#047: Assessing Analytics Job Descriptions

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:04.00 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Horror Hour. Tim, Michael and the occasional guests discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And no, the Digital Analytics Horror Hour.

00:00:23.08 [Michael Helbling]: Hi everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is Episode 47. Do you ever get contacted by recruiters? If not, give it six months. For most of us in the digital analytics space, getting access to new job opportunities is just sort of this thing, you know? But how to decide what is best? understanding how to read between the lines in a job description can help you sometimes avoid making a poor career choice. And that’s what we’re going to talk about on this show. How do you evaluate and assess a job description? Tim and I are going to pool our collective but slightly outdated wisdom since both of us have been at the same companies for about four years now almost. But in any case, welcome Tim, my co-host to the show.

00:01:16.23 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, hold on. So you said it’s where? That’s a good look. Okay. It’s good location. Do what? I’ll be doing storytelling and marketing mix modeling. You know, I’m recording this podcast right now. Can I get back to you? Just shoot me an email. Yeah, I’ll return your call. Okay. Yes. Yeah. Hey, Michael. What’s going on? Hey, Tim.

00:01:41.60 [Michael Helbling]: That was good. Sorry about that. That was the first ever digital analytics power hour attempt at a comedy sketch.

00:01:51.18 [Tim Wilson]: The amount of planning that went into that started halfway through your intro.

00:01:55.65 [Michael Helbling]: Hey, no, it’s perfect. And that’s the thing is one of the challenges of the modern day analyst is evaluating career opportunities because there are so many of them. And even, you know, as you and I were preparing for this show, I think we were both just struck again by the number of opportunities that exist out there in all different shapes and sizes.

00:02:20.90 [Tim Wilson]: Thought we gas like i gotta go dig up i gotta see if i can find a couple of open postings on one of these job sites that did not take long yeah and it’s you know we understand right that it there is.

00:02:31.82 [Michael Helbling]: A lot of demand in our industry but it seems like it’s as strong as it ever was and while that’s really great news for anybody practicing analytics. It can also give you tough choices in terms of what’s the right thing. So let’s dig into it. Tim, what is it about a job description that first could capture your interest?

00:02:58.33 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, my interest? Probably if it’s got a couple of hooks on something that I’m looking to grow at in my career, like some level of specificity. It’s funny to say what grabs me as that should read more. I’d like to read more. It tends to be more, you know, by bullet number two, I’m like, ugh, you’re killing me. You know, this is ridiculous. So the absence of utter blather is kind of what grabs me, I guess.

00:03:29.01 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. And I think for me, one of the things that’s so key is the description of the company and the description of what they’re trying to do with this role.

00:03:40.22 [Tim Wilson]: And so often the company usually kind of boilerplates.

00:03:43.88 [Michael Helbling]: A lot of times it is, but sometimes that can really capture, you know, I mean, think about like, Zappos for instance, right? So I think they described your company in their culture really well. I actually don’t have an example of a Zappos job description, but I’m just saying like that’s an example of one that sort of has like a really can catch your eye with kind of what they’re thinking about in terms of what their company or their culture is. So that is really important though because culture matters.

00:04:13.78 [Tim Wilson]: We’re back to literally skip those paragraphs. They’re usually at the bottom.

00:04:18.50 [Michael Helbling]: Well, that’s interesting. So, well, no, but that’s a good comparison because I read those but you do not or not usually or you come back to them if there’s things in the like position requirements or essential skills that like are interesting to you.

00:04:33.55 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, but to end to be fair, I have not I have not read a job description that I was applying for the job in probably six years. So how I actually read it. So I feel like I tend to be reading job descriptions on behalf, you know, from the poster side.

00:04:50.14 [Michael Helbling]: Right. Or for someone else like, Hey, is this a good? What do you think of this? Yeah. Or do you know somebody who could fit this role or something like that?

00:04:58.38 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, I guess that’s when somebody says, can you what do you think of this job? You know, I still don’t tend to read. that I tend to go look and say, do I know anybody at that company? And then it’s one, what do I think of that person? And two, do I know that person well enough to, to, you know, probe them a little bit for the, for some Intel?

00:05:18.24 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah.

00:05:18.98 [Tim Wilson]: But yeah, I’ve had ones where it’s like, Hey, we’re looking for this. Can you read it? And I’ve had that, okay, time to put on your tactful writing hat to say, Oh my God, you know, you are, Really, do they need experience in core metrics and web trends and Adobe Analytics when you only run one of those?

00:05:39.00 [Michael Helbling]: At this point, would you consider the need for experience in core metrics a red flag if you were doing a job search?

00:05:47.79 [Tim Wilson]: I don’t think so. I know they’re easy to bash, but it seems like they’re areas. Actually, last week, I was somewhere where a very large local retailer that’s running it. I understand the core metrics is that a lot of companies that are using it and using it well are using it as a data capture mechanism. They basically have said, A tag’s a tag. There’s a lot about the sort of multi-tag stuff in core metrics that if we’re able to take in the raw feed and we want to splice it with other data anyway, we don’t need the entire front end. We just need that raw feed of hits and we know how to parse it and it works fine.

00:06:26.18 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, and I would agree it’s not necessarily a deal breaker. It’s just one of those things where you’re like, okay, so I wonder if in the interview process that will be on the table or not.

00:06:36.27 [Tim Wilson]: Which curiosity was lands in, corn metrics or were they Adobe the whole time?

00:06:39.63 [Michael Helbling]: When I was there, we were on Adobe Analytics. Okay. They had transitioned from core metrics in the past though. So the campaign ID still sported the classy CM underscore MMC.

