Write a clear job description.
Find a job posting platform.
Devise a screening process or phone interview for candidates that meet the minimum requirements for the role.
Submitting your ad is just the first step in the business intelligence analyst hiring process—once your ad goes live it's time to sit back and wait, right? Wrong! It's important to stay extremely proactive as your ad goes live because there will be hundreds, sometimes thousands of applicants submitting their resumes to your ad every day!
Step 4: Know what to look for in your ideal candidate.
While there's no single "right" way to go about finding a candidate, there are a few attributes that tend to indicate that you're on the right track. Here's what you should be looking for in an ideal BI analyst:
A blend of technical and soft skills. Your candidate should have strong technical skills, of course, but also show an aptitude for effective communication and collaboration – with peers, as well as in large groups. You don't want your BI analyst sitting alone with their head down all day—they need to be able to work well with others and share information when appropriate.
Experience. While it's great if your BI analyst has been working with BI tools since they were a child prodigy or something, most likely it will take some time for them to gain the experience necessary to become proficient in such a multifaceted role. The perfect candidate will have four or more years' experience working with data analysis tools like SQL, Python and R; mining systems like PowerBI; machine learning models and languages; statistical analysis software; and business intelligence suites like Tableau.
Final thoughts
Hiring a business intelligence analyst can be a difficult task, but it doesn't have to be if you have a clear sense of what you need. You'll want to set clear goals for the role as well as expectations, and then incorporate those into the hiring process so that you're looking for an ideal candidate.
For example, let's say that your data is being stored in several places and it's hard to get a holistic view of your customer data, your employee data, and other areas that are important to your business. The goal of hiring might be to centralize all this information. The expectation would be that they find ways of doing this with minimal disruption or impact on existing systems, people, or processes. Your ideal candidate will have experience working with multiple systems and finding ways to integrate them in order to make the necessary data more accessible.