Why does a data vacancy stay open for months?

A data vacancy that has been open for six months is rarely about scarcity. There are plenty of data analysts and data engineers; they simply are not responding to this vacancy. In the conversations we have, the same causes keep coming back, and all of them can be fixed without raising the salary.

Is the vacancy actually asking for two people?

Data engineering, building dashboards, bringing stakeholders along and putting a model into production as well. Anyone who can do all of that already has a job and is unaffordable. We call it the five-legged sheep.

Those who do apply are good at one part and average at the rest, so they are rejected by many recruiters and HR departments. That is how a vacancy becomes hard to fill: the requirements exclude everyone who would have fitted.

The solution? Split the role. A data engineer who builds pipelines and a data analyst who creates the insight are found faster together than one person who has to do everything. Often the second role can be temporary: six months of capacity is enough to clear the backlog.

Do the requirements describe the work or the past?

Five years of experience with a tool that has existed for three. A certification nobody on the team holds. Requirements like these do not filter for quality, they filter for coincidence.

Describe the work your candidate will do in the first six months instead. What is waiting, what is the first assignment, who sits next to them for guidance? People recognise themselves in that, and it makes selection fairer: you judge someone on what they are going to do rather than on what they happened to run into before.

Is anyone having the conversation, or is the advert alone?

Many good data professionals are not actively looking. They have jobs, they are approached weekly, and they respond to a good conversation, not to an advert.

Without someone actively having that conversation, the vacancy stays open no matter how well it is written. That is exactly what New Data Search exists for: active search, selection on substance and cultural fit, and staying involved after the placement.

Does a candidate recognise your company in the vacancy?

Cultural fit is the phrase that comes up in every hiring conversation and appears in almost no vacancy text. A candidate reading your text should be able to think: “this is where I want to work”. Not because of the salary, but because of the company and the people in it.

So write down what is different about you. What a working day looks like, where colleagues run into each other, what you are proud of and where things are still messy. Someone who knows in advance what is expected of them and what they are there to contribute applies with a different feeling than someone who only read a job profile.

What does solving this get you?

A shorter lead time, but above all fewer people leaving again after six months. A placement is not an end point, it is the start of a relationship.

If you are unsure whether the vacancy is the problem or something behind it, the New Data Scan is the starting point. In a single working day we map how data, processes, systems and people come together at your organisation, and where exactly the role is missing.