00:06:52.83 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, yeah, I’ve got clients that transitioned years ago and they’re still yeah, they don’t even have Adobe setup to pick it up and that I mean for me that would be a red flag because it’s not it’s a tool that I am in on occasion and bumble my way through and just don’t know it well enough. But if, hey, if you’re an analyst who’s been doing, you know, core metrics like crazy shit, move to Wisconsin, you can have your pick of companies there or for that matter, Columbus. I mean, they’re, and I’m sure there are others.

00:07:18.55 [Michael Helbling]: No, there’s plenty of them. And that’s just it is, I honestly, you know, I think, and I, you probably agree with this in terms of evaluating someone for a position.

00:07:27.05 [Tim Wilson]: I’ll let you know if I agree with it. Let’s just not be presumptive.

00:07:30.41 [Michael Helbling]: I’m pretty sure you agree with this and that the tools, I’m not sure if you agree at all, but let’s just play out this scenario where you agree with me. The tools themselves matter a lot less to what an analyst does. So in other words, if I was hiring an analyst and I had Core Metrics as my tool and the person coming in had no experience on Core Metrics, I’d be less worried about that than if they had no ability to show me their critical thinking or storytelling or data analysis skill.

00:08:03.98 [Tim Wilson]: Uh, I, I partially agree. So one, I’m pragmatic enough to know that it’s a big plus.

00:08:09.52 [Michael Helbling]: You’re just looking for a reason to disagree at this point.

00:08:12.76 [Tim Wilson]: Well, no, if, if I’m hiring for core metrics and, and somebody comes in and doesn’t have core metrics, but they do have Adobe or GA or web trends or.

00:08:22.64 [Michael Helbling]: Well, yeah, obviously comparable in a different tool.

00:08:25.94 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, but I also have gone through now enough times that it’s just it’s exhausting to have somebody come in who use tool X and they’re like, yeah, I can learn whatever and then for years. Everything they’re doing until why I have to start every conversation with them telling me that well yeah I you know but how how did this thing you know in Adobe this is I would just do this this way I’m like yeah but you’ve been doing this for a year and a half and it’s time to stop playing the if I was doing it in Adobe. Card so I mean I think there’s in a job description if they list the tool I would like to see it listed as a you know this is what we use although hopefully you’re gonna go check that out anyway you know we’ll take other comparable skills. I know that we like to say, yeah, you just need critical thinking and the curiosity and these sort of competencies and attributes. But the fact is, you need to be able to wrap your damn head around how the tool works and how the data is coming in.

00:09:31.19 [Michael Helbling]: No, absolutely. I do agree with that statement.

00:09:35.16 [Tim Wilson]: I think if that person is… You agree with me, but I don’t agree with you.

00:09:38.42 [Michael Helbling]: That’s perfect. I was going to say that if for a year the person is carping on the tool and how everything would be better if they could switch to this other tool, that was a defect that you should have discovered in a different part of the interview process.

00:09:54.08 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, well played. Boom. Well played. Boom.

00:09:58.91 [Michael Helbling]: All right. We’re talking about job descriptions not about hiring people because Tim refuses to hire me no matter how much I beg him. So here we go. Let’s talk about the scope and what to look for in terms of what the job description is. So what are the things that sort of light up both good or bad when you look at a job description?

00:10:28.55 [Tim Wilson]: I mean it’s almost cliche to say it at this point but the the unicorn job description where it looks like somebody in HR has gone to monster or indeed and they have searched for whatever the job title is and then they have. very proudly gone and copied the descriptions from seven different other postings and then they’ve kind of deduced them and then put them together and then put that in front of the hiring manager and says is this what you would like and they say yes and then you look at this job description and it’s you’re going to be speccing you know managing the implementation and and best in class data collection and you’re going to be managing garnering actionable insights from the data and you’re going to be a master of storytelling and visualization and you’re going to be able to do marketing mix, market mix modeling and attribution management and it’s just so clearly a Frankenstein together. list of every buzzword trying to hit every keyword search to me that’s like you know what the hiring manager either was not sufficiently involved in the job description or the hiring manager doesn’t really know what they really need and that’s a big big red flag for me.

00:11:43.93 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of sieve type stuff where they’re trying to capture every little thing. And it is a warning sign to me when one role is performing too many functions. Because today’s analytics has to exist in any decent sized organization. Obviously, there are small businesses, medium sized businesses where this doesn’t apply. But you can’t just have one analyst doing everything now.

00:12:15.08 [Tim Wilson]: And that’s the thing. I think if you’re a small business, and you’re going to hire something you’re calling an analyst and you list the sun and the moon, that’s still a problem. If you’re a small business and you can afford one person, then you need to be able to scope your job description to what that one person can realistically do.

00:12:32.43 [Michael Helbling]: Right. But I mean, there’s a big difference in like, hey, let’s get some new tags on the website and the analyst jumps into there. tag management tool and publishes them to the site versus, hey, let’s put some new tags on this website and you start planning all your steering committee meetings for the eight months down the road when this finally goes into production. And those two things exist in the real world, right? So that’s what I mean by that. The other thing, though, is that I’ve actually found through personal experience, sometimes it’s not necessarily a total showstopper if somebody’s throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall. I was in an interview once, and I kind of brought that question up. I said, hey, listen, there’s a number of skills in this job description. Here’s how I match up to those. And I want to tell you about the ones that I don’t have. And I want you to know that now, because I don’t want you to proceed in the interview process if you feel like that won’t be a fit. And the interviewer was like, it’s actually OK. We actually took a lot of different things, because we wanted to cast a wide net. And I was like, just so you know, that might get you less candidates than more. But it didn’t inhibit the conversation at that point. But it was sort of like I just don’t care. I’m not going to pretend that I know stuff. So I’ll just tell you, hey, if you need me to be this kind of expert, I’m not. I’ll tell you what I think it takes to become that and whether I could do that for you or not.

