How to Hire "A Players"

You're trying to grow your business, but you know you need more help than the local labour market can provide. Face it – you need a superstar. Maybe even an American.
But how do you do it? Can you really lure an A player out of the land of the free into the Great White North.?

My column in this week’s National Post looks at how one Vancouver company hired two U.S. hotshots to grow its technical capability and U.S. marketing presence beyond what local talent could do.

The company is Coastal.com, the online eyeglass/contact lens retailer. My article includes interviews with CEO Roger Hardy to explore why Coastal felt it needed U.S. expertise, and with Coastal’s two recent all-star recruits to find out what it took to lure them to B.C. from the U.S.

Excerpt: “Aaron Magness says moving to Canada fulfilled his ambition to work in a more international context; in the United States, he notes, “you can get by very well only looking at the U.S. market.” At first, he says, he wasn’t “overly enthusiastic” about Coastal’s offer, but “as I saw the size of the marketplace and where it could go, I found it very exciting.”

You can read the full story here: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/01/03/recruiting-talent-from-the-valley/

Bonus read:
My NatPost blogpost about how to think more creatively. To get better results, says author and innocation expert Michael Michalko, stop focussing on the problem itself, and approach it from an outside-the-park point of view.

Excerpt: “Creative thinkers form more novel combinations because they routinely conceptually blend objects, concepts and ideas from two different context or categories that logical thinkers conventionally consider separate,” writes Michalko.

It’s a quick read at: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/01/04/breaking-through-your-creative-blocks/