Last month, the Entrepreneur website highlighted Design Thinking as one of the most in-demand skills sought by HR teams from candidates. As the workforce takes on increasingly globalized dynamics, recruitment processes are also undergoing drastic changes to meet the demands of new roles.
Today, recruiters are evaluating candidates on far more than academic background. Whether a software developer or an interior designer, design thinking has been identified as an essential skill for any position.
But what does this capability entail? The ability to make quick decisions and generate creative solutions to solve existing — and emerging — problems relevant to the job. It is a skill well worth developing.
AI vs. Design Thinking
There is still no cause for concern: despite all the advances made in machine learning, human beings are still needed to input all the information, analyses, and insights. In other words, standard behavior and its variations must still originate from human intelligence.
As a recent challenge, companies have faced the difficulty of creating services and workflows where people and machines complement each other. This is where design thinking enters the picture once again. It occupies a critical space for understanding and adapting processes, since its user-needs-focused premise helps AI software understand how systems will actually be used.
One key point is to adopt design thinking right at the beginning of a project — still during the ideation phase — to ensure that a customer-centric vision is being applied. How is the user journey envisioned? What are the expected outcomes? The answers lie in design thinking, not in artificial intelligence.
Text by Pedro Waengertner