00:14:06.02 [Tim Wilson]: That doesn’t that it just vaguely rings of the I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to write a short email or the I’m going to make your tagging job really easy. Just tag everything.

00:14:16.50 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I mean, it’s not ideal, right? It’s just sometimes it’s not necessarily completely deal breaker. And it’s hard sometimes because a lot of times the people writing these job descriptions have less idea about what it is that these people do or what we do. And that’s certainly been true historically.

00:14:35.65 [Tim Wilson]: Well, and that’s actually, I think, a great point that if it is a entry level to junior, mid-level, you’re getting hired into an organization that’s an analytics organization, I think there’s no excuse for that kind of job description because that should have a hiring manager who knows what they’re getting. If you’re getting hired into a more senior level and they’re There’s a bullet in there about building the analytics organization, or building the analytics practice, or building the analytics team. And I’ve certainly walked in to those. And those are companies that I think really, really struggle in there. We finally recognize we need to build this. We maybe have one really junior person who has no one mentoring them. And they don’t even know what right looks like. If they’ve got the line item that says, hey, we need somebody to build this organization, then I feel like that’s the opening to go in and say, OK. If you want to build this organization, you’ve got two points in this job description that I think are 80% of this job. You’ve got five things on here that we’ll talk about in five years, realistically, whether you hire me or not. And then, so like that I think falls into your category. So I’d say the super broad, and this is a $40,000 a year job, I’d run for the hills. If it’s a more seasoned job, then

00:15:53.48 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, you hear that, San Francisco? There are people out there making $40,000 a year. Sorry.

00:16:04.51 [Tim Wilson]: So I feel like we’ve gotten this far in, and we have not actually brought up what I think is actually a good resource. And I had given it a little bit of a look. I mean, the DAA’s job descriptions, which the good and the bad, if you’re not a member of the DAA, not a corporate member, then you don’t readily have access to it. We’re not going to send you the job description, but there are some things I think we can draw from it, and one of them being just the sheer number of roles that they’ve got defined. I mean, I think overall it’s a pretty good document. So is it worth chatting a little bit about sort of what I think they did right?

00:16:41.80 [Michael Helbling]: Absolutely. Are we allowed to say negative things about it, or is that anti? Oh, yeah.

00:16:47.14 [Tim Wilson]: I think there are some negative things as well.

00:16:50.37 [Michael Helbling]: No, I mean, I don’t want to be overly critical because I love the resource that it is and what it’s attempting to provide to people and thinking through both their own careers as well as, you know, people going out to do hiring in this space. So overall, big fan. But I think there’s also some room for improvement too. But anyways, let’s go for it. What are you seeing that you think is that’s a good thing?

00:17:14.90 [Tim Wilson]: Well, I mean, anything that it’s inherently a product by a committee. So right, a horse.

00:17:20.13 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah.

00:17:21.49 [Tim Wilson]: Moeose is a horse designed by committee.

00:17:23.27 [Michael Helbling]: Well, and so like, here’s one example of, you know, where I think in our industry today, we have an actual problem, which is, and it’s actually across digital, I think, in terms of agencies and things like that. The director level title, right? The director title is one that I think it’s passed out way too soon.

00:17:44.52 [Tim Wilson]: Well, I think in some ways the senior analyst gets passed out way too soon.

00:17:51.27 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, and that’s the challenge. I think people who in certain agency settings have been around for four or five years suddenly have director level titles, which doesn’t make a lot of sense in other contexts.

00:18:06.52 [Tim Wilson]: Well, but I mean, they, I mean, to be fair, the financial industry kind of led the charge on that.

00:18:12.21 [Michael Helbling]: Right. Everybody’s an AVP.

00:18:14.66 [Tim Wilson]: But I think separately from that, if you just look, I mean, what you should be doing with the document, because it’s basically for anybody who hasn’t seen you to have access, it’s a big grid. You got multiple tabs and you’ve got four levels of people, ignore what the titles are. It’s from more junior to most senior. Within those, you’ve got, you know, two to four roles. So if you look at it, you’ve got, I don’t know, 10 or 12 different descriptions. And then you’ve got way too many rows of competencies that you’re ever going to want to put on a job description. Because the DAs, in a sense, they try to cover everybody’s needs. But if I was writing a job description, I would go through that and say I want to find one column that fits what I think I’m looking for and then I want to read through what they’ve got listed as the competencies and start pulling out because it’s got stuff that is, you know, should you be mentoring junior analysts to identify interest areas and outline path to become an expert? Is that important for this role or not? You know should you be taining and incorporating benchmark data internal external and reports and analysis for comparison purposes what level what degree should you be doing that. So i think i mean to me the title thing aside although i do feel like companies set themselves up for some challenges because they like basically wind up reading something that’s. Director level from the DAA, we look at it and say, really? That’s a director? That seems a little high. They look at it and say, oh my god, that should be entry level. And we want to pay this really low salary for it. But if you can’t find, to me, generally, looking down and saying, these are pretty well-crafted assisting and troubleshooting implementation issues using tools and methods suitable to the technical environment. Is that something this role is going to do or not? If I’m an analyst, do I want to know? Am I going to be the one when somebody calls and says, there’s no data for this, what’s going on? And I got to go to the site, go through the action, look at the tag debugger, track down what’s messed up in the data layer of the tag management system or not. And that’s, it’s kind of rare to see that sort of, you know, there’s a decent level of granularity to the description.

00:20:21.90 [Michael Helbling]: And that is very helpful.

00:20:23.67 [Tim Wilson]: And I do think but I think association things just are there inherently skewed towards being a bit ambitious and these the job descriptions came out of the whatever the competency skills assessment exercise and I sort of had the same thought from that is that yes. It’s hard to disagree with any one thing. Or you sort of know that as reviews were going on, somebody said, ah, but I’ve got somebody in my organization where this is critical that they do this. And as soon as somebody who’s contributing says this is critical in their organization, it’s got to go on the list. Even if the other 80% of the people say, yeah, we don’t really need that. It’d be awesome if we had it, but it’s not really critical. So I think these, the nature of them is they tend to get a little too broad and deep simultaneously to be 100% realistic.

