Talent spotting is becoming ingenious as contestants discovered at a recent event organised by data analytics provider Mu Sigma.
The engineers aspiring to become decision scientists, as the company calls its professionals, were asked to create a business model for a retailer of vada-pav, the popular bread and potato snack, in a test aimed at judging both coding skills and native intuition.
From the price of potatoes and chillies and following a patented recipe to measuring the impact of politics, cyclones and other forces of nature on the supply chain, the contestants analysed disparate data and made sense of them.
"We look for talent that is more right brained or intuitive, thoughtful, and subjective. It is not just about numbers but feelings. There is a human experience behind every decision," said Ambiga Dhiraj, head of fulfillment at Mu Sigma, who said no hires were made at a particular company event where over 2,000 students from 317 engineering colleges took part.
"We don't care much for the alma mater, what we look for is creativity, thoroughness of the approach and the quality of work," said Dhiraj who expects her company to hire 1,500 data scientists this year.
Experts said this multi-disciplinary approach that combines math, intuition and coding is becoming necessary in the fast-growing global data analytics industry.
India will need two lakh data scientists in the next few years, according to consulting firm McKinsey, while the US requires 1.5 million big data analysts.
"A good data scientist is someone who knows which algorithm is good for what," Amr Awadallah, cofounder and chief technology officer of California-based big data startup Cloudera which in the past two weeks raised $900 million ( Rs 5,396 crore) from chipmaker Intel, Google Ventures, T. Rowe Price and Michael Dell's private equity arm.
Mu Sigma, which employs over 3,000 decision scientists, has developed recruitment processes designed to identify talent which can uniquely blend left-brained and right-brained thinking to solve complex business problems.
For instance, aspirants have to watch a film or a Ted Talk clipping and write down key takeaways on a piece of paper no bigger than a business card.
"Synthesis is the essence compared to summary," said Dhiraj an alumnus of College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai.
Once hired, employees have to acquire an internal certification which involves significant amounts of time spent on client engagements covering a variety of business problems and domains.Mu Sigma clients include several of the world's top corporations including Pfizer, Microsoft and Dell.
Twenty-five year-old Piyush Sagar Mishra, an engineer from Manipal Institute of Technology who underwent the training, said the focus was on "qualities such as curiosity, collaboration, exploring new ideas and a knack for learning".
Experts say what is working for Mu Sigma is that instead of hiring senior consultants it is chasing fresh graduates and teaching them the art of decision science.
"We are laying focus on building a robust analytics workforce, rather than acquiring it," said Dhiraj.
