Data analysis is the process of turning raw data into information and insight, which can be used to make business decisions. A data analyst, or data business analyst, is someone with the knowledge and skills of data processing software and business development strategies to provide sound decisions to executive management. Data analysts collaborate with other data professionals to identify and extract pertinent data, transform data into useful information, generate reports based on their findings, and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess business initiatives’ success.
Finding a great data analyst for your organization is a tall order, but BeamJobs is here to help. We have great examples and advice on how to create excellent job descriptions, so you can attract and hire the right people.
The job: Crunchy Foods is a small, but growing company that provides healthy snack foods. Our data analyst position is perfect for someone with a passion for crunching large amounts of data, analyzing, and creating highly useful business information and statistics. We are looking for someone to make an immediate impact by taking the initiative to build our data warehousing and generate a library of tools to help our business leaders create successful products and expand our market share.
What you’ll be doing: The mission of this role is to assess vast quantities of data regarding our business and markets. Work with our business teams to create KPIs and tools to evaluate our processes and products.
Benefits: We offer a competitive compensation plan with salary and bonus, health insurance, 401(k), option plan, and unlimited vacation policy.
Qualifications:
About the company: Crunchy Foods was founded in 2015 in scenic Des Moines, Iowa, and is a quickly growing snack food producer and supplier. We have an increasing number of products and are working hard to develop our brand and more innovative products. We rely heavily on market data analysis and are focused on leveraging technology and big data to drive our growth. Our company is a small, driven, and highly team-oriented group. We are looking for a like-minded professional to join our team.
Job details: Buy-This-Not-That is a high-tech marketing company that was established in 2010 and is headquartered in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii. Our main business is providing media buying platforms to Fortune 200 companies. The senior data analyst function is a key role within our company and is a client-facing position that provides business-critical consulting services.
Role: This position requires equal aptitude and enthusiasm in executing these critical functions.
Benefits: We have strong competitive compensation plans with salary and bonus, full benefits including health insurance, 401(k), option plan, and unlimited vacation policy.
Qualifications:
About the company: Buy-This-Not-That is focused on leveraging cutting-edge technology and methods to maintain our position as a market-leading provider of programmatic media buying and media buying platforms. Both our technology and consulting expertise combine to give us our competitive advantage. We need someone who is a driven knowledge leader who can work closely with clients and provide expertise in best practices for data analysis. If you want to be an industry leader and pioneer in innovative marketing IT, then we are the company for you!
Job details: Treblecleff Industries in Durham, North Carolina, is a custom manufacturer of automotive parts. We are seeking a data analyst who is an expert in data acquisition, statistical analysis, review, and visualization. If you join our team, you’ll also need to be able to interpret large amounts of data from many sources to generate a seamless story to enable executive decision-making.
Responsibilities: As a key position within Treblecleff’s IT organization, this position participates in creating client deliverables, marketing analysis, research initiatives, client support services, and go-to-market strategies. The analytics manager also serves as a technology resource, assisting with databases, pipelines, and other data infrastructure.
Benefits: Our compensation packages are very competitive, commensurate with experience, and include salary and bonus, full coverage insurance, and vacation time.
Qualifications:
About the company: Treblecleff Industries has been in business for over 50 years, and we are a leading service provider for beading, slotting, drilling, flaring, flattening, notching, piercing, and threading. We are a large manufacturing company but run with very lean staff who must be experts in many areas. We are looking for outstanding talent who can help grow our product lines and business productivity. If you like challenges and great opportunities, then this is the right job for you.
Writing a great job description for any role can be challenging. The data analyst role can be especially difficult because it covers such a broad selection of skills and can be very different among companies. It is easy to fall into the trap of creating a lengthy description of what a data analyst does.
To ensure that your candidates read and understand the complete description of the job, it is important that you keep it as brief as possible, but make sure you include all the key information that makes your job and/or company unique. Remember, you're selling the job and your organization, and you'll get a lot better quality data analyst resumes and data analyst cover letters when your job description doesn't stink.
You obviously should always include all the pertinent job requirements for the role. Doing this for a data analyst position can be difficult because there are so many things that a data analyst does.
