AI is changing what it takes to land a job in IT.
As businesses put AI to work, CIOs must decide which skills to expect from new hires and how to evaluate them. Experience with AI tools is increasingly valuable, but a resume alone tells them little about whether a candidate can put those tools to effective use.
Michael Corrigan, CIO at World Insurance Associates, wants evidence during interviews. He and his team ask candidates how they’ve used AI and what results they achieved. If they can’t connect that experience to a business outcome, he considers it a red flag.
His expectations also vary by role. AI experience is essential for software developers and data scientists, he says, but less critical for help desk hires. However, critical thinking remains his top priority across all roles, along with data literacy and cybersecurity awareness.
TechTarget spoke with Corrigan about how AI is changing his hiring decisions, how he evaluates candidates and why he isn't planning to replace IT jobs with AI.
Can you briefly describe your IT team?
Michael Corrigan: I’m CIO at World. We have three entities, and the IT team supports all three businesses. We’re responsible for everything from application development, our AI roadmap and strategy, our company infrastructure — network, hardware, cloud compute — as well as our cybersecurity.
We’re a fairly lean team. World has about 3,000 employees nationwide, and on the IT side, we’re just under 50 full-time employees. We do a little bit of outsourcing of our level one help desk for initial intake and triage.
How has your team been using AI?
Corrigan: We started with cybersecurity back in 2023. As threat actors were starting to use these tools to exploit vulnerabilities, we wanted to be able to match that capability. We weren’t able to add a lot of headcount in our cybersecurity team, so we used AI.
Application development has been another area for us where AI has been a tremendous lift in efficiency. We can very quickly build out prototypes based on what the business needs. It’s really brought down the time to delivery on application development projects.
How has AI adoption changed hiring needs within your IT department?
Corrigan: It’s changing the roles that we hire for and the capabilities that we expect. We’re still looking for very strong technical cybersecurity, data and business-focused talent, but increasingly we’re looking for people who know how to use AI to improve their effectiveness.
"AI fluency is becoming part of the baseline rather than a separate specialty skill."
AI fluency is becoming part of the baseline rather than a separate specialty skill. Twelve to 18 months ago, it would have been more of a specialty skill. Now we’re looking at it as something someone should bring to the table as part of their skill set, regardless of their role within IT, because it gives us the ability to expand their usage, whether that’s in cybersecurity, architecture, governance, integration or change management. Having that AI fluency in their toolbox is important to us as we evaluate new candidates.
How do you assess a candidate's AI fluency beyond what's listed on a resume?
Corrigan: Earlier this month, I was asked to present to a group of recruiters, who described the event as a masterclass on this exact topic. One thing that stood out from the questions with the recruiters is just looking to prioritize business judgment, technical depth and AI fluency in the candidates we’re looking to hire.
The way we do that is not just asking them, “Have you used Copilot, Claude or Gemini?” Instead, we ask open-ended questions, such as “How have you used Copilot in your previous role”, and “What results did you get?”
We must be very specific, not just see if they’ve checked the box. “Oh yes, I’ve used Copilot,” they might say, but you must follow up about which use cases and what capacity. What were the results? Did you use any metrics or KPIs? Did it give you time back in your day? Did it give you better results?
We generally find that if someone is more high-level and says, “Oh, yep, I’ve used Copilot,” or “I’ve used Claude,” but they can’t tie it back to a business outcome with a clear benefit, that’s a clear red flag for us.
Has AI reduced your need to hire, or is it mainly helping your team get more done?
Corrigan: Right now, it’s helping our existing team get more done. We have not held off on hiring just because we could automate some tasks with AI.
Which skills matter more when hiring IT staff now that LLMs and AI agents are widely available?
Corrigan: Number one is critical thinking, and that’s nothing new for an IT organization. IT — especially software development, network architecture and cloud architecture — is problem-solving. Whether in legacy IT or AI-enabled environments, strong critical thinking skills remain the number one thing we look for.
"Whether in legacy IT or AI-enabled environments, strong critical thinking skills remain the number one thing we look for."
Number two is probably data literacy. All workflows, processes, applications and systems touch and move data. So, it’s important to have a high literacy of data integrity, quality, validation, and the process flows, such as how that data is stored. Is it sensitive data or non-sensitive data?
Then there’s decision-tree logic: How do we treat non-sensitive data compared to sensitive data? If you lay out the critical thinking, you can understand the data literacy. Then you can extrapolate that into process design. That’s a very critical skill for IT organizations to have in-house.
Lastly, I’d add cybersecurity awareness. Going back to data literacy, we must always be mindful that sensitive data must be protected, especially with newer, emerging tools that may train on your data or expose it externally. Candidates need a good understanding of cybersecurity, even if they’re not in a cybersecurity role, to know how to protect sensitive data, company information or intellectual property. So, critical thinking, data literacy, process design and security awareness.
How do you decide whether to hire someone or use AI to handle additional work?
Corrigan: We’ve done both. It starts with looking at the nature of their work. If they’re doing something repetitive, rules-based or high-volume with a lot of transactions — or if it’s something we can easily validate the output of — then we may use AI to absorb that work. If it requires human experience, judgment, accountability, creativity or business knowledge, we wouldn’t use AI for that.
We would hire the candidate and then look for them to use AI to remove friction and add capability in their job. We wouldn’t replace their job with AI.
How do you decide when to train existing employees in AI skills versus hire externally?
Corrigan: It’s going to vary on the role. We’re kicking off next week with another partner of ours with some AI training for our employees. We’re starting with our leadership staff. This is outside of IT, although we have a few IT leaders included. It’s really to help our leadership understand how to think about and use AI for the functions, roles and responsibilities that fall within their organizations. We’re doing the same thing within IT.
If someone is coming in as a data scientist or they’re going to be working in software development, they must have experience with AI tools. It’s just baseline table stakes.
If we’re looking for someone to come into a help desk role, it’s important for them to understand the tools, especially if our employees are using them, so they can help our employees when they get stuck. But I’d say it’s less critical. We’re not expecting those roles to design workflows, build out operational efficiencies and applications, or secure the organization using controls configured through AI-embedded tools.
Is there anything you've tried in hiring or training that hasn't worked?
Corrigan: Initially, one tool we tried didn’t work out. It had a lot of hype around its capabilities. The team got excited about using it only to find out it wasn’t as capable as we’d expected.
Has AI changed your willingness to hire entry-level IT workers?
Corrigan: Not at all. We need entry-level workers to be the thought leaders of the future. However, those roles are evolving.
We’ll still need a talent pipeline for entry-level roles, but they’ll probably be expected to contribute at a slightly higher level, since they can augment some of their work using AI. But I think the foundation for those tasks is necessary. I don’t see AI changing the need for entry-level roles in IT.
How do you expect AI to affect your IT hiring plans for 2027?
Corrigan: I don’t see it reducing headcount. That’s number one.
In 2027, we’ll be continuing to use AI to increase IT’s productivity. We want to reduce friction in their day, automate repetitive tasks and add operational efficiencies. But we wouldn’t stop hiring for a specific role because we plan to do it with AI.
We would still hire for the role and augment the employee with AI to make them more capable and powerful. But we still need that individual to be here to contribute, be held accountable and use their business judgment.
Tim Murphy is a reporter covering IT strategy for Informa TechTarget, with a focus on IT leadership, governance, workforce skills and AI strategy. His enterprise technology coverage has earned multiple Azbee Awards.
The above transcript was edited for brevity and clarity.