00:21:12.98 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, that’s fair. And I just remembered, like, one of the key aspects of the DAA, if you complain about something, you’re automatically on the committee to fix it. So I retract my earlier complaint about it.

00:21:23.60 [Tim Wilson]: That’s awesome. You get to get the money and sign up to a… Yeah. I think I’ve done my time in 2016 with my DAA commitment. I support them wholeheartedly, but I have a finite amount of time.

00:21:36.55 [Michael Helbling]: There you go. All right. So, no, I like that. And I like the way they categorize it as well in terms of both technically focused roles as well as sort of business focused roles.

00:21:47.81 [Tim Wilson]: Which and it will just a read across just i think entry level they’ve got a customer experience digital analyst a marketing optimization digital analyst and implementation specialist a statistical analyst and a social media analyst and they even provide sort of some alternate you know titles those aren’t necessarily the titles you want i think that’s that’s one of those. There’s challenges of ours. Industry is that analysts is too broad. I guess that’s what it is. I’m an analyst because my organization has this classification of analyst, but I’m an analyst for digital analytics or web analytics or social analytics. And it just offends my sensibilities a little bit when you have the same root word in your job title twice.

00:22:26.99 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I’m not a big, at this point, don’t really care about job title that much, but I sort of agree with you, except that if it’s helping people understand what it is you do, then it’s probably not a bad thing.

00:22:39.00 [Tim Wilson]: Right, well, and that’s the level two, that was what reminded me of it for the DAs. There’s one of the roles is Senior Analyst Analytical, and then that’s really to distinguish because you’ve got a Senior Analyst Technical, a Senior Statistical Analyst, and a Manager of Analytics, and that just winds up inherently saying, well, now we’ve got this one that’s extremely clunky, so.

00:22:58.56 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it happens. So another thing about job titles that I look at and try to evaluate is the title itself matched up with the core key responsibilities and where I see those responsibilities kind of falling. So as an example, Let’s say there’s a job description and it’s for a director level role, but inside of that job description, there’s no mention of a team or a group of people that you would be managing in that role. So I kind of feel like it’s difficult to be a director without actually managing people.

00:23:35.56 [Tim Wilson]: Maybe they just have realistic salary expectations though, so they forget it.

00:23:39.16 [Michael Helbling]: I don’t know. And the other thing is like, okay, big high-level title, you’ll be responsible for assembling weekly reports in Excel and making sure those kinds of things, when you compare them, that’s a red flag. It means that what they really need is probably more like a senior analyst. and they just haven’t figured out how to shape the job correctly, or they think they have to make it have this title so that someone of quality will pay attention to it. At the same time, you’re not going to fool people through the whole interview process, so just be straight up about what it is.

00:24:13.50 [Tim Wilson]: So this is funny. I actually, my nine months of misery at a insurance company, I got hired in as a director. And then I want to say it was one of those things where HR, the massive company goes through and does all their re-leveling and resetting. And so I managed like a month or two, couple, I don’t know, two, three months in was like, Uh, you don’t have any direct reports, which I knew going in. I think I had one direct report and HR’s thing was like, no, you have to have at least three to have this, whatever. So it’s like, so you’re, we’re actually going to have to move you to a senior consultant. There’s no change on the salary or the career path. And of course I was, I was like, I could, I could give a shit. This place sucks. Anyway, but it was interesting that they went through a, I think there were some people who were very, That was also an organization that had, I think, four levels of vice presidents. So that’s the world of large companies.

00:25:03.06 [Michael Helbling]: We’re building up to that at Search Discovery. So we’re four levels. Yeah, no.

00:25:08.61 [Tim Wilson]: Vice president of espresso making and… That would be my job.

00:25:14.68 [Michael Helbling]: So what I do every morning. No, okay. So what else in a job description do you look for?

00:25:21.26 [Tim Wilson]: I mean, I would say just scanning through some of these that we looked at as we were sort of prepping for this. Just weird stuff, like the job description, one of the first ones that I came across said, synchronized storytelling, and storytelling was two words, capitalized and in quotes, synchronized storytelling using data translation to drive actionable insights across the digital organization. And then it had a much longer, the primary focus, so anytime they say primary, you know you’re in trouble, will be on clearly and concisely visualizing digital marketing analysis, thus driving more efficiency and effectiveness across all stages of the consumer life cycle.

00:25:58.70 [Michael Helbling]: I’m like, well, that’s kind of just… Hey, some strategic consultant kind of paid good money to rate that job description, I bet.

00:26:09.59 [Tim Wilson]: So I think when buzzwordy stuff gets dropped in and it’s kind of weirdly out of context, like I think it’d be awesome if companies were saying, look, we have got a gap in our organization and we need, we know there’s, we’re finding good stuff in the data, but we have got to find somebody who’s really strong at actual storytelling and visualization and we’re going to make that something key. I think that’s great when it’s, I found this from some other job description, You know, or I’m going to lump that in with a bunch of other stuff. You know, if you’ve got storytelling and mix modeling in the same bullet point, you know, what the hell are you talking about?

00:26:50.43 [Michael Helbling]: What do you think about certification and hitbox is one of the yeah, I just saw one is like, you will need to be certified in site catalyst hitbox or, uh, what was the other one core metrics, et cetera. Etc.

