Hiring the Undiscovered Genius! Creativity Tests that Matter!

Hardly anyone hires anyone today based solely on the candidate’s CV. Even recommendations are suspect, unless they are signed by people who are known and trusted by the evaluator. So how do you find high performance, creative individuals to add to your company’s roster?

 By definition, creativity is the ability to produce alternatives to what is commonly known. In literature and the arts, the results do not need to meet “reality” tests, but in innovation they do. Unlike a hobby, where creativity may have a single client - the hobbyist, innovation is creativity useful to many.

 In most cases, an innovator’s resume will contain easily verifiable entries which document their creative achievements, such as patents or publications. But not always. Patents cost money and publications require institutional backing, both hard to come by early in one’s career. Even extra-curricular activities can be limited for some by time restrictions or family obligations.

For young candidates the capacity to innovate may be there, just waiting for the right environment to surface and thrive.

 Despite popular misconceptions, undiscovered genius is not the exclusive domain of the young. Peter Roget invented his famous “Thesaurus” when he was 73 and “Grandma” Moses became a celebrated painter well into her seventies, at a time when most others are long retired or considering running for President.

So how do you evaluate creative potential? One way is to give the brain a new job to do, evaluate its response, and compare it with responses from a statistically significant number of candidates. This method is used by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) in qualifying children for gifted and talented programs. It tests for fluency (number of ideas in unit time), originality (statistical infrequency of a response), abstractness of titles (borrowed real estate term describing ability to organize the thinking process), elaboration (ability to detail concepts) and resistance to premature closing (keeping an open mind).

Although the TTCT is geared towards testing youngsters, we adapted the method to assist Human Capital departments enhance their company’s talent pool. However, to identify gifted and talented adults you need to test for more than the candidate’s ability to put together stick figures. And each professional position requires a different set of questions and evaluation methodology. We generally use compound questions which test, simultaneously, creativity and basic relevant knowledge.

 For example, an applicant for a physicist position might be asked to list all the laws of Physics violated by shrinking devices such as those featured in popular sci-fi movies like “The Incredible Shrinking Man”, “Fantastic Voyage”, “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” and “Ant-Man”. While most would list Conservation of Energy and Conservation of Mass, Conservation of Momentum and Conservation of Information would likely be found with a decreasingly lower frequency. This would add to the originality score. Explaining the details of how these laws are violated will affects some of the competency scores. Not seeing any of these movies is disqualifying for obvious reasons!

 A potential marketing manager would face a different kind of challenge. What you may want to test for is a candidate’s ability to create new opportunities. Here is an example. 

“In order to lower the cost of air travel over short distances, Flap Air starts a commuter service where passengers are stacked in a three-dimensional array of boxed seats, each equipped with all amenities required by a flight less than one hour long (see illustration). In the space provided below list as many possible enhancements as you can think of, for this service. Feel free to interpret or modify the description of the service as you see fit, while maintaining the key idea of the three-dimensional stacking of passengers.”

 A PhRma company may want to probe competency a bit deeper.

“At a given time in the future, a super-Lamarckian form of evolution becomes instantly dominant. From that point on, everyone’s genetic traits evolve, during their own lifetime, as a consequence of individual actions and exposure to other people and the environment. Things like eating, exercising, listening to music, any form of trauma and even touching other people or objects, all induce immediate changes in the genetic code. List below some of the consequences of such change.”

A common answer to a similar question we used in the past was that the event would lead to a rise in “gene privacy” issues. A unique and well documented response was “immortality”. Again, the genius was in the details!  

Andrei Cernasov, PhD

The Innovation and Design Agency (Innodesa, LLC) is an innovation consultancy based in Morristown, New Jersey. You can reach Dr. Cernasov at: [email protected]