What gap are you trying to fill? Before you get close to offering a Data Scientist a job you should be clear in your own mind what skills gap in your organisation you are trying to fill. In my experience these are good reasons to be hiring a Data Scientist: You need someone with mathematics, and in particular statistics, skills that can do a better job of understanding data and creating meaningful outputs than your average accountant or computer scientist. You need someone that thinks and operates in a numerically framed way, someone that is comfortable with representing concepts as graphs and formulae. Those 2 core competencies are to be found in any successful Data Scientist. You may be tempted to frame the role in the following terms: You need someone to make sense of a large dataset, to understand the dimensionality and the "shape" or distribution of the key components of that data. You need someone who can create, improve or debug some very sophisticated algori