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....

Here is a cool hack that I developed for Facebook, in case some of you don't know it already. So, one of the complaints that I often hear about when suggesting that you source from Facebook is that most of the profiles are not open, and you have to make a friend request to see if the person is the right profile...and if they don't accept etc, etc.... So I put my head to this problem and came up with a work around.

Welcome readers to my new Blog, entitled Radical Recruitment. You might be wondering what is Radical Recruitment. For me, it's a new way of thinking about recruiting, I think the great Lou Adler said it best when he wrote "Find Jobs for People, not People for Jobs". It's a new paradigm in recruitment, that places the candidate at the forefront of the process, and aligns all the other key stakeholders around an exceptional candidate experience.