How can Businesses Recruit Talent in AI
By Devashish Shrestha
In the near future, AI talent will be on demand in almost every industry. The World Economic Forum estimates that 133 million artificial intelligence and Machine learning jobs will be created by 2022 with “spending on AI projected to surge from $12 million in 2017 to $57.6 billion by 2021” according to “Recruiting AI Talent: 4 Ways To Get Ahead Of The Next Hiring Wave.” According to a recent survey, 61% of organizations most frequently picked Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence as their company’s most significant data initiative for (the upcoming) year. Similar to how the previous technology revolution transformed businesses in the way they started using the world wide web, email and PC’s, this new revolution brought about by AI will revamp business applications. With a steadily increasing demand for AI talent, companies now face the challenge of finding and recruiting AI talent, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find. Here are some tips on recruiting AI talent.
There is no better place to find qualified talent than in schools where all the education and training happens. This means that schools can be hotspots for finding and recruiting talent in any field including AI. The 6 ways to find AI talent — are you looking in the right places suggests that “universities are a great source for tech talent,” and with AI courses in colleges becoming quite popular, getting a recruiter to pull in AI talent from there can be an effective option. In order to aid with that task, collaboration platforms like Piazza can be used that consists of a portal for recruiters to target specific students. Furthermore, companies can establish partnerships with schools by offering internships and post-graduate employment in “exciting projects” with great “benefits” to attract interested students — this article gives more on How To Recruit Machine Learning Talent Successfully.
Apart from university students, a valuable talent pool is AI faculty members who can be selected to have a corporate job on the side. For example, Yann LeCun runs NYU’s Center for Data Science together with being Facebook’s Director of AI Research. Essentially what this means is for more companies to embrace the idea of having both part-time and remote talent.
Collaboration between institutes, labs, and think tanks also greatly aids in garnering AI talent. For instance, the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (was) opened in conjunction with Huawei and UC Berkeley that surely is a hotbed for attracting talent in AI.
Another recruitment strategy that is quite similar to crowdsourcing is hosting hackathons. They bring together talented coders, creative individuals and people from various technical backgrounds to address a problem and collaboratively create a solution from scratch. These 7 tactics to recruit AI talent in a market dominated by tech giants will help you stay competitive. This means that while recruiting AI talent, instead of just looking for people with specific backgrounds in AI, companies should seek talent who are highly motivated, possess an aptitude for adaptive learning and a commitment to tackling hard challenges. Such talent can always be nurtured, groomed and turned into a professional in the field like an ML or Data Science.
If businesses cannot find the talent in AI, then they always have the option of creating them and this is where Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) comes into play. In fact, they are also an incredibly cost-effective way of doing so. Not all of an organization’s domain experts need to be computer programmers as they can also be useful by having an understanding of the basics of AI as well. A famous example of MOOC is Andrew Ng’s deeplearning.ai program on Coursera that uses (just) five online courses to explain neural networks and machine learning. MOOCs can also be used to train company employees who were hired because of their aptitude and a knack for AI.
Another strategy for a business to find talent in AI is not really to go searching for them, but attract them and there are many ways to do this. Here is how to recruit machine learning talent successfully. There are many factors that attract talent in AI like intellectually challenging opportunities, competitive compensation and resources, location, brand recognition, diversity of problems, the impact of their work, and the quality of the team. The end goal is to provide them with meaningful and exciting work that really matters so that they feel like they are contributing to creating a positive social impact on the world and reaching their true potential. These 5 Tips for Attracting Artificial Intelligence (AI) Talent will help you in attracting more AI talent.
Lastly, to attract good talent in AI, the money will likely play the most influential role especially given the shortage of AI talent and the scope of work that needs to be done. So competitive salary probably will be one of the incentives to attract and retain such talent. All in all, it becomes obvious that there are various strategies for businesses to recruit talent in AI whether it be by going on a wild goose chase like visiting and partnering with schools to pull in talent or attracting talent by providing competitive salaries, compensation plan, and other incentives. Companies can also use unconventional tactics like crowdsourcing and hackathons to source talent in a different way. And lastly, instead of trying to find and recruit such talent, they can create such talent themselves by hiring individuals who possess the aptitude for AI and training them through MOOCs. As we enter a new age where AI talent is still scarce but in high demand, organizations will have to come up with dynamic strategies to recruit AI talent.