00:27:06.45 [Tim Wilson]: It was like about that like cycle. It’s an interesting one when I read site catalyst because I feel like yeah, I’m willing to let that one slide, right? Well, and there’s a certain rubble. I think they’re it’s funny. I’m willing to let side on a job search. I they get kudos if they include both and I’m like you’re looking for a keyword. Thing it’ll be great if you’re showing that you recognize that’s not the real product name but you’re also trying to get this you’re doing keyword searches that should cover across that right exactly but the thing is a site catalyst i frankly if i was talking to somebody i was interviewing a candidate. We were talking about Adobe and I was trying to get her to say discover or ad hoc analysis or report builder and she couldn’t. It’s another one where if you’re going into a company that is relying on reports and analytics or site catalyst, whatever you want to call it, maybe that’s a big opportunity, but that shows that they don’t even know the power of the tools that they have.

00:28:05.86 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I mean, and it’s certainly can be a red flag if the only tools they mention are kind of the ones that are not the right name for them or or or HBX just doesn’t exist anymore.

00:28:21.21 [Tim Wilson]: We need a website story.

00:28:23.42 [Michael Helbling]: But in that particular job description, Tim, because I think we were both looking at the same one earlier, the other thing that was really kind of stand out to me as kind of like a, as a warning bell was the fact that it both knew on its certifications and those products, but in addition to that 15 or more years of experience on top of it. And while that’s certainly possible today, there are very few people who, after 15 years in the industry, maintain certifications in specific products because it’s just not necessary to do unless it’s a specific requirement of a job or something. But it’s not a thing that people maintain certifications for. Maybe I’m wrong about that.

00:29:04.97 [Tim Wilson]: Wait a minute. Was that an agency position? Do you remember?

00:29:07.74 [Michael Helbling]: I don’t remember. I think it probably was. I’m not going to try to give anybody any clues about how to find any of these because I don’t want anyone to be like, you were talking bad about our job description.

00:29:19.49 [Tim Wilson]: And I really would. That’s not if your job description sucks.

00:29:24.56 [Michael Helbling]: And yeah, because if you if we have a listener is listening and they work for a company where this is one of their job descriptions, I don’t want them to feel like they’re, you know, less than just because their company did a bad job with job descriptions.

00:29:37.47 [Tim Wilson]: Now this is the reason for them to hop into the measure slack and just rip us up and down.

00:29:42.14 [Michael Helbling]: Well, that too.

00:29:42.98 [Tim Wilson]: Obviously, we’d welcome that because I welcome I welcome the direct messages on Twitter for Matt Gershoff every morning. An episode goes live when he tells me what the questions we should have asked. Honestly, I’m going to cover.

00:29:55.80 [Michael Helbling]: I’m a little jealous that I don’t get him. He obviously sees you as the smarter of us, too, which is probably fair. Depending on how much coffee each of us has had well. Yeah, so that’s one I think there was another one I was looking at where it was basic It was the title was reporting analyst. So I mean you’re talking about like Let’s really try to dress this up as something super sexy for an analyst because nothing gets somebody out of bed like, hey, I’m going to be pumping out reports today. So that’s the title. And then at the very, very bottom, and like, here’s all the things you got to do, and you need five years of experience for this role. And it’s just like, hey, according to the DAA, I’m a director now. So why would I ever apply for this role?

00:30:47.37 [Tim Wilson]: Another funny anecdote from Tim’s career is when I switched to being full-time in analytics, it was a role that was the reporting manager. And I think I had two people who were reporting to me, which was kind of funny that I was a reporting manager with reports, so I had some other redundancy going on there. That was a case where very quickly we were like, this is not the right dividing a BI organization between the reporting group and the analysis group is probably not correct. But yeah, but a reporting analyst, you are going to be responsible unless you know what you’re a reporting analyst. We have a rich set of data and we have very data savvy users and we need to build, we need to have reports built where you’re actually building stuff that is automated and interactive and well aligned and helping people figure out what their KPIs are. Like, I can see that role. It’s not helping them from a keyword search. You’re like, okay, you just took two spadefuls of dirt before you read the first bullet on the description. That’s not going to draw people in, but I could see that being defined in a way that was interesting.

00:31:50.66 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it’s it just blows my mind and also maybe, you know, there are people out here who totally fit this and I’m way off base too. So I’m hoping that actually this episode might garner a ton of people telling us how wrong we are given our general lack of like actually seeking new job experience.

00:32:09.41 [Tim Wilson]: Damn consultants, we need to get somebody from industry back on the bond as a permanent host. I would say didn’t hit on because we found one of these. The use of the key KPIs for me personally, that would probably make me take the call just to request that they correct the redundancy in their job description. Where do you where do you fall on knowing that a lot of times job descriptions get they’re just like the resumes where they get It might be there’s this beautiful polished version, but then it gets shoved into 75 systems Which is one thing so formatting I’ll forgive where do you fall on the typos in the job description knowing that was probably in a junior person in HR who screwed up and might not be an indication of the company or the organization Where do you fall on those?

00:32:54.54 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it’s I’ll be honest. It’s I’ve never considered it a deal breaker.

00:32:58.70 [Tim Wilson]: I think you can’t but in transit, what if it’s in the standard boilerplate that you scrutinize and place undue importance on it’s on every one of their descriptions?

00:33:07.98 [Michael Helbling]: Well, it may be possible that I’ve even done that in job description. So let’s you know, I don’t want to cast the first stone.

00:33:18.03 [Tim Wilson]: That’s right. I hadn’t even thought about the genius of this, that we haven’t had a job description publicly posted ever. This is great. I can throw all the rocks I want. I can throw all the stones.

00:33:29.00 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. I would say it’s not a good look. Anybody making a typo on a job description, that’s not something you should go figure, seek out.