A great way to show what a job role requires is by using examples of the types of issues a data analyst in your company needs to be able to solve. Use an example of a gap they need to fill or why you are specifically hiring for this role. You can cite a specific current challenge they will need to address. If you are increasing resources, capacities, or capabilities, then talk about that. As always, be specific and brief.
Include critical and unique requirements for your company, but don’t have too many. Avoid listing obvious skills or traits, such as “strong data analysis skills.” A long list of job requirements will discourage diverse candidates from applying. Companies are constantly striving to increase their diversity and remove barriers for women and minorities in the workplace.
To ensure your job descriptions are not countering these efforts, it’s important to use words and phrases that are not biased. Mya’s “Bias in Job Descriptions” article breaks the topic down to give you a better understanding of how to keep your documents unbiased.
Furthermore, data analysts must manage many complex tasks simultaneously. They must be able to quickly and efficiently identify essential data and distill massive quantities of data down to the most valuable information. Your job description needs to do the same.
The University of Arizona's writing center stresses the importance of picking "the word that most clearly conveys your meaning." When writing your data analyst job description, consider the connotation of each word choice. While you may want your data analyst to meet with stakeholders, consider leading with "engage" rather than "meet." While they may have similar meanings, "engage" has a more positive connotation.
Finally, before you post your job description for the world to see, take the time to revise and edit. We know you worked hard, so avoid the temptation to submit your description for mass perusal before you’ve corrected word choice, grammatical errors, or even worse, an inaccurate salary range with one too many zeros.
So, take an extra day or so to have other staff (preferably data analysts familiar with the jargon) provide feedback; then, give it a last look yourself. When you’re satisfied, submit your post to boards with confidence, knowing that your job description will speak to high-quality talent.
Below is an outline that covers all the items for all data analyst job descriptions.
Job details: This is a quick introductory section for your job opening and company. Take advantage of this section to immediately sell the role and your organization. Remember to keep it very brief. Give a quick one or two sentences about the what and why of the data analyst role. It is also important to give them a taste of what your company is about. You want to strongly entice them to join your company.
What you’ll be doing: This section may also be referred to as “Roles” or “Responsibilities” or “Requirements.” This should be a bulleted list of the tasks involved in the job role. As we mentioned earlier, keep this list short, but make sure you include anything unique to the data analyst role in your company (versus other companies) and critical to the success of the role. Best practice guidance for any job description is to always use active verbs, avoid jargon and filler words, and be as specific as possible.
Qualifications: This is a key section of the job description because it quickly tells the applicant whether they are a good fit for the role. It is critical to include all the absolute must-haves for the position. Typically, these are things like: education, experience, certifications, and specialization requirements.
For soft skills, use relevant personality words like “creative,“ “self-motivated,” “organized,” and “reliable,” but avoid having too many. Data analysis has a lot of typical requirements, but it also covers a wide range of skill sets. Always include any special and non-standard qualifications for your company. As with every section of your job description, be brief, specific, and clear.
Benefits: Placement of this section is flexible. We don’t recommend having it as an introduction, but it is okay just about anywhere else. You may want to have this early in your job description if your benefits are a major selling point for the position. Focus on anything that differentiates your company benefits from other companies. Be specific and clear about the benefits and list everything. Again, you want to make the position as attractive as possible.
About the company: We recommend placing this at the very end of your job description. This section is where you give job seekers more details about your company. If your company is small and not well known, this is where you tell them why they should want to work there.
A data analysis professional is also interested in knowing what the company’s position is on leveraging information technology and big data. You should, in a sentence or two, give them a brief synopsis of how the company approaches the use of data in their strategy and how the data analyst role fits in.
Data analysts are investigators and puzzle solvers. They seek out data that is relevant to the business strategies in any way, and they identify patterns and trends in the data that can be translated into viable business plans and/or tactics. The data analyst must be able to process and translate very large volumes of data into understandable and usable business information.
Below are some sample roles a data analysis professional might fulfill as part of their job. One single data analyst might not fill all these roles, but this will serve as a source for things you might want to include.
Data Acquisition
Problem-solving
Communication and Reporting
Leadership
Training