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AI is changing the way we work faster than ever before. But with rapid changes come new challenges, especially when it comes to hiring the right people.

How do you know if your team is ready for AI? Are you focusing too much on skills and not enough on adaptability? These are the questions many leaders face today.

To help you make the best decisions for your team, I will share three tools that will help you find and hire AI-ready talent:

1. AI Readiness Assessment Quiz – This quiz helps you decide if your organization should focus more on AI skills or adaptability.

2. AI Readiness Assessment Matrix – This matrix helps you see how different types of candidates fit your needs.

3. AI-Ready Employee Hiring Guide – This guide helps turn insights into interview questions and candidate evaluations.

Let’s discuss how these tools can help you make smart hiring decisions.

Hiring for AI Skills: More Than Expertise

Hiring the right AI talent is tough. Many leaders do not know exactly what skills they need, what questions to ask, or how to tell if a candidate is the right fit.

This challenge is backed by recent data: 65% of companies are regularly using generative AI, nearly double from just ten months ago. This fast adoption shows how important it is to find AI-ready talent.¹

That is why I built the AI-Ready Employee Hiring Guide GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), a custom AI tool specifically designed to make hiring for AI talent easier. The guide is free (if you have a paid version of ChatGPT) and helps you figure out if candidates are ready for AI work.

The goal is not just to hire people who know AI, but to find those who can make AI work for your business. People who can adapt, learn, and create value with AI.

According to Carol-Lyn Jardine, VP of Growth Marketing at DHI Group, Inc., companies need to prioritize more than just technical knowledge when hiring for AI roles.

“The value in AI talent comes from technical capabilities and the skills to leverage AI in driving innovation and business results. Look for candidates who are adaptable. They can translate their technical expertise into meaningful, actionable solutions for your organization.”

AI Readiness Assessment Quiz: Where to Start

The first step in building an AI-ready team is to understand what your organization needs—deep AI skills or adaptability. The AI Readiness Assessment Quiz can help you figure this out.

The quiz will ask you to rate statements about your organization’s needs. Questions might be about how important AI is to your projects or how advanced your industry is with AI.

Based on your answers, the quiz will guide you on whether to focus more on hiring for AI skills or adaptability. Here is how to use it:

• Step 1: Rate Statements: Rate statements like “We have urgent projects that need AI expertise” on a scale of 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree).

• Step 2: Assess Needs: Use your results to decide if you need immediate AI skills or if adaptability is more important.

• Step 3: Match Outcomes with Roles: Match the result with the roles you are hiring for. If adaptability is more important, look for candidates who are fast learners, even if they do not have a lot of AI experience.

I used the AI assistant Claude to build this quiz using natural language, no code. You do not need a subscription to Claude to use it. Here’s a video that shows the quiz in action and below are screenshots.

AI Readiness Assessment Matrix: Visualizing Candidate Fit

After understanding your organization’s needs, you can see how different candidates fit using the AI Readiness Assessment Matrix. This is a 2×2 chart that compares Current AI Skills and Adaptability.

Each part of the matrix shows a different type of candidate:

This matrix helps you figure out which type of candidate best fits specific roles in your team.

AI-Ready Employee Hiring Guide: Crafting Your Questions

Now that you have used the quiz and the matrix, the AI-Ready Employee Hiring Guide GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) will help you turn this knowledge into action.

This GPT helps hiring manager develop interview questions and offers tips to evaluate how well candidates can adapt to AI in their jobs.

Scott Morris, CMO of Sprout Social put the guide to the test.

“Custom GPTs help maintain consistency and improve efficiency across teams, including in hiring processes. For example, the AI-Ready Employee Hiring Guide GPT ensures that hiring managers can consistently prepare relevant interview questions and evaluate candidates’ AI skills in line with role requirements.”

Here is how to use the guide:

• Step 1: Define the Role – Start by defining what the role requires. Are you hiring a content marketer who needs AI skills, or a data scientist who will work with machine learning?

• Step 2: Use Matrix Insights – Use the 2×2 matrix to decide the kind of candidate you need—high skills, high adaptability, or something in between.

• Step 3: Create Questions – The guide will create questions that assess things like adaptability, ethical thinking, and AI experience. For example: “Describe a time when you had to learn a new technology quickly. How did you handle it?”

• Step 4: Assess Responses – Use the guide to know what good answers look like and what red flags to watch for. Adaptability-focused roles should show excitement for learning and strategic thinking.

• Step 5: Evaluate and Decide – Evaluate candidates based on their adaptability and AI knowledge to see if they meet your needs.

