Dive Brief:
- At what’s being touted as the AI hiring event of the year, the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference in Long Beach, California has employers vying for talent in a finite pool of candidates, Business Insider reports. The goal: to power their firms to the next level of machine learning.
- Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and Facebook are among the industry heavyweights sending small armies of recruiters and spokespersons to try to hire attendees, presenters and rivals. The competition is so fierce, salaries and offers are expected to start at $100,000 and ramp up to nearly $1 million, Business Insider says.
- Machine learning is anticipated to grow in the computer science space for the next decade or so. After that, experts predict, it will likely move into all other sectors — finance, retail, manufacturing and more. AI talent is likely to continue to draw heavy demand for the next few decades.
Dive Insight:
Predicting what the future will hold in technology is not a talent most HR professionals are readying their recruitment plans around. But the time is quickly coming where you’ll have to hire for jobs that don’t currently exist.
In addition, recruiters are trying to hire in anticipation of the 1 million computer science jobs opening in the next two years with less than half as many grads to fill them. Those numbers likely don’t factor in the explosion of additional jobs AI will generate, and the high wages that will follow those jobs.
More and more companies large and small are looking for creative solutions to stay on track. From apprenticeship programming, bootcamp tech programs and partnerships starting at the high school level, the race is on to be at the forefront of tech hiring. Even the largest players in the industry are eschewing a four year degree for raw talent when it comes to hiring for AI and other not-yet-developed tech needs yet to come.
