"Yet all too often, we look for people who have ALL of the skills we already have instead."
Exactly. The other thing the companies/groups do is that they hire for their needs right now instead of thinking about what they might need later... But the biggest mistake is in not thinking-outside-the-box when it comes to candidates. There's an assumption that the person you're looking for has exactly a certain background and set of skills. As an example (sorry, not a web guy), you're hiring a chip designer and you overlook the guy who's been writing software to design chips (EDA)... The chip design guys tend to think the coder doesn't know anything about chip design, but as it turns out to write software to design chips you've gotta know a lot about designing chips.
Exactly. The other thing the companies/groups do is that they hire for their needs right now instead of thinking about what they might need later... But the biggest mistake is in not thinking-outside-the-box when it comes to candidates. There's an assumption that the person you're looking for has exactly a certain background and set of skills. As an example (sorry, not a web guy), you're hiring a chip designer and you overlook the guy who's been writing software to design chips (EDA)... The chip design guys tend to think the coder doesn't know anything about chip design, but as it turns out to write software to design chips you've gotta know a lot about designing chips.