How to Hire—and Keep—the Next Steve Jobs

How to Hire—and Keep—the Next Steve Jobs

Recruiting Tip: “Advertise” Your True Workplace Culture

Let your Web and social-media presence reflect how dynamic your organization is. At Atari, recruitment spiked with the ad “Play games, make money.”

Recruiting Tip: Don’t Limit Your Interviewing Focus to a Candidate’s Accomplishments

It is often more telling to find out how he accomplished something.

Recruiting Tip: Tap Upon Your Employees’ Connections

Encourage teams to suggest and champion a recruit, like someone they’ve worked with. These candidates must be good—or your teams wouldn’t want to work with them again.

Recruiting Tip: Ask Interviewees About their Hobbies

That’s where you’ll get a sense of their passions, as well as the intellectual challenges they pursue “just for fun.”

Recruiting Tip: Ask Weird Questions

Because when you catch them totally off-guard, you see how they tackle real-time thinking challenges.

Retention Tip: Dispense With Hierarchy

After all, the value of a networking event, or even a great party, is rooted in the concept that anyone at any level can interact with anybody.

Retention Tip: Foster ADHD

If you pigeon-hole IT staffers to one big project, they’ll find unproductive ways to incorporate variety into their routines. With eclectic duties, they won’t need distractions.

Retention Tip: Encourage Pranks

Peer-accepted “rule breaking” energizes IT departments with creative irreverence.

Retention Tip: Don’t Allow Anyone to “Just Say No”

Make them propose something better instead.

Recruiting Tip: Embrace Failure

Fear of failure shouldn’t inhibit your teams. Examine failures for “success clues.” Apple’s Lisa computer flopped, but its “lessons learned” led to the Mac.