Industry Insights

Periodically, we like to check in on the hiring market for quantitative folks and see how things are progressing, usually by sending out a quick “flash survey” to our vast network of analytics hiring managers and HR partners –  to take the temperature of the room, if you will. Why say that we think the hiring market is still just as hot, when we could back it up with data? What we found this time, was that overall, 84% of analytics teams plan to hire in the second half of 2016. This includes teams adding to their headcount, backfilling already established positions, and those adding and backfilling. This number very closely aligns with what we found in early 2015.We were also able to focus on a few of the most common industries where analytics teams are found, to give you an idea of what the key players are up to. This excerpt from our latest Burtch Works Study shows the distribution of predictive analytics professionals among common industries.

As you can see from the bottom bar, the overall quantitative market is still going quite strong, but there are a few insights to unpack here:

1. Advertising & Marketing Services firms are seeing the most expansion, with over 80% of teams adding to their headcount.
2. Consulting appears to be pulling back a bit, since compared to other industries it has the largest proportion of firms not hiring.
3. Financial Services is not hiring as aggressively as the rest of the market, with less than 50% of firms adding to their headcount.

As we noted at the beginning of the year, this market activity has meant that about 1 in 5 predictive analytics professionals changed jobs last year, a slight increase from 2014.Given the shifts in a few industries, it will be interesting to see if that has affected the number of quants changing jobs when we collect the data for job changes during 2016.In our salary study, we did find that salaries seem to have relatively leveled off from their breakneck increases of previous years, so perhaps the market is reaching a more sustainable rate of expansion.We’re always interested in tracking changes in the quantitative hiring market, so stay tuned for updates as we continue to gather more data!