Fieldwork Partners

🎉 Announcing a new one-day workshop: Designing Successful Interview Plans for Data Teams. Has your company’s hiring process gone stale? Is your team spending tons of time interviewing with mixed or poor results? Hiring for a role outside your comfort zone? Join us for an expert-led working session to craft the tailored interview plan and process you need right now. Drawing on decades of hiring ops experience Kathy Copic and Geneviève Kathleen Smith are running a one-day workshop for data leaders who are actively hiring. During this collaborative workshop, you’ll: ✏️ Build a clear process that candidates will be excited by, and your team can execute on confidently 🎯 Discuss the interview types that are (or aren’t!) working for other teams 🎲 Learn how to run interviews systematically and fairly 💥 Leave with a completed draft of your own Interview Plan, plus customized interviews and resources based on best practices Remote sessions will take place over two half days on Zoom, while in-person sessions will be one-day workshops in July and August. We’re offering $1750 early bird pricing if you register before July 1. Apply at the link below!

July 1! Today is the last day for Early Bird pricing for our upcoming workshops on Designing Successful Interview Plans for Data Teams. This is truly one of our favorite topics. ✅ With a clear, thoughtful interview process customized for your role, you can make the best use of your team’s time, show your candidates why they should work with you, and gain confidence in the offers you make. ❌ Without clear interview plans, we’ve seen teams burn themselves out with too many low-signal interviews, struggle to move candidates through their pipeline and keep their interest, and end up without the evidence they need to make compelling offers, especially for new or complex roles. If you’re planning on hiring this summer or fall, join us! Hear what’s working and what’s not for other teams and craft your own custom Interview Plan during the one-day working session. Happy Q3 to those who celebrate. 🎆

Only 5 more days to secure early-bird pricing for our upcoming workshops for data leaders on designing successful interview plans! We’re excited to see you in person in San Francisco or online. Bring your toughest hiring challenges and we’ll tackle them together, crafting an interview process that will help you build a better team. Link to register in the comments below.

👀 It’s been months & you don’t have candidates for your open role. You know something’s not working, but the job is posted & your team is waiting. What now? 🕳️ Don’t fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy. It’s better to have a hard conversation & consider pulling the post to revise it, rescope it, or even suspend the search, rather than rush a bad fit. ✔️ Don’t be too hard on yourself! It’s valuable to take a step back and consider what isn’t working and your options for moving forward.  🤝 Want more advice at this challenging moment? At Fieldwork Partners, we work with teams to scope the right roles for their organization—faster hires, more efficient teams, better business outcomes.

There are a lot of definitions of “fractional” floating around now, and it’s unclear what scope of work belongs under that banner. At Fieldwork Partners, we’ve found Reforge’s “expertise as a service” spectrum useful. It’s a tangible framework for thinking about all the ways that companies might engage advisors, fractional executives, and interim executives – and what the differences and tradeoffs are between them. If you have a current leadership gap, this piece may help you narrow in on what you need —or what you don’t— from a potential fractional executive. https://lnkd.in/emju-gww

Kathy and Geneviève have started hosting a series of fun, informal, in-person lunches this year -- imagine the lunch you'd have with dear old colleagues and friends at really good conference, but skip the conference. 😁 Want to join us? We may be in your city soon! There's a quick sign-up survey to share your location and what you're interested in talking about in the comments! 👇

What do job seekers need to know when considering a big career change? It was such a treat for me to get go back to Berkeley Lab yesterday to share some advice along with fellow panelists Ana Ovcharova (IonQ), Marat Freytsis (Anthropic), Mark Dishner (Lam Research), Riccardo Manenti (Rigetti), and Ronald Goossens (ASML). Here are some top takeaways from our discussion for folks making a career transition: 1. The best way to understand the current market is through talking to people. Through these conversations, you can learn so much about the types of jobs available, the skills you’ll need to be successful, who is hiring right now, how to make your application stand out, what different companies are like, what different teams are working on, etc. When you’re looking for a new role, get back in touch with former colleagues, old friends, and professional connections, and learn more about what they’re doing now. 2. There are so many different types of companies (big, small, fast-paced, slower-paced, working in different fields, etc) and roles (manager, individual contributor, working on a small team or a big team, in person or distributed internationally) that you should focus your search on what you’re most interested in and the best fit for. Pay attention to what’s working and not working as you apply to roles. If you’re not getting interviews or offers that work for you, talk to more people to help you figure out how you might change what you’re looking for or how you’re describing your qualifications. 3. Do some research on the places that you’re applying to – ideally talk to some folks that work there. Use what you learn to customize your application, and speak to why you’re a good fit for that particular company and role. When you interview, be ready with questions for your interviewer that show your understanding of the company and their sector. 4. Practice describing your current work at a variety of levels – what was the goal of the work, what was the day-to-day work like, what tools and techniques did you use, what was the result? When making a transition, you may need new vocabulary to describe your past work to teams in a new space. 5. You will make mistakes! Applying and interviewing for new jobs takes a lot of practice, especially when you are making a transition. Don’t wait to get started until you have done “all the research” or “all the preparation.” You will learn through the process and on the job, so get started and learn by doing! Thanks so much to Simon Knapen for hosting the conversation and to Cheng-Ju Stephen Lin for the invitation! If you’re on a team looking to hire specialized candidates in data or engineering, we love designing interview processes that bring in exceptional candidates from a wide range of backgrounds – either before the search starts or if it’s dragging on and needs a fresh take. Get in touch with us at Fieldwork Partners!

Looking for a new data role where you can support journalists? 🗞 🔎 📊 ProPublica AND The Wall Street Journal both need people to help their newsrooms better understand their audiences. ProPublica is hiring an Audience Data & Insights Analyst and WSJ is looking for a Senior Data Scientist to focus on their audience-data strategy. Links to apply and more details on both roles in the comments below. #hiring #datascience #missiondriven

Join Kathy Copic and Scroobious founders this week, as they discuss when and how to use AI + Data to level up your company and your product. There are no right answers that apply to everyone -- only tradeoffs. Kathy will share a framework for thinking through tough choices around AI to help you make thoughtful decisions now and as your business grows.

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