Our company mentors data scientists for free until they're hired. Here's what we've been seeing in the data science job market in the past month.

1/ There's been a general hiring slowdown during March, by a factor of about 60-70%. We actually expected hiring would go to zero temporarily, but it hasn't - at least not yet.

2/ In the past 3 weeks, we've seen several finalized job offers ("Your pay is $X0,000 and you start Monday. Welcome aboard!") get withdrawn without notice.

In the 18 months prior to March, this had happened zero times.

Watch out for this.

3/ Impact is very uneven. Companies that rely on foot traffic (e.g., fashion retailers) are hit hard, freezing hiring, doing layoffs.

B2B SaaS companies like Twilio and Airtable are mostly hiring normally.

Remote work enablers like Slack and Zoom are accelerating recruitment.

4/ Layoffs haven't hit too many data scientists just yet. So far only 3% of our alumni have been affected.

That includes both temporary furloughs and salary reductions that fall short of layoffs.

4b/ (Companies: If you need to cut payroll, please consider temporary furloughs instead of firing outright.

That will give your employees the optics of still "having a job", plus the flexibility of being able to look for a new one. It's the right thing to do.)

5/ If you're worried about being laid off, your first line of defense is to become indispensable. Find ways to save money; find ways to add value; do it without being asked.

Most companies don't *want* to do layoffs. The more value you bring, the more likely you'll stick around.

6/ On application strategies:

In-person networking is off the table. Approaches that work better for reaching out are cold emailing (must be done skillfully) and LinkedIn outreach (ditto).

A lot of folks now bored at home and more likely to respond to emails than before.

7/ Online meetups might turn out to be a good channel for networking. Not sure yet - it's too early to say.

Some of our mentees are actively experimenting with this.

8/ On interviews:

You'll often be interviewed over Zoom. You should be aware that Zoom has a setting that tells the meeting organizer what's on your screen. Assume by default that interviewers will be using this.

9/ Try to make sure your Internet connection is solid for interviews.

If you can't, mention your spotty connection at the start of the interview. Most people will understand and cut you some slack on this.

10/ The good news:

Pretty much every job is suddenly remote. Geographic barriers are gone. You can now apply to a much wider range of companies than before.

11/ That's what we're seeing so far, but still early days. Hard to predict the next few months, but right now, getting a DS job is hard but not impossible.

The game is to find the companies that aren't hit too hard by work-from-home + lockdowns.

Good luck out there everyone.