To the ears of seasoned business people, ‘design thinking’ sounds like something a wayward teenager wants to do in art college. Far from it. Design thinking is for business too, given its focus on solving customer and end-user pain points.

Colin Hickey, chief commercial officer at Starcircle in Cork, is a convert. In 2021 he completed the Professional Diploma in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership at UCD’s Innovation Academy, and Hickey’s main takeaway from the experience is adopting design thinking in his daily role.

“The design thinking framework that we learned as part of the course is about understanding the end user - putting yourself in their shoes and empathising with them - and producing a minimum viable product that can be tested really quickly,” he explains.

Starcircle styles itself as a ‘talent sourcing technology provider’, and augments traditional recruitment processes by layering technology with human expertise to assist clients like Facebook, Amazon, Dropbox, Cisco etc to source ‘hidden talent’.

Led by James Galvin, Starcircle Ltd had a tough pandemic, and booked a net loss of €250,000 in the year to June 2020. With the scramble for talent compounded by the spectre of the ‘Great Resignation’, Hickey is conscious of the pressures to constantly innovate.

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“We’re a disruptor within our category but to stay a disruptor you have to stay ahead. Our technologies, methodologies and solutions are working right now, but that could be easily caught up on by our competitive set," says Hickey. "We set up a Talent and Innovation Hub where we test out new theories and technologies in a safe-to-fail space.”

One method Starcircle uses to track down hidden talent is nearest neighbour analysis. This involves seeking out candidates who have some of the skills required, or skills that are close to the exact job description.

This could be a solution to the old cliché of a woman matching eight or nine out of 10 requirements on a job description, and not going for it because she doesn’t believe she is qualified, while a man will throw his hat in the ring if he fulfils three or four of the requirements.

“Right now the power is with the candidate, because there's so much demand,” Hickey advises. “We have a conversation with candidates to see what they want. What do they want to achieve, and where do they see their career going? It's not necessarily just matching a job to a candidate - it's understanding the candidate and matching the job to them.”