Hiring an innovative workforce: A necessary yet uniquely challenging endeavor

To increase innovative performance in work settings, most scholars agree that organizations need both an environment that is supportive of creativity as well as employees with high levels of creative potential. Substantial research effort has been aimed at understanding work contexts that facilitate creative thinking, yet less is known regarding how to most effectively recruit and hire creative talent. To fill this knowledge gap and guide future research efforts, we discuss the KSAOs most predictive of creative potential as well as the means and methods for assessing this potential. In addition, we explore the challenges to quantifying successful innovation, proposing that creative achievement represents a unique and specialized form of organizational performance. Supplementing this discussion we provide recommendations for obtaining high-quality, substantive criterion data. We conclude with a brief discussion on recruitment and long-term selection strategies for innovation.

► Organizations can use KSAO’s to hire creative talent.
► We highlight and address challenges for capturing creative performance criteria.
► Knowledge and skills should be both domain specific and broad to encourage creativity.
► Creative talent is attracted to companies with high autonomy and creative culture.
► Creative performance is hard to predict because of it’s complexity and low visibility.