For recruiters who aren't sure where to find these mythical post-docs who do science (with "Data"): 1. Go to a scientific journal that involves serious computa

For recruiters who aren't sure where to find these mythical post-docs who do science (with "Data"): 1. Go to a scientific journal that involves serious computational work. 2. Look at the last author on an article. This is usually the lab boss. 3. Google "$LASTNAME lab webpage". 4. Look for graduate student and post-doc profiles. 5. Email them and offer more than the 38k they make for working 60+ hrs/wk. 6. Now you have a "Data Scientist" Alternatively, just Google "Argonne National Labs". There is no shortage of Data Scientists with years of experience (every scientist I've talked to has guffawed heartily and asked "what other kind of scientist is there?"). Yes, I get that the term is just a very unfortunate choice of words (on the order of General Linear Model vs Generalized Linear Model), but the point is that no one knows to brand themselves this way. Recruiters are probably just frustrated by the lack of linked-in-ness, and the fact that most people competent at "Data Science" don't know what that means. Here are things virtually every PhD in a computational discipline will have done: 1. Written code. It might be just Matlab, Python, R, etc. 2. Written up and communicated the results with compelling visualizations, both orally and written 3. Published a paper at some point demonstrating they can do this. 4. Dealt with failure and hunches that didn't work out after weeks of work. On the hiring part, after you've found these mythical creatures: As someone who does science (with Data, even!), here is the best question I can think of to ascertain my competence: "Diagram an approach to answer a particular question, with emphasis on ruling out competing explanations and demonstrating whether a result is true. Sketch some hypothetical visualizations you'd use that show what your result is, how large the effect is, and how sure you are that you're right." I should be able to do that. On the flip side, if an employer can reason with a post-doc about that process in an intelligent fashion, they would be excited about leaving academia. You might need to teach them to use a cluster, EC2, whatever, but you will not have to teach them to ask and answer questions.