No Luck Recruiting AI Talent? You're not Doing it Right - InformationWeek

Another way to expand your pool of "qualified" candidates is to look for individuals with nontraditional backgrounds. When companies are looking to hire talent like operations or salespeople, industry-specific experience is a definite benefit. While competition for the best candidate in these fields is still intense, the arenas are well-established enough to offer a more robust pool of suitable candidates, so the challenge is more manageable. But when it comes to a field as new as ML and AI, limiting your search to individuals with years of experience will quickly whittle the applicant pool down to next to nothing. Unless you're ready to shell out $500k as a starting salary, good luck trying to outcompete the Facebooks and Googles of the world. Instead, recruiters should seek out people who have crossed over industries, changed roles, or have, through a diversity of experiences, demonstrated that they are connectors and integrators. These candidates offer the adaptive thinking necessary to build the future of artificial intelligence as it unfurls. And, most people will completely overlook them.