Data scientists are in high demand: McKinsey estimated that we will be facing a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 data scientists by 2018. Employers have to be on top of their game to keep competitors from poaching their hard-won data science talent. At the The Data Incubator, we work with dozens of companies eager to hire data scientists from our fellowship program. But, as we explain to those employers, attracting and hiring great data scientists is only the first step: they also need to motivate and retain them. We’ve drawn up some best practices both from our own experiences as well as from those of our hiring partners. They fall into three main categories: Support, ownership, and purpose.
