How to Hire—and Keep—the Next Steve Jobs
Let your Web and social-media presence reflect how dynamic your organization is. At Atari, recruitment spiked with the ad “Play games, make money.”
It is often more telling to find out how he accomplished something.
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.
That’s where you’ll get a sense of their passions, as well as the intellectual challenges they pursue “just for fun.”
Because when you catch them totally off-guard, you see how they tackle real-time thinking challenges.
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.
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.
Peer-accepted “rule breaking” energizes IT departments with creative irreverence.
Make them propose something better instead.
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.