Are we hiring for the right skills?

Before you read the post watch the video below, you'll probably get the gist of where I'm going with this post, but if you will dear reader, continue below once you have viewed the video.

TED | Talks | Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? (video)

So, I'm watching this video with my wife one evening and thinking to myself (as I usually do), how does this relate to Talent Acquisition.  And I started thinking back to all the hires that I made over the years and those that were OK and not great hires and those that were super star hires....and you know what the difference was, you betcha, the level of creativity.  But you see dear reader, as we train creativity out of people in school, we follow that up in the workplace, this of course according to Ken's talk makes absolute sense.  After all we created schools in the Industrial Revolution to do what?  Well, to make good workers, and really that goal hasn't changed, we're creating generations of good, compliant, corporate citizens (with all those great skills).  Whenever I, and many of the other recruiters I know, meet with a hiring manager we ask them for the top skills for the job at minimum.  We don't ask them about the people, about how they will add value to the organization, who will provide the next big innovation.....the next big idea....that will change the course of the company.  To illustrate my point let me tell you a story....

I was working as a Recruitment Manager a number of years ago at a large consulting company.  At the time we were primarily involved in contracts with the defense industry.  During that time we won a contract that involved some C# and .Net development (which was still in Beta at the time).  The company asked me to hire a .Net Architect.  We searched for a long time, I did a lot of research on .Net but still had a lot of trouble finding anyone that could do the job.  One afternoon in August at a coffee shop in downtown Toronto I met Sam.  He was currently the owner of a small web company, for the last few months they had been using .Net to create web marketing platforms for companies that sold equipment for X-treme sports.  Sam had started into this business because he'd wanted to buy some gear online and found that no such opportunity existed, and in the true entrepreneurial spirit, decided to start a business filling that niche.  Now you're probably thinking, he must have had a strong previous experience with technology, on the contrary, prior to starting the company he had been the lead guitarist of a quasi-famous Canadian rock band, and had taken up programming because he viewed it as an art.  It took over 6 months to both convince Sam to join us and to convince the company to take a chance on him, but I tell you after meeting him for 5 mins I knew this guy was meant for greatness.  Sam went on to develop a system for the company for healthcare, related to OHIP billing which won a contract award in Ontario and completely changed the direction of the company.....and he did it though his creativity, and not so much his skills (technical I mean).  And we were lucky that we grabbed him when we did, because he's gone on now to do greater and greater things for other Canadian technology companies.

My point is, maybe sometimes we're sending people away without really realizing their potential just because they don't have 5 years exactly of skill X, or skill Y.....and maybe that's hurting our clients.  Just another radical thought.

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