In following up to an earlier post, I’m delighted to report that we’ve hired a Creative Director.  This is a first hire of its kind for us here at TiVo.  With 72% of our employee population identified with some aspect of development or IT in our organization, we could use some more representation on the right-brain side of things.  Of 178 applicants, tons of cold calling, four finalists made it to interview with senior executives.  Here are few things that were reinforced along the way:

• Career trajectory – Where is the candidate in their professional development when you connect with them?  We knew that we wanted someone with pedigree agency experience.  However, finding the right one that knew going to the corporate side was the next/right move for them was challenging part.
• Creation vs. execution – Our brand generated a lot of returned calls and referrals.  We knew we needed someone who was a “fount” of creative ideas.  The tough thing was finding someone who could also lead as well as contribute to the execution of said ideas.  An ” associate creative director” would not have had complete ownership of their projects.  A “group creative director” or “executive creative director” would not have had recent hands on experience that needed for team.  Narrowing the search down to a “creative director” didn’t make things easier effort wise, but the clarity more than made up for it.
• Get work samples – In this case it was relatively easy with (online) portfolios.  Yet we assigned homework.  To come up with a solution to a major opportunity or challenged we were wrestling with.  Since the candidate didn’t have the knowledge or data a TiVo employee would already posses, it was a handicap we had to factor in.  The important thing was seeing how the candidate thought through things (with what we’d given them), developed a solution and communicated it to people outside their discipline.  This paid us huge dividends during the vetting process.

There are more lessons learned, but we’ll just save those for another time.

Photo by Pink Sherbert Photography