Hiring entrepreneurial people

Frank Arr has posted an interesting email from Tim Holborn with several interesting ideas.

Tim states that over the last couple of years he has been involved in the creation of many ideas, but not product. It seems he has also been looking for a role where his skills can be put to use, but has failed. Now to Tim's first idea and recruitment.

Essentially Tim is suggesting that current recruitment practices might not cover matching of ideas people and organisations. Now recruiters will say (please let me know if I am wrong) that they do take into account the softer side of things when trying to match candidates and roles. However I personally see several issues with this current process, which might explain Tim's lack of success. Firstly, Tim is right on the money when he talks about job ads, framework currently being used in a majority of ads (at least in Australia) focus on the typical profile attributes, education, experience etc. Not on the "entrepreneurial" attributes.

Secondly, this is further hindered by the tools that have been provided to job seekers and recruiters where we make it really easy to search on traditional attributes but provide fairly poor keyword/free text searching capabilities. This then limits the match capabilities from both sides of the fence.

Finally, the HR department of any medium to large organisation "forces" hiring manager's to develop traditional job descriptions. Where manager's must specify the education, experience they want. I have never seen an hiring process that would "allow" a manager to create a job description with 2 words in it "ideas person". Ok you might want a few more but I think you get the point.

If you read the rest of Tim's email there are some great ideas there, now all I need to do is find an engineer and we can commercialise "Computer expansion port for displays"!

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