When we hire, we tend to hire for experience.  In other words, we want to hire people for what they already know, and mostly to do things they have already done.  This always bothered me as an employee because I switched jobs usually to do something *new*, but that’s a tangent I will try not to go down in this post.

When hiring for an organization that is looking to LEARN (such as a startup), then you need to hire people not for their experience, but for their curiosity and proclivity for self-directed learning.  How do you find those people?

You have to have an organization that attracts the curious.  I used to work for a company whose main marketing message to clients was ‘proven experience.’  This was usually backed up by reams of spreadsheet templates and powerpoints proving how we could pinpoint down to the minute how long a project was going to take.  Curiosity, in this context, was frowned upon.  Because the client was paying to get something done that we have done a million times the same way.  It didn’t matter that there was a potentially better way to do it, because the client was paying for predictability.  I could go down another rabbit hole just on the nature of predictability in technology projects, but I won’t, because the premise of this post is organizational learning.

Curious people are always wondering if there is a better, faster way to do something, and curious organizations attract curious people.  Thus, a curious organization is always tinkering with its internals to figure out how to best approach/attack/execute in the market.  The outward expression of curiosity is learning, and the organizations that ‘learn’ are the organizations that outperform.