Reader,

What is your strategy for filling AI engineering roles next year while managing clients and properly vetting technical talent?

For the past six months, I’ve been partnering with two EU-based leaders on selling AI products and bespoke solutions.

My role has been to vet small to mid sized businesses, run technical discovery, and help teams decide what to prioritize.

The reality is messy. And misalignment rolls downhill. If that misalignment hasn’t hit your pipeline yet, it will within the next six months.

I know because I’m getting calls from my staffing community asking me various types of vetting questions so they win deals.

The game we're playing hinges on everyone having clarity, and you can't have that without understanding the technology skills you're hiring for.

For Example:

A seasoned IT sales rep reached out for help vetting a remote AI engineering requisition at Goldman Sachs.

I wasn't surprised when they told me about the hiring manager.

This was a new manager with unclear initiatives on paper and the rep had already sent a few resumes, only to have the manager reject each one.

The sales rep could sense the requirements were shifting, but aligning with the hiring manager was like herding cats.

Imagine trying to hire for a role you don't understand. Yikes.

Instead of sending more candidates and refining on the fly, Sales Rep Guy paused and called me.

We reviewed the requisition together.

When I asked him to walk me through the business initiatives and actual technical expectations, he could not.

It wasn’t his inexperience, it was the requirements themselves. They were totally ungrounded.

Rather than treating it like a half-baked dev req, he wanted clarity up front on the manager’s initiatives and what would actually be needed to staff them.

So we rebuilt the approach:

1. We created a targeted question set using an AI engineer from my company
2. Went back to the hiring manager, and walked through it live

Within minutes, it was obvious what the manager understood and where the gaps were.

From there, we proposed one specific candidate profile aligned to the most likely needs for Q1.

And that sales rep took the wheel from there with confidence and control.

This is the point:

• Keeping up with the technology is table stakes. It's a bare minimum requirement.
• Keeping up with how clients are actually adopting technology is the differentiator.

Some companies are moving fast. Some are not.

Others think they are until misalignment between leadership priorities, hiring decisions, and technical reality exposes them.

I see the difference because I sit between AI buying and hiring every day.

What are you doing for yourself?

Stay tuned for Part Two, where we break down the requisition from an engineering perspective and show how to turn ambiguity into a clear candidate profile.

If you’re trying to stay current on AI, Promptmates is a solid community for TA and staffing leaders who want to keep up without the noise.

-Jaclyn