How to Hire—and Keep—the Next Steve Jobs
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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.
Steve Jobs preached "Think different" during his celebrated reign at Apple. But you may not realize that he cultivated this quality under a mentor who launched the restaurant chain, Chuck E. Cheese. Yes, that's right. Nolan Bushnell started the noisy, kid-friendly pizza joint, along with two dozen other companies. Among them is Atari where, as Bushnell recounts, an "unkempt, contemptuous 19-year-old" Jobs got his first real job. In the recent book, Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep and Nurture Talent (Simon and Schuster), Bushnell provides the following recruiting and retention tips among the dozens he recounts in the book. His overall philosophy discourages managers to seek "safe" employees who won't ruffle any feathers yet, then again, seldom make meaningful impact. Instead, Bushnell looks past various personality quirks and seeks out employees who convey a unique sense of passion and creative spark. Jobs, for example, ticked off certain Atari employees so much that Bushnell eventually told him to work nights when no one was around. Clearly, he went on to accomplish great things. Bushnell's other innovations include Catalyst Technologies, the first technology incubator; Etak, the first car navigation system; and Androbot, a robotics company. He also has consulted for IBM and Cisco. For more about the book, click here.