HHP,

Has any one else had success including competing in the HHP in their resume?  I recently updated my resume and included it and it seems to have improved the receptiveness of recruiters to talk to me.  I was wondering if any one else had had the same exerpiances. It certainly provided a good talking point about using a massive data set to draw business insights! Is there a job board that Kaggle maintains for data scientists? 

Anyways, I was succesful in getting a job in a social network gaming company. If any one is interested in learning more about what a data analyst does at a socail games company, let me know, and I can write more about it in this forum.

Congrats with your new job - I would be interested in hearing more...

Also, do you can you point us to your resume so we can see how you incorporated HHP.

I slipped the fact that I was "planning" to participate in the HHP into my CV for a recent fellowship application. It didn't seem to hurt. It was probably a dry year though.

It's been positive for me, too.  I've been in a few data mining contests on Kaggle & elsewhere, and I described them in a separate section on my resume & on LinkedIn. In addition, one contest team I was part of created a website / blog devoted to our work, and a few visualizations from there were picked up by some other blogs & magazines.  

The result was that, even though I'm not actively looking for a job, my teammates & I were approached by several recruiters (for me, it was mostly from algorithmic trading/Wall St firms plus  a search enGine company).  They were all interested in talking about data-mining contests & my other experience, since data-mining / ML is central to those businesses.  Several recruiters also told me that they also liked the fact that I worked on these contests as a hobby, because they view technical hobbies as a sign that a candidate is truly passionate about technology / CS / data-science, etc.

So I think these contests are a great addition to your resume, but I'd also recommend putting some of your technical projects online, or keeping a technical blog about hobby projects, like each Kaggle contest you enter. Even in this recession, there are recruiters out there trolling the web for qualified candidates, and these steps can only help them find you & to demonstrate what you do.