00:33:38.79 [Tim Wilson]: So there might have been just an awkward little jump cut here because Helwing had to step away for a bleeding child. Because while he was gone, I got to actually track down one more job description, which is funny that it did not occur to me to do this before the episode. But it’s about the shortest job description I saw in any of the research. It does actually refer to Adobe Analytics, parenthetically, Omniture, and it’s actually damn short and damn intriguing. And you know where that is? That would be the analyst opening at Search Discovery.

00:34:11.40 [Michael Helbling]: Oh boy.

00:34:12.36 [Tim Wilson]: Do the high number of qualified apps against him by the time things were recording this in May of twenty fifteen by the time it goes live but it’s interesting in that there are a couple of things on this it says you know some whether or not you actually have an opening or not. you know, some technical parentheses, web development skills, including experience in JavaScript, jQuery, CSS, HTML, et cetera. To me, that’s kind of of the, hey, you got to be interested and intrigued in getting your hands dirty, but we’re not saying that you have to be coding JavaScript. So that’s right. Actually, do think I’m not really shocked that it’s good. I was really hoping I could find something that you’d mentioned that was and it does lead with the company description. So yeah, no surprise. I didn’t actually read that.

00:34:59.07 [Michael Helbling]: Also, no surprise given what we’ve already covered in the show. All right. I’m too embarrassed to talk about our own job description. So let’s move off of this. Because, yes, I probably did write that. So anyone else who would like to see that, you can look at it. But it’s too much of a sales gimmick to do that.

00:35:20.67 [Tim Wilson]: If you get the DAA, if you get the DAA’s job description and when your head is spinning, you’re like, oh my God, what I’ve written now seven pages, I need an antidote to that. You know, go and steal from search discoveries.

00:35:32.79 [Michael Helbling]: Well, but to be fair, what we’ve written might not work for a company looking for an analyst because we’re a consulting organization and so one person may fulfill a very specific set of requirements for a project. Whereas, if you’re hiring and you get one analyst for your organization, you need a much broader set of skills potentially. To be able to accomplish the things you need to accomplish as the company.

00:36:03.59 [Tim Wilson]: That’s at the end that’s really what it means it’s a Venn diagram right you’ve got what is the company truly need and they’ve got a little bit of a hierarchy and they’ve got is an analyst what am I looking for an interested in. If I was looking right now I would be the candidate positions would be small relative to what the volume of positions that are digital analysts because I know where I want to grow my own skills and I know what my core foundation that can knock out of the park is and what I’m looking for in a job description is is there enough stuff on here that I knock out of the park. And some stuff on here that I’d have to stretch and I’d be comfortable going in and saying, oh, you want me to develop this and I’m going to have to develop. So I think it does come down to maybe that’s part of the challenge I have with this whole talking about this whole subject is it is very personal, very individual, you know. If you say I want to do digital analytics, then you’re going to see a shit ton of job descriptions and you’re going to be saying I can do half of everything on every one of these. So what resonates with the job description really comes down to what are the two or three things that I’m really looking for. And that’s what I want to tell the recruiter I’m working with. And that’s what I want to sniff out in phone screens. and I want to find a couple of things. It may be the 10th bullet, and if I take that phone screen and say, you know, the 10th bullet on your job description, which says X, because chances are the person screening me doesn’t even know or remember, that is what I am super passionate and excited about. Now, is that 10th because it was a throwaway thing, and it’s not really core to this position? Or was it somebody sorted these alphabetically by the first letter, and you’re now super excited because that’s what I’m excited about?

00:37:43.44 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, no, I mean, that’s certainly true. And if you, you know, the other piece of this, which is your own career application, that’s right in there, which is probably a whole other show. But, you know, let’s go back to making fun of other people’s job description.

00:37:58.79 [Tim Wilson]: further and on paragraph two of the search discovery job description.

00:38:03.54 [Michael Helbling]: All right. All right. Well, and again, like these are some of the things like what are the gatchas or what are the things that are, you know, kind of would say, okay, I’m a little concerned about this. or kind of like what I said before of like, all right, they’re asking for like all these different things. Can I just say that in a lot of contexts, job descriptions that heavily say things like data science or other buzzwords give me pause or concern. And what’s interesting is the company themselves are really important to whether or not I give any credence to that job description and the data science type words that they use being something I pay serious attention to.

00:38:44.14 [Tim Wilson]: I think if I’m really serious about getting people that I want to be data scientists, chances are I hope that I’m smart enough to not put data science in the job description because I’m desperately trying to get candidates. I would want to be putting, especially, and I’ve done research on this kind of for various reasons, like that’s a buzzword term that is 20 different things. So it’s actually not that if I said I want a data scientist, that is not nearly as informative and descriptive as you might think it is. So it is much more valuable to say, hey, I need a data engineer. I need somebody who’s comfortable with data engineering or I need somebody who is comfortable programming with data using, you know, our Python, you know, SPSS or SAS or similar. So yeah, I think And I guess one person’s buzzword is another person’s fundamental terminology, but I think I agree. Buzzwords come scary.

00:39:43.97 [Michael Helbling]: Like this lead the development of big data analytics that can be delivered via APIs or UIs.

00:39:54.50 [Tim Wilson]: I’m not sure where to go with that. That’s outstanding.

00:39:59.50 [Michael Helbling]: And maybe that makes sense and I’m just not smart enough to know what that means because that’s totally possible So if you’re a big data analyst out there and you understood that we’re like, oh Michael simple It’s you know, so Matt Gershoff just DM Tim Wilson Now that we know that’s a thing, drop me a line anytime, by the way.

00:40:21.48 [Tim Wilson]: No, Michael is hurt.

00:40:23.04 [Michael Helbling]: No, I’m not hurt. I’m also a bad communicator because it’s not like I was emailing or tweeting him either. It goes two ways.

