Corporate recruiters and HR professionals have a long history of treating all applicants and jobs equitably, a term that synonymous most organizations use to mean “the same.” Unfortunately, if you treat all applicants the same, you’re liable to miss some individuals who, if identified and hired (and in many organizations allowed to do what they were hired to do), would have an unequal impact on business results. These individuals are labeled as innovators, game changers, thought leaders, and diverse thinkers.
Although pursuing operational excellence and efficiency in recruiting was once an acceptable goal, it is no longer. We are now living in a world where innovation drives growth and performance, not process conformity, strict policy, or established standards. In this new era, recruiters and recruiting leaders need to toss aside everything they think they know about recruiting, and reinvent a recruiting process capable of identifying innovators and treating them differently. (The same could truly be said about recruiting any type of diverse candidate.)
There are many reasons why managers in corporate recruiting fail to institute specialized processes and programs to capture individuals (executive search professionals have long excelled at treating game changers differently). The most common reason for their lack of action is that they have failed to calculate the differential in business impact that hiring and retaining innovators can have on a business.
Leading firms like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and General Electric have led the way in understanding the value of these individuals. Google, for example, has found that a top engineer can deliver as much as 300 times more value than an average engineer. In fact, Google has created the world’s first recruiting process designed to capture and hire innovators in every position in the company. As Google puts it, “Thinking beyond the norm is expected, no matter what position you happen to hold…Innovation is our bloodline. Even the best technology can be improved.”
Apple demonstrated its knowledge in building competitive advantage through hiring when it brought Tony Fadell on board to help create the iPod, an act that has led to billions of dollars in revenue. There isn’t a huge amount of publicly available research on the exact dollar impact of these innovators, but almost all of what does exist shows that they produce at minimum five times the business impact of a standard hire. In my experience, the results are so dramatic that they are hard to question. Whether you hire innovators or develop them, it’s time to realize that HR must develop a program designed specifically to capture these innovators, game changers, and diverse thinkers.
There are a variety of reasons why most traditional recruiting systems either fail to identify or delay the hiring of innovators. Some of the prime reasons for this include:
The key point here is that most college education is extremely structured, and as a result, it routinely frustrates people who think outside the box, a condition that often results in them quitting prematurely. (This condition, if present in your organization, can also cause them to leave your organization quickly!)
Solution: The key to fixing this problem is to modify your job specifications and your ATS or recruiter-driven screening system so that a lack of a degree is weighted neutrally.
Almost by definition, innovators have ideas and concepts in areas where having a great deal of experience is not even possible. The fact is that the speed of change and innovation in the world has increased dramatically to the point at which knowledge, answers, and even experience can be obsolete in as little as two years.
Solution: Once again, screening systems need to be modified so that they don’t automatically exclude people with fewer than “X” years of experience. Experience should be one factor that is considered, but as Google has found, you need to look at successes and experience outside of the work environment in order to identify game changers and innovators (did they write a book, win a regional contest, start a business, etc.).
Solution: Google’s approach is to look beyond work experience. It considers a whole range of successes by using a questionnaire that asks about other experiences and successes, in addition to the resume, to identify innovators and diverse thinkers. If you’re bold, consider asking applicants on your website to specifically list their successful innovations and ideas that have changed the game. You should also change your keyword search process to focus on key terms that indicate the possibility of innovation. Some of the words you should search for include “innovative,” “new,” “novel,” “breakthrough,” “groundbreaking,” “discovered,” “created,” “outside the box,” and “quantum leap.”
Solution: Start by identifying which academic programs are likely to have innovators and outside-the-box thinkers. Yes, you should look at the narrow, traditional degree programs, but your search shouldn’t overly focus on those degrees. You should periodically take a chance on interns from these other more creative disciplines in order to better assess whether you’re missing out on some top people. Company-sponsored contests and projects are also good ways to identify individual innovators from a variety of majors. In addition, rather than focusing on just top schools for your recruiting, you should also look at liberal arts institutions that specialize in producing broad thinkers who are probably not overly tied to the current technology and the current way of doing business.
I would speculate that Tony Fadell, during his first interview at Apple, must have said something to the effect of, “You guys are missing it. Apple shouldn’t just be in the computer business, it should also be in the music business.” Unfortunately, at most firms, criticizing what they currently do almost guarantees you’ll be screened out. IBM learned a long time ago with its wild turkey and with its current extreme blue program that bringing in individuals who don’t fit can actually help spur change. Jack Welch did something similar at GE when he required senior executives to have a (usually younger) technology geek as a mentor in order to push the executives into using and understanding more technology.
Solution: The first step is to realize that if you want to lead the way in disruptive technology and process improvement, you need to revise your screening and interviewing process to allow disruptors through. The goal is to change the screening so that, at least for certain jobs, outside-the-box thinkers (who by definition are not like your current employees), have a sufficient opportunity to demonstrate their ideas and new ways of thinking. Recruiting probably also needs to designate an innovation champion whose job it is to identify the resumes of candidates who have the potential to be innovative and to ensure that they get an opportunity to demonstrate their innovativeness during the interview process. The key is to celebrate uniqueness, not to reject it.
Solution: You need to educate hiring managers and those who sit in on interviews on what they can do to improve the assessment and to lower the reject rate of innovators. The best solution is generally to give potential innovators a perplexing real problem that the team is facing, and ask the candidate to walk them through the steps that they would take to resolve it. If the answer differs significantly from your current approach, you have found an outside-the-box and diverse thinker. Educating interviewers about the need to occasionally take a chance on higher high-risk candidates is also a good idea.
Some other things that you can do to make your recruiting and interviewing process more friendly and welcoming to innovators include:
It’s no secret that CEOs are demanding more innovation from every source. Unfortunately, recruiting hasn’t been doing its part in identifying and bringing on board a sufficient quantity of innovators and game changers. In fact, recruiting might have actually been scaring them away.
Success starts with realizing that innovators are different, and as a result, they must be assessed, interviewed, and treated differently than other candidates if you expect to land them. What is needed, rather than a hodgepodge effort, is a program designed specifically to target innovators. If at least 5% of your new hires have not been identified as innovators, game changers, or diverse thinkers, you can blame yourself for hurting the company’s bottom line. It’s really that simple.
Note: This article is a follow-up to my previous article on how to hire innovators that was published by ERE on October 16, 2006. You can read this article here.
