For businesses, AI tools and technologies may have the power to be genuinely transformative. However, that assumes they can attract workers with the right technology skills to utilize them. Unfortunately, as with most bleeding-edge technologies, finding workers with those skills isn't easy. That's because schools aren't yet producing many graduates in the field. And those already in the workforce with the practical knowledge to fill open roles are in exceptionally high demand. To cope, businesses that wish to join the ranks of early adopters of AI must develop new, top-to-bottom talent strategies. Here are some key considerations to keep in mind when doing so.
Conduct Competitive Compensation Research
In a relatively new field, it's often difficult to determine what compensation a prospective employee may demand. The risks of creating inappropriate compensation packages are immense. If compensation falls below industry norms, hiring will become impossible. If it exceeds those norms, overhead will skyrocket and harm the bottom line. To avoid either outcome, careful research is essential.
Industry salary data aggregators are an excellent starting point. PayScale and Salary.com can provide specific information sorted by skill, job title, and location. And although government data sources remain limited, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is beginning to build data sets relating to AI jobs.
It's also advisable to create profit-sharing or stock option programs as a part of employee compensation packages. Workers in the AI field assume that their work will lead to higher profits and increased business value for a prospective employer. Giving them a means of sharing in that growth serves as an essential lure for highly-skilled candidates.
Create Defined Growth Pathways
In a fast-growing and ever-evolving field like AI, employees want the ability to grow and evolve along with it. That means it's essential to create well-defined organizational career pathways to attach to every new job role. It's one of the key strategies the most prominent players in the AI world use to attract and retain talent. Google, for example, prioritizes filling high-value job roles with internal transfers.
To support creating new career pathways within a business, it's helpful to adopt and use a skills management platform. Such platforms help businesses keep track of internal talent and skills. Some even offer AI-powered skill-matching capabilities to suggest internal candidates for newly created job postings.
Partner With an Industry-Specific Recruiter
Like it or not, the average business may struggle to access top AI talent, as they get crowded out by prominent Silicon Valley firms. Short of building out a massive—and expensive—recruiting operation to compete with them, the only realistic option is to find alternate talent acquisition methods. One of the best options is to partner with an industry-specific recruiter. They know the market for talent inside and out, and many even have their own stables of talent from which to draw.
Source Group International is a perfect example of a suitable AI recruitment agency. Their strict focus on skilled tech professionals means they have internal hiring experts who understand the needs of firms building out AI teams. Best of all, they have access to talent pools spread across multiple continents. That can enable the creation of remote AI teams that dodge the limitations of a business's local labor pool.
Make AI a Company-Wide Cornerstone
Finally, trying to lure top AI talent to suit a business's immediate needs is only one step in what must be a much larger reorientation toward the technology. To create a healthy talent pipeline and maximize the benefit of future AI initiatives, it's necessary to elevate AI skills as a priority in all hiring. It isn't necessary to hire programmers to staff every corner of an organization. Rather, it's necessary to favor candidates with experience using AI tools when filling roles organization-wide.
It's also wise to integrate basic AI training courses into standard onboarding procedures. That can help build a solid organizational foundation upon which to build. The focus of such training needn't be technical. Instead, it should focus on broad topics such as AI ethics and appropriate use of AI-infused productivity tools. By providing such training, it should also be possible to spot workers with natural aptitudes for the technology. That can become a crucial way to build the aforementioned internal skills database.
Building For The Future
Ultimately, the burgeoning AI field holds considerable promise for businesses across every industry. However, like the world-changing technologies that preceded it, it also presents a conundrum. It's that early adopters may struggle to get AI initiatives up and running, yet stand the greatest chance of reaping maximum rewards. Meanwhile, businesses that wait for academia to catch up and make hiring easier risk losing ground to competitors they'll never make up.
By laying the groundwork for AI talent recruiting success now, however, it should be possible to avoid early stumbles while maximizing the potential for bottom-line gains. Hopefully, the strategies detailed here can help make doing that somewhat easier. If nothing else, they'll get any AI recruiting effort off on the right foot.