Ai in data science job applications

I’ve talked a couple of times about people using AI to apply for jobs in my team. I don’t entirely feel like I’ve got my point across so I thought I’d write a blog post about it.

I think sometimes people think that I actively want to weed out people who need AI to help them write an application form. So I’d like to say upfront that I do not want to weed out that kind of person. When I recruit data scientists I look for people who can communicate well, but that absolutely includes people who use AI to help them communicate well. Clearly you can use AI to communicate in the actual job, so I have no issue with people using it as part of the recruitment process. For the same reason I don’t give people silly tests they do in 30 minutes with no google in my interviews. I ask people to bring me some code they wrote and to talk about it. Use whatever tools you want, but bring me something that’s yours and explain it to me. And it works very well.

The data science job market is absolutely brutal at the moment. I have rejected hundreds of job application forms and tens of interview candidates in the last 12 months. It breaks my heart and I’d like to give everyone a job. And I’ve certainly rejected lots of people who were very appointable.

So I want to be as clear as possible here. I see a lot of content that appears to be written almost entirely by AI at the application stage. We reject nearly all of the candidates who submit stuff like that. Not because they used AI to write it but because AI is bad at writing data science job applications. I don’t hugely care what other data science managers think about what I’m writing, they can all think that I’m an elitist idiot who thinks data scientists should be able to spell really well with no help- but if you’re a data scientist applying for jobs please listen to what I’m saying. AI is bad at writing data science job applications. You will never get a job interview with me unless you go beyond what the AI tells you to write (and see my other post for some advice on what to write). If you need help writing and use AI to do it that is completely fine by me but you’ve got to do a better job than the AI does because and I’ll say it one more time AI is bad at writing data science job applications.

Now I’ve started having people say things in interviews that appear to be written by AI. This isn’t quite as problematic on the surface because AI usually ticks the right boxes and gives decent answers. However, there is a serious flaw in this method that again guarantees that you will not succeed using AI unless you add some of yourself in there. This flaw is simply that people are talking about concepts at interview that they don’t understand, because they don’t have the level of experience they claim to, they’re just saying what the AI said. For example, they say something like “I used Docker” but they are not able to give any information about what they used it for or how they used it (this is not a real example, it’s to illustrate my point).

To be clear, I’ve no idea if people are using AI or not. If you showed me some data science questions I could give you some buzzwords to say at the interview to impress the interviewer. The fact that this stuff is generated by AI is neither here nor there. Maybe your friend told you to say it. Maybe you googled “Stuff to say at data science interviews”. But if you come to an interview and talk about something but show no understanding of it nobody is going to employ you. You need to understand all the stuff you’re talking about at interview whether you got it from AI, your friend down the pub, or google.

Honestly some of my feelings are mixed in to this post. I give interview questions a week in advance to give everyone the best chance to do well at the interview. And I give up my time and the time of the team to interview data scientists. It’s actually one of the highlights of my job and I love meeting candidates and talking to them about their work and the work of my team . Many candidates tell me something I don’t know or have a unique way of looking at stuff. Not all hiring managers give questions in advance, and they say things like “They’ll just get it off ChatGPT”. So by coming to an interview and parroting AI text that you don’t understand you’re not only harming your own chances of succeeding at interview but also making it less likely that other people will give everyone the best chance as I do and supply questions in advance.

So please, if you’re a data scientist applying for jobs, don’t blindly paste in AI generated content into the application form (but use it to enhance what you write by all means). And if you do use AI to help you write your application form please make sure you understand what you’re writing and can talk about it at interview.