00:40:32.38 [Tim Wilson]: No, I think, I mean, big data and data science, it’d be much better if you need somebody who is skilled with Hadoop or column-based database systems or whatever the hell the right terminology is. You want to drop some legitimate, this is a platform we have and soften it a little bit, you know, exposure to or familiarity with. I don’t mind the familiarity with. Apparently, I can’t pronounce it. I don’t mind it when I can read it. i think that’s good because that’s somebody reads it and says yeah i haven’t worked with that i’ve been interested in it but i’ve been in the same company for seven years and we just don’t have it so you know i’ve never worked with redshift but i know what it is i do reading on it and i’ve worked with this other thing that is you know similar platform. or I’ve been on Core Metrics for eight years and I really wanna switch to Adobe because I’ve heard X, Y, and Z and it seems like they’re doing a lot of neat stuff or I don’t wanna be pigeonholed into one tool. But I think that, I don’t mind the word sum and the word familiarity which are both kind of a, with some specificity behind them as a, you don’t have to be a black belt in this specific thing But we’re giving you a flavor of what we use like what our systems and platforms are and you either know them or you want to learn them and we’re showing in the job description that we’re not expecting you to come in necessarily as an expert. We’re going to go down the checklist and say you already know it or no. You don’t know it, but you’re interested in it. So I think those are totally, totally valid.

00:42:05.37 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. No, it makes sense. Oh, and the other thing to look out for one last thing, and then we’ll wrap this up. Another thing to look out for is in all of this thing, look for things that tell you that they expect you to tow the party line a little bit. That’s always a little bit of a challenge because there’s sometimes when there’s like things like, a can-do client service attitude, or able to think about the uses of the data in visionary ways, or things like that, which should maybe be, and people don’t realize sometimes that they’re sticking those in there, but those can actually be a little bit of an issue.

00:42:42.98 [Tim Wilson]: And because it’s setting up just a vague and unrealistic bar or because it’s, oh, we’ve already gotten our minds kind of what sort of glorious thing you’ll deliver.

00:42:51.54 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. Why don’t you bring all of your really smart stuff in here and do exactly what we tell you to do?

00:42:56.46 [Tim Wilson]: Right. Yeah.

00:42:58.36 [Michael Helbling]: And that’s not the ideal situation for someone who’s looking to kind of lead as opposed to take orders. And so depending on where you’re at in your career and what you’re doing, that’s something to watch out for.

00:43:09.48 [Tim Wilson]: How much is that job description versus getting into the interview?

00:43:12.68 [Michael Helbling]: I think you got to have both. So sometimes you can see it in the job description. Sometimes you’re not sure. And so you want to validate in the interview process and you try to learn as much as you can. I always tell myself or I always coach people like go through the interview process, get if you’re going to do it, do it so that you are expressing all the interest in the world and, you know, get the job offer, then decide whether you want it or not.

00:43:37.83 [Michael Helbling]: Right.

00:43:38.27 [Michael Helbling]: Personally, if we went back and replayed all the interviews I’ve ever done, I have not followed those rules. So I’ve done a very bad job of that. And so I can express tons of interest when I’m interested, but I’ve been a bad candidate in some cases too. And I haven’t even followed like basic advice where I will literally, you know, express disinterest or disagree openly with people about this is not the right way to position this role. And that’s probably, surprisingly, those scenarios that are offered did not also come. But that’s fine, because I knew from the conversation I didn’t want it. But at the same time, that’s not smart. You need to do the whole burn in the hand thing as opposed to, I’ll tell you where you can put your stupid job. I’ve gone ahead and marked up your job description yet. That’s right. I’ve made some brief edits to what I think my role and responsibility should be. Yeah. And let’s get into salary requirements. When do I start? So, yeah. Anyways, all right. Well, let’s quickly do some last calls and we’ll pull this train back into the station. It’s been a little up and down, but hopefully there’s been a little nugget here or there that you can latch on to and use for your career. Yeah. What do you got for last call, Tim?

00:45:01.36 [Tim Wilson]: Well, so this is going to be our related, but I’m going to try to make it a little bit broader. So my last call specifically was kind of inspired Donald Phipps. I’ve got to learn how to pronounce his first name.

00:45:13.52 [Michael Helbling]: Oh, yeah, for measure slack. That’s where I know him from.

00:45:15.74 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, yeah. You know, I have a lot of interactions there, but he had posted in the our statistics channel. a link to this page that is called Tufty NR, which is if you’re using R and if you’re a big Tufty follower, it basically goes through like 10 or 12 different types of visualizations and how to generate, you know, what the code would be in R to generate a fully Tufty certified visualization. Now, two things. I think Tufty’s a little bit of a purist, and I would not ever really want to generate something that is 100% Tufty. And there are many listeners to this that are not in R, but it got me thinking about just the value. And I have sort of learned this as I’ve been learning R and GG Plot 2, that you’ve got this concept of a theme. But in the same thing, you have an Excel, right? You can create a chart, customize everything, and then save that as a chart template. But the value of having in whatever platform and I assume Tableau has some sort of styles that you can save. I’m almost 100% sure it does. So my last call is a little bit of a call for having really well crystallized standards for the visualization of objects, visuals that, you know, for your charts and graphs and tables. I did this years ago. An organization we did in excel went around everybody’s computer and we got into all the everybody in the department got into their system and said this is we’re setting up all these things up and the the tufty in our. Post which one is just kind of slick that somebody went through and put the time into to figure this out in a way that you just copy and paste the code but kind of got me thinking a little more broadly about yeah. Makes sense. It’s a little tougher when I’ve got multiple clients to say, here’s the standard because I want to match what clients use pallet-wise. But inside of organizations, I’m a huge fan of spending the time to set up those base templates that everyone in the group is using so it’s consistent and best practices.

