Demystifying Hiring Hurdles of Artificial Intelligence Professionals

Is artificial intelligence (AI) outsmarting human intelligence? How much do organizations depend on artificial intelligence? Would humans lose their jobs to AI?

These are crucial questions are being resonated in the job market. Companies across industries are now deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their day-to-day operations to eradicate errors. AI helps them to increase productivity with less human intervention. Thus, the demand for skilled talent in AI is “essentially increasing”.

Sourcing AI talent

The major source of AI talent is mostly from professional training institutes and educational institutions. However, the difference from hiring professional training institutes and educational institutes is the skill and knowledge of the candidates. 

As professional training institutes, focus not only on the subject, but provide experiment-based training thereby such talent pool is available with a high level of industry-defined AI skills. Whereas, the students from educational institutions are learning the AI as one of the topics in their syllabus and lack the practical knowledge and implementation skills. This would mean that organizations who hire talents from the educational institutions, need to provide training to their newly hired candidates before deploying them. This trend will only change when colleges would start exhaustive courses on AI through the updated curriculum and extended curriculum programs.

Challenges in hiring talents in AI

Hiring AI proficient talent is a little tiresome for technical recruiters owing to its recent emergence as cutting-edge technologies. While a few challenges in identifying the source of such talent is highlighted above, below are a few other challenges that technical recruiters face:

• The dearth of candidates to fill the position is the first challenge.
• Setting a competency framework and job description. 
• Scarcity of talented resource persons in the area affects the assessment and interview process.
• Lack of advanced tool to test the competencies of candidates.

The solutions are underlying in the challenges itself. Major issues would diminish, as the popularity and demand increase in the coming days. 

Solving the conundrum

The ultimate solution to onboarding AI professionals would be to devise an appropriate hiring strategy with the help of technology.  An AI professional needs to have knowledge and skills in multiple programming languages, data science, analytics, machine learning, amidst a few others. Hence, it is required to test all of these skills. An agile tech tool combined with the AI needs to test all these competencies in a comprehensive way.

More than testing the capabilities of the candidates, the software should be a comprehensive onboarding tool from sourcing suitable candidates and assist the L&D teams to facilitate effective training for employees.

CodeTrac from MeritTrac helps the hiring managers to test the coding abilities of the candidate on the various programming languages. Apart from finding the capabilities of the candidate, this program also helps them to benchmark his/her skill. By leveraging CodeTrac's online programming skill tests, organizations can design an efficient developer recruitment cycle. Organizations can build customized coding scenarios based on their business needs, and tailor pre- as well as post-training requirements. This indeed helps to bridge skill gaps for employee’s career progression.

Going forward, more sophisticated skill assessment tools will solve all the challenges and hiring AI talent will not be an issue anymore. AI has already built inroads in the hiring landscape in Europe and the US, and gradually penetrating in the emerging economies like India. The automated algorithmic tools will phenomenally assist the technical recruiters to make informed hiring decisions.