Innovative organizations cannot sustain their achievements without fresh ideas and new approaches that are often brought in by new hires. Companies that foster innovation need not just highly skilled workforce; they need highly engaged employees – people who love to work there, who are motivated to be creative, and whose personal values fit well the organizational culture. Finding the “right” people for the organization is a challenge that goes through all stages of a recruitment process. However, if the initial step of generating applicants fails to bring these “right” people into the mix, the whole hiring process may prove fruitless.
Something feels broken in our current recruiting system. Research tells us that firm success depends upon having the “right” workforce, emphasizing the alignment of corporate cultural values between organizations and their employees. However, companies invite candidates to interviews based on a system of keyword matching, looking for technical skills and previous experience, leaving out cultural fit considerations to the face-to-face meetings. But what are the chances that, under the current system, those “right” people will even get invited?
It is not easy to change our natural inclination to seek out similarity. The process starts with moving away from the unconscious urge to seek for likeness and toward the conscious acceptance of dissimilarity. In addition to finding team members who differ from you in terms of education, ethnicity, geographic origin, etc., try to also find team members among people that are multidimensional and cross-trained in different areas. These folks possess ‘associative fluency,’ a quality that allows them to make connections about ideas and applications, rather that “tunneling” into specific domains when a wider view is needed.