The AI-Ready Employee Hiring Guide gives you a simple way to turn broad skills into real interview questions.

If you don’t have a paid ChatGPT subscription, this video and the screenshots below show you how the guide works with an example:

Upskilling Your Current Team: An Untapped Resource

The right AI talent might already be part of your team. Upskilling and reskilling your current employees can be an effective way to build AI skills without hiring new people. Training existing staff has several benefits:

• Familiarity with Company Goals – Current team members already understand your business goals, culture, and workflow. Upskilling them means you save time and resources on onboarding.

• Improves Morale and Retention – Offering growth opportunities shows your commitment to employees’ careers. This boosts morale and can lead to higher retention rates.

• Cost-Effective – Hiring new talent can be expensive, especially for specialized AI roles. Investing in training your existing team is often more affordable.

• Greater Trust – You already know the strengths and weaknesses of your team members, which makes it easier to predict how they will apply new skills in practice.

Consider creating an AI learning program for your team, using resources like applied AI workshops with real-life use cases for specific functions and roles, online courses, or AI tools that they can experiment with in a safe learning environment. The AI-Ready Employee Hiring Guide can also be adapted to assess existing team members’ readiness for AI roles and identify key areas for growth.

AI as a Teammate: Shifting Perspectives

In my previous newsletter titled “Humans + AI: The New Marketing Dream Team, Built with Heart”, I talked about using AI as a teammate. This idea is supported by many AI users. Workers who see AI as a teammate are 33% more likely to be more productive compared to those who see it just as a tool.³ The same is true when hiring AI talent—we need people who can work with AI to do better work.

Recent studies show that people who use generative AI save more than 30 minutes every day, and over 90% of them say AI makes their work easier to handle.²

Only 39% of people globally who use AI at work have received AI training from their company. And only 25% of companies are planning to offer training on generative AI this year. Giving your team proper learning opportunities is key to their success.²

This is especially important because 75% of workers around the world are now using AI, and 46% of them started in the last six months.²

Here’s a playbook for how a real 25-human and 20 AI-team was built in 6 months and results.

Building Your AI-Ready Team

AI is changing fast, and hiring needs to keep up. It is about building a team ready to learn, adapt, and grow, not just hiring someone with the right skills today. This is even more important because AI use has grown to 72% in organizations worldwide.¹

Use the AI Readiness Quiz, the 2×2 Matrix, and the AI-Ready Employee Hiring Guide to structure your hiring process and get your team ready for a future with AI. Remember, 85% of people who are strong AI users start their workday with AI and use it to prepare for the next day. This shows how important AI is becoming in daily work.²

Erica Seidel, Founder and Executive Recruiter at The Connective Good, reinforces the need to think about hiring strategically.

“As AI changes the workplace, leaders need to carefully decide when to upskill their current team and when to hire from outside. Upskilling internal talent can be cost-effective and builds loyalty, while hiring externally brings in new skills that the team may not have yet. Using both approaches together is often the best way to meet both immediate and long-term goals.”

Share Your Thoughts

If you are hiring for AI talent, try the AI-Ready Employee Hiring Guide. Explore the AI Readiness Assessment Quiz to better understand your organization’s needs. I would love to hear how these tools work for your team and any feedback you have.

The future belongs to those who can mix AI with human creativity. Is your team ready? 67% of respondents expect their organizations to invest more in AI over the next three years, so now is the time to get your team ready for an AI-driven future.¹

Feel free to share your thoughts or any challenges you face in building an AI-ready team.

Sources:

1. “The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value.” McKinsey & Company, May 30, 2024.

2. “AI at Work Is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part.” Microsoft Work Trend Index, May 8, 2024.

3. “The State of AI at Work.” Asana Work Innovation Lab and Anthropic, 2024.

The Practical AI in Go-to-Market newsletter is designed to share practical learnings and insights in using AI responsibly for go-to-market strategy, product, brand, demand, content, and digital, and growth marketing. Subscribe today and let’s learn together on this AI journey!

For those who prefer more interactive learning, explore our applied AI workshops, designed to inspire teams with real-life use cases tailored to specific marketing functions.

Also check out this team transformation case study and step-by playbook of how we helped transform a lean GTM team into a human-AI powerhouse with human and AI teammates.

Or, if audio-visual content is your style, here are virtual and in-person speaking events where I’ve covered a variety of AI topics. I’ve also keynoted at many organization and corporate-wide events. Whether through the newsletter, multimedia content, or in-person events, I hope to connect with you soon.