What’s happened:
The rapid development of AI is forcing big tech companies to go to great lengths when it comes to hiring top talent. A few weeks ago Microsoft-CEO Satya Nadella (56) in an unusual step Inflection AI founders Mustafa Suleyman (39) and Karén Simonyan, as well as 70 of their employees. Suleyman, who is also co-founder of the current Google subsidiary DeepMind, and Simonyan are to head a newly created AI department at Microsoft.
And Nadella isn’t the only tech CEO playing an active role in recruiting – at Meta Mark Zuckerberg (39) reportedly personally approached DeepMind researchers from Google in order to poach them. Elon Musk (52) tweeted just last week
, that “the battle for AI talent is the craziest battle for skilled workers” he has ever seen. The compensation for its AI engineering team Tesla He therefore wants to increase it in order to prevent them from being poached – also from Musk’s own xAI start-up
, which he leads as CEO.
And what really happens:
The race for AI talent is causing big tech companies to behave more and more like startups. Until now, it was rather unusual for CEOs of large companies such as Microsoft, Google or Meta to be involved in hiring employees below the C-level. What is even more unusual is that other companies are even being paid to take over their leading minds. After the mass poaching of the co-founders and the majority of employees, Microsoft promised Inflection AI $650 million in compensation, even though officially there was talk primarily of license payments for software.
This shows that at the end of the day, one thing counts most: talent. In our new book “Scaling Through Chaos
“We analyzed 200,000 job profiles in 200 high-growth companies. The evaluation showed that founders spend around 50 percent of their working time dealing with human resources issues. For many people this is unusual at the beginning and they often have the feeling that they are doing something wrong. In the start-up phase, the focus is often on recruiting; as the company grows, it becomes more about getting the management level on track. But as the examples of Zuckerberg and Nadella show, even the most successful CEOs make talent their top priority.
Especially on the threshold of the AI age, established companies are also more open to relying on so-called tiger teams to develop new products: i.e. small groups of specialists who can act quickly and make decisions autonomously.
Start-ups already spend a large portion of their raised venture capital on hiring employees – now the big tech companies are also increasing their spending on top talent: AI researchers at Google reportedly receive $5 to $10 million per year and at Meta about one million dollars.
What’s next?
Companies will likely continue to rapidly expand their AI teams as the AI arms race continues to intensify. While larger companies have often filled management positions internally, they are now increasingly looking for external employees.
However, many tech companies should pause before embarking on a major AI hiring spree. Meta and Microsoft are recruiting AI researchers so aggressively because they are currently building their own generative AI models (LLM), and very few experts in the world have the skills to do this.
But AI talent can also come from within. Job van der Woort from the HR start-up Remote recently spoke about how he tries to lead by example as a leader by working a lot with AI and also developing his own AI bots. He emphasizes how important it is to train all employees internally and to take advantage of the many offers available online. Internal training also helps to promote employees with high potential who understand the intricacies of the corporate culture and specific customer needs in detail.
Ultimately, however, it is clear that the most successful and ambitious founders spend an enormous amount of time on the topic of skilled workers, from recruiting to working with managers. HR issues can sometimes feel chaotic. But it is the price of transformative breakthroughs, especially in the age of AI.
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