For most people, the important thing is not their existing skills with AI and automation. The tech will continue to evolve. This is the worst AI will ever be.
The important thing is their mindset toward rapidly evolving technology and their mindset toward what happens as the technology becomes more and more useful.
What mindsets are most important?
- Willingness to learn
- Willingness to experiment
- Desire to find ways to do more fun stuff and create more value
- Awareness of what tasks they like and don’t like
If the candidate will be asked to use AI tools & think about automation, it needs to be clear that they’ve actually used technology in the past. They may not necessarily need to have the specific technical skills you’re asking for, but they do need to be quick to learn and embrace technology.
When hiring leaders, I think the best questions are the ones we’re already asking. A leader’s main focus is on building teams that are continually higher-performing. AI is an accelerant for that.
When hiring for frontline employees, these questions get to the heart of their willingness to learn, embrace, and use new technologies and methodologies. Only a few questions are specific to AI.
I’ve not met many great employees who didn’t have the above mindsets. These mindsets worked long before the age of AI, and they’ll work after it, too.
First-order questions
- How would you define your relationship with technology?
- Have you experimented with any AI tools? What did you think?
- Tell me about the last technology you learned to use. How did it go?
Two-step questions
- What tasks do you dislike in your current job / what did you dislike in your last job?
- If you didn’t have to do them, would you be interviewing with me?
- ** This proves they know what they like and don’t like to do **
- What’s the last thing you learned that made a material impact in your life?
- What was the impact?
- ** This proves their excitement to learn and apply their learnings **
- If you could only do the 3 things in your day that you think would make the biggest impact on the organization, what would they be?
- What would their impact be?
- What stands in the way of that impact now?
- ** This helps you identify all the things that should be automated… it’s everything that’s not in their top 3 things **
The key with AI at this stage is that it’s moving so fast, that, at this stage, I think the best way to vet and hire is through their mindset, not through their existing skills. Skills can be trained in short-order.
Mindset can’t.
