Today is 25th December and its a great time be with family, enjoying time together. Though that, I’m seeing more people taking the opportunity to go for holidays and also a long overdued time off.

So, I’ll be sneaking myself some time off and might not be updating as often during this two weeks. I might still be spending time on Facebook, playing with WarBook but otherwise, its going to be rest day.

For those who celebrates it, I wish you Merry Christmas and those who don’t, have a great holiday. Kan pei !

“I can’t find good staff”

“I need to look for people”

“We’re hiring”

Offer, counter-offer, new offer”

We’ve heard them all. Talent in the digital field is tough to find. In an industry that’s a little more than a decade old, there’s a lack of good talents that are available to meet the demand of today. The ideal world when this industry matures. Unfortunately, until then, it’s a pure blood fight out there or maybe a little bit of luck.

There’s no best way to move forward in the hiring field except you try to protect good ones while groom the newbies. As an agency who values people, part of the most important programme anyone can ask when joining a firm is whether they have a proper talent management programme. Such programme are probably in a few hundred books but yet there are not a lot of companies who actually practise it.

The point here is to be able to counter the deficit in human resource, the only way is to have a strong programme that helps you maintain great people while able to quickly get new inexperience employees on a fast track.

Another method that a lot of companies utilised are hiring foreign talents to guide and train teams of people. Since certain market mature faster than others, we tend to be able to harness imports to help balance certain skill-sets. This is a good measure for global agencies who can transfer their talents around but not necessary a good idea if you’re a local agency who operates in a lean environment.

Generally, to be able to operate at a level your clients require, there’s much to do in the area of planning and also how to resource correctly. I’ve seen good talents go to waste because their strength are not harnessed in the most ideal approach, making them fail miserably. For example, why get someone who’s weak in numbers to be preparing them.

In all fairness, there are good talents out there to be pinched but the principal is whether they are willing to leave their agency to join you. If your competitive agency has a strong programme to keep their people, an excellent environment to boot and a competitive package, I really doubt you stand a chance unless you have something that’s too irresistible.

While I was at Stream 2007, one of the interesting discussion I had was with a fellow from Israel who’s currently involved in democratic school. What struck me as even more interesting is how he explained the entire process of democratic school and the excitement in his tone. His enthusiasm and passion excites me as much and he’s convinced me on why this is the best type of school.

I’ve always believe that you can build a great piece of business when you have enthusiasm and passion. Strangely, that’s not always in the hiring guide we have in a company. There are surprisingly lot of hiring that’s based entirely on skills and experience, passion an added incentive but never really an important criteria.

Recently, I went to a meeting with two extremely passionate individuals, each of them totally vibrating enthusiasm and passion in what they do. They can articulate their thoughts, their vision and even the steps they are taking to make it come through. After a few of this encounter, it prompt me to write this article to start investigating whether we should re-evaluate our hiring technique and based the first criteria on passion and only follow by the other criterias like experience or skills.

Any thoughts ?