00:47:11.02 [Michael Helbling]: Awesome. All right, so my last call is going to get me in trouble at work, but I’m going to talk about it anyways. So as you know, search discovery, we do a lot of work with tag management platforms. Not too long ago, as you recall, Google made some significant updates to Google Tag Manager. They updated and added this workspace as concept. And I want to call out a couple of blog posts that I think are really great at highlighting those. Unfortunately, there’s not one that I can show, at least not at this juncture on the search discovery blog about it. But I’m sure we’ll get right on this after this episode here.

00:47:46.18 [Tim Wilson]: But this time this goes live, if there is one, we’ll include it in the show notes.

00:47:49.00 [Michael Helbling]: Yes, right. No, but actually, the one I was reading recently was by Lunametrics. So they’re kind of update to what was changing in it. I thought it was a really good write up that the Lunametrics blog had.

00:48:00.88 [Tim Wilson]: And Lunametrics had a quality blog post. I am so shocked by this.

00:48:05.52 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, well, you know, they they are good at a couple things, but this is definitely one of them. No.

00:48:11.07 [Tim Wilson]: And what I also crazy awesome are posts going on on the Lunametrics blog, too.

00:48:15.46 [Michael Helbling]: So, yeah, no, I mean, there’s they just have there’s some really great folks on the Lunametrics team. Frankly, I’m I’m like, oh, All right, sorry, I should not talk like that. But the other thing that I found really classy of them is at the end of their post, they even directly linked over to Simo Ahava’s blog post about the same topic to send traffic his way, which I thought was pretty awesome.

00:48:43.21 [Tim Wilson]: Simo’s another one that it’s good to know that he’s finally gotten a quality blog post out there.

00:48:49.26 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, exactly.

00:48:50.20 [Tim Wilson]: After his years of mediocrity.

00:48:52.16 [Michael Helbling]: And we just sort of just skimming and skimming, looking for something we can use at us.

00:48:58.17 [Tim Wilson]: If only there was enough details that I can actually take what he’s talking about and just copy and paste it and directly apply it.

00:49:06.36 [Michael Helbling]: So if and when we ever could get SEMA on here as a guest, which, you know, let’s just sort of make an open call situation right now. I literally, I always tell this person that I hired them because they knew about Simo Ahava, because I sometimes ask people like, how do you keep up on industry trends and what do you read? And so they were like, oh, well, I read Simo Ahava’s blog and I was like, you’re hired.

00:49:31.33 [Tim Wilson]: It’s like, what are we gonna do next for the next 53 minutes of this interview?

00:49:36.13 [Michael Helbling]: Anyway, so I just, that was my last call, you know, in the tag management space, you know, certainly I like Adobe DTM quite a bit. We do a lot of work with the other tools in site and Intelium and of course Google Tag Manager. I love seeing Google Tag Manager keep raising their game. It’s, it makes tag management better for everyone when that happens. So nice, nice work. and good on you Lunametrics for having a great write up about it. All right, so that’s my last call. As you’ve been listening, if you think, you know what, I’ve got this job description and I’m just not sure how to do it, why for the low, low cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, Tim Wilson and I can join you for an exciting adventure of rewriting your job description. No, I’m just kidding. That someone could offer that as a service, actually. I mean, if you’re thinking up something cool to do with your career, you can hang a shingle. And I don’t know that a lot of people would hire you or not, but that’s it’s definitely a skill.

00:50:33.79 [Tim Wilson]: There’s a gap out there based on our on our survey. No, I mean, that’s just sort of the world of poorly written anyways.

00:50:41.24 [Michael Helbling]: So if you’re listening, Corey, no, I’m just kidding. All right, this episode is going out with a whimper instead of a bang. No, but if you’re listening, you’ve got comments or you’ve seen ones or your own observations about how you’ve evaluated job descriptions. We’d love to hear from you on our Facebook page or on the Measure Slack. The newly popular resurgence, like a couple of months ago, it just seemed like we had this amazing influx of new people on It’s really exciting. It’s giving a whole new energy to the measure slacks of definitely get into that community if you have not already. And what else can I say except we’d love to hear from you and keep analyzing.

00:51:26.90 [Announcer]: Thanks for listening and don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter or Measure Slack Group. We welcome your comments and questions. Facebook.com forward slash analytics hour or at analytics hour on Twitter.

00:51:41.64 [Charles Barkley]: So smart guys want to fit in. So they made up a term called analytics. Analytics don’t work.

00:51:50.70 [Michael Helbling]: Surprise. Here we go. Do that. Any of those keywords. Did you just hear my dog bark? Yep. Alright, hold on. Let’s just pause for just a second. I’m gonna deal with that. Just great. Super. There! It just keeps freezing again and again and again.

00:52:23.43 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, I think that may be beating the same horse to death. The horse is dead.

00:52:31.44 [Michael Helbling]: Well, that’ll really help the horse’s analytics career out a lot. Great job, Tim.

00:52:38.37 [Tim Wilson]: I’m going to start that again because that phrase is not going to come across well. OK.

00:52:46.06 [Michael Helbling]: Hey, I need a minute. I’ve got kids next door kind of making a record, so hold on.

00:52:51.89 [Tim Wilson]: It’s good. Check out your job descriptions on Sick Rusty Eyes.

00:52:55.67 [Michael Helbling]: Okay, tonight is the night. So not only… Okay, so Maria’s gone because she’s at a thing tonight. So not only are my kids making a ton of noise, but one of them broke a glass in the bathroom and cut their hand on it while we’ve been recording.

00:53:14.80 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, Jim Cain! This is the, uh… I don’t remember, but I’m just like… He’s got him all bandaged up, are you good to go?

00:53:23.87 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, he is. He, they, his brother put a bandage on him, and I was like, perfect, the mom gets home, she’ll probably want to wash that out, but it looks like everybody’s alive, so… I’ll get back to work!

00:53:37.03 [Tim Wilson]: Rock, flag, and job description!

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