I think I'm in the minority, but I really hate the term, "data scientist." It seems usually to mean, "senior statistician, but with training and credentials expected of an RA" (to clarify, that isn't meant as a comment on the original article). I would be especially skeptical about hiring someone who <i>self-identifies</i> as a "data scientist," people are trained as Statisticians, Biostatiticians, computer scientists, various subspecialties that end in "-metrician" (e.g. Econometrician, Psychometrician, Cliometrician), etc; no one is trained as a "data scientist." Unless you're hiring someone really junior, you want the "data scientist" to have a specialty -- anyone good will have one.<p>But the best way to find a good "data scientist" is probably the best way to find a good programmer -- be one yourself; tap your professional network; and hire people as consultants/freelancers on non-critical projects before making a real commitment. Identifying someone with a deep skill that one doesn't possess oneself is pretty much impossible. And on the flip side, I have trouble imagining that someone who really knows what he or she is doing would want to work for some unknown.<p>If you want someone to scrape and clean data with Perl and generate some scatter plots and histograms, look for undergrads with good grades who worked as Research Assistants, or recent grads working as RAs at consulting firms, research centers, governmental agencies, or think tanks. They'll do great (by and large), they've have had some informal training from a more senior researcher to help put everything in context, and faculty often steer their best students into those sorts of jobs, so there's a pretty strong quality screen. I'm sure there are other places to find people too.