I find it difficult to distinguish artificial plants from the real ones now a days, so is the case with talent. (Why do I keep comparing plants to talent?) We can grow plants on rooftops, in pots and keep plastic plants in soil. It has become difficult to distinguish one from the other. The texture, the look are very similar.

Artificial Plants are difficult to distinguish from real ones.

Similarly some of the talent around us is unfortunately artificial. I believe that every human is capable and there is a purpose and ability that the person has. But not every human is capable of doing everything. When a person is incapable of doing a certain task but he does not realize this inability and insists on continuing to do it, I feel it inappropriate. Then if he goes one step further and acts that he is capable, I call it artificial talent. And like artificial greenery, it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish artificial talent from the real talent.

It is easy to make the mistake of hiring such people. They have the degrees, they have the convincing power. They can often slip through the check posts in the recruitment process. But a few days into the job and most of the colleagues know that this is not the right person for the job.

Coding, Graphics and Content?

I know one such person quite closely. The person has been jumping from one position to another, has progressed a great deal, can safely say that he is a genius in his ways. But he was learning his way into every job he got. He passed tests for coding, graphics design and content writing, all with flying colors. It was too good to be true. He was cheating through them. He did the same through out work, got work done but almost none of it was done by him personally. Before the end of his contract he already had another position lined up, which was paying him three times the current.

Was there anything wrong with this? He was getting the job done! Why should anyone have trouble with it? No one did. But I still call it artificial talent, the person did not excel at any of the tasks he posed to be doing, he exceled at networking, at researching – whatever means he was using to get the work done – but not at the skills he was hired for. And this to me is artificial talent, difficult to distinguish from the real talent in interviews. But you work with him for a day on a task together sharing screens and you will have no doubt left. The ideas come after a short break, not when you are discussing and this delay is indeed has a price to pay.

Pressures

I don’t blame artificial talent themselves entirely, I think the pressures we put on people are often too much. Be it financial, peer pressure or a companies’ expectation of employees when hiring. When a company posted for a person with these three separate fields, they were in a way preparing for trouble.

Artificial talent can bring prosperity, fame and all, but the self-actualization will most probably never be achieved.