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By David Vincent, Managing Director of Randstad Sourceright EMEA
As the AI revolution accelerates, how can you ensure your company has the right skills — even if they don’t yet exist? By focusing on people’s human potential and inherent capabilities, you can create a workforce able to learn and adapt to help you capitalise on the promise of AI.
While much uncertainty remains around AI — such as its full potential to transform how work gets done, the best ways for companies to use it responsibly, and its impact on the workforce — there is no denying that it’s here to stay. As the use cases for AI increase exponentially, companies (and their employees) will need to embrace it to ensure they stay competitive and innovative. But to fully realise the promise of AI, you need to have people on your team who understand the benefits, can see the potential and will help you leverage all it has to offer.
Here’s the challenge: not only is the talent pool for the nascent AI skill set relatively small, but with AI still in its early stages, you might not even know the particular AI skills your company needs. In fact, as we’re still in the early stages of the AI revolution, many of the skills needed to fully capitalise on AI don’t even exist yet.
Given this reality, how can you achieve the seemingly impossible: hiring talent who have these hypothetical skills? The answer lies in recognizing the potential in your people (both internal talent and external candidates) to acquire those new and emerging skills, and providing the training and development to help them grow and acquire those skills.
Overcoming talent scarcity
With relatively low unemployment in the U.K. and around the world, qualified talent is in short supply. This is especially true for individuals with the skills most highly sought by companies today, such as AI. According to Randstad Enterprise’s In-demand Skills research, although roles requiring AI skills represent the lowest number of job postings of the skills clusters evaluated, they are still the hardest to fill.
The job vacancy rate (JVR), a measure of the competitiveness in hiring for each type of role, is 7.9% in the U.K., compared to the global average of 5.1%. With high demand for such roles, yet low supply in the local market, finding individuals with skills in AI is a challenge. According to the research, talent with this experience is five to eight times harder to find than the market average. Specialisations within the AI domain, such as robotics, can be up to 18 times harder to find.
In this complex landscape, it can be challenging enough to identify, engage and retain skilled AI talent. This task is further complicated by the fact that the field is still so new, and the AI initiatives and the skills needed to drive them forward remain undefined. To address this, you’ll need to figure out how to tap into the potential of your people to build a workforce with the capacity to learn the new skills that will fuel the AI revolution.
Recognise the power of human potential
It might seem it doesn’t make sense to hire for skills that don’t yet exist. But this may become the norm; the World Economic Forum (WEF) suggests that 50% of the workforce will need to be reskilled by 2025. At the same time, with AI able to automate repeatable tasks, certain areas of experience may become less essential than they once were. This may sound daunting, because it means that you’ll have to look at talent differently.
Instead of evaluating candidates just on their hard skills and experience, consider other factors including their capacity to adapt and learn, as well what motivates them, to ensure new talent has the capacity to acquire those needed skills.
Consider the Human Potential Model, which explores how people have an uncanny ability to achieve their aspirations by learning new things. This is accomplished by a combination of one’s learned skills and their more innate core skills — such as creativity or analytical thinking — as well as their own individual aspirations and motivations. The feeling of both “being” and “wanting” are powerful drivers that encourage people to think differently and take on new challenges. Giving people the opportunity to help drive the future with AI and play a major role in determining the necessary skills and acquiring them can feed that basic need.
Hiring with an eye towards human potential can also help with engagement and retention, which are more important than ever given the scarcity of talent with AI skills. For example, the 2024 Randstad Workmonitor research found that 72% of global employees want to future-proof their skills through training, especially in areas like AI. Meanwhile, 29% say they would quit a job that didn’t provide sufficient opportunities for learning and development. Offering candidates the chance to pioneer new technologies and ideas will foster the environment in which they want to stay and grow, instead of seeking those opportunities elsewhere.
While certain work tasks and knowledge around AI remain unknown or undefined, that shouldn’t prevent you from putting the effort in now to secure talent for future needs. Hiring the right people today — or identifying those already in the company — with the necessary knowledge and core skills to pick up on new things and deliver should be a top priority. But first, you have to find them.
How to recruit for potential
Finding the right people who can learn quickly and grow into a role can be challenging, requiring a new way to think about talent and recruiting. In essence, this means focusing not just on their learned skills and past experience, but on the core competencies that are inherent to their performance. Traits such as complex problem-solving, analytical thinking, mathematical aptitude and creativity are all found to be core skills of AI talent.
The value in considering these traits is backed up by Randstad Enterprise’s Talent Trends Report, which shows what talent leaders around the world say are their top considerations when evaluating talent. Overall, 83% say the potential to learn to grow is most important, followed by intellectual or personality traits (80%) and personal motivations and aspirations (80%).
Focusing on core skills can help you predict an individual’s potential to excel in new and emerging roles and responsibilities while helping you overcome the rampant talent scarcity for AI talent. It can also improve workforce diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. For instance, the AI skills sector has one of the lowest female-to-male talent ratios. By hiring talent based on their potential to learn on the job to fulfil those future roles, you can help to close the gender gap and empower people from other diverse groups to advance in the field as well, while still building a bench of highly capable talent.
While the capabilities and business needs around AI still remain uncertain, existing AI tools can be used to help identify the skills you might need in the future — and the skills your candidates and current talent already have. For example, AI-powered technology can automate skills classification and facilitate the creation of skills taxonomies — key to understanding both the internal and external skills available and to deploying talent in response more quickly. Rather than relying on manual work and one-off data pulls from your HR team, the process can be automated as technology draws intelligence from job descriptions, talent profiles, market data and more.
This will empower you to more easily understand the skills current talent already have, uncover areas for which you need to recruit externally and, ultimately, identify the people who are best suited to drive your AI initiatives forward.
A future-proof recruiting strategy
While the full potential of AI remains to be seen, companies that aren’t already seeking to find talent with AI skills — or the potential to adapt and learn them — will be at a disadvantage. By building up your ranks with talent who already have the core skills to learn new things, adapt to rapid changes and bring an innovative mind-set, you can have the right people in place who can take on new responsibilities around AI and give you a significant advantage.
David is a seasoned professional with over 20 years of experience in recruitment and outsource recruitment solutions.
As Managing Director of Randstad Sourceright EMEA, David works with clients across various sectors such as banking and Financial Services, IT Services and Life Sciences. He has been deeply involved in designing, implementing, and developing outsourced recruitment solutions for top-tier clients around the world.
David has previously held leadership roles at Resource Solutions, Adecco, and Hays, managing large teams and multi-million pound budgets. He takes pride in his ability to develop and maintain relationships at executive level.
He holds a BA from Sheffield Hallam University.
