Intrapreneurs are individuals that use entrepreneurial thinking to create change or launch new ventures within existing organizations. They essentially always ask, “Is this the best and most effective way to do something? Is there a better or new way?”

Intrapreneurs may launch a new revenue-generating product or service, make systems and infrastructure more effective, or incorporate a social or environmental good component to your work. Organizations like Google are famous for fostering intrapreneurs through a culture of innovation and providing employee hours to explore new ideas.

In general, intrapreneurs can be trusted to work on a range tasks from strategy to implementation, and collaboratively across departments. If your company is already established, intrapreneurs can hit the ground running without spending time creating infrastructure and securing resources. Intrapreneurs pursue new strategies while staying true to the core principals and goals of the organization.

So, how do you find an intrapreneur to join your team? When you interview prospective employees, ask them if they’ve ever launched new initiatives or ventures for a previous employer, and listen for questions they may ask about workplace culture and employee responsibilities. Intrapreneurs are great at managing up and across departments, so find someone that has a history of working on teams in both leadership and non-leadership roles. You should also look for people that aren’t afraid to take calculated risks and fail. And don’t forget company culture—make sure that you hire an intrapreneur that will fit seamlessly with your team and management style.

You should also look to hire internally because you may already have an intrapreneur on your hands. Do you have employees that consistently think outside the box and offer suggestions, or people you trust to launch new initiatives? Are they passionate about your organization’s mission and do they have a history of working well within the company culture and infrastructure? This might be the intrapreneur your organization needs.

Once you’ve hired or identified your intrapreneur, the goal is to empower them by providing the trust, freedom, and resources they need to be successful. Allow for all team members to think about internal innovation and provide more opportunities to suggest ideas or build proofs of concepts.

If your social enterprise truly values collaboration and innovation, you need at least one intrapreneur on your team, so start searching.

Hila Mehr is a social intrapreneur currently working as a social enterprise fellow in Hyderabad, India. She blogs at hilamehr.tumblr.com. Connect on Twitter @HilaMehr.

Interview Transcription:

Matt Alder: Ok, so I’m now here at SmartRecruiters talking to Jerome. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Jerome Ternynck: Sure, It’s good to have you Matt. My name is Jerome Ternynck, I’m the Founder and CEO of SmartRecruiters. I am a recruiter, and an entrepreneur. I’ve been in the industry for a while. Enjoying my time there, both on the service side and on the technology front.

Matt: Cool and we’ve been talking about what you’re doing with SmartRecruiters, and how disruptive it is. So tell us how you’re disrupting the recruitment industry. What’s your plan?

Jerome: Well, my plan is to disrupt the recruitment industry in a big way by making recruiting easy. I want to make hiring easy. I think we live in a connected world in which you cannot have a billion people connected on Facebook and then have Joe Blogs who cannot find a sales rep, I don’t like that fact. Our disruption kind of grand plan for recruiting is we’re just going to take complexity away from recruiting and make hiring easy. Let businesses have an easy access to talent and let them enjoy the growth that they deserve, and create the jobs that we’d like them to create.

Matt: It’s a great vision. How are you realizing it? What does the platform do? What is the grand plan as it were?

Jerome: Sure, so we’ve built an integrated recruiting platform, we call it a social recruiting platform. It’s kind of a new generation ATS that’s brought onto a sourcing platform and that really takes you from the point of “oh you want to hire someone?” We’ll help you create a job, we’ll distribute it to all the various channels, referrals, your website, Facebook, free boards, paid boards, everywhere, helping you to find candidates. Then we’ll bring all the candidates back into one place, let you share those candidates with your colleagues, make meetings, reviews, assessment, a background check, and so that within three weeks you make a hire and you look back and think, “this was easy!” That’s the experience we want to give.

Take complexity away, let you find good candidates, make the right choice.

Matt: And the software and the platform is free, right?

Jerome: It is entirely free, yes. And I think if you want to disrupt an industry, you have to also innovate from a business model standpoint, and for us it’s really important that we get to reach not the Fortune 500 that have tons of recruiters and sourcing and technology, but really the SMBs (small / medium sized businesses), the millions of business that employ 70% of the workforce and those are the ones that are feeling the pain of recruiting, that have issues recruiting. Making the platform entirely free to use with no “miums” as I say, no limitations, no premium features, nothing – it’s a just as free as it gets, then this allows us to reach a much wider audience.

Matt: And you guys are still in Beta, yeah?

Jerome: Yea.

Matt: But how many companies are using you already? How’s it going?

Jerome: Since we’ve launched in March 2011, we’ve had good traction and good success. Over 12,000 companies have signed up to date, and it’s accelerating, primarily through the word of mouth. I think people are just enjoying the ease at which they can just sign up and start hiring within seconds. It’s just that simple as posting a job is what you need to get started. So lots of people coming in there, they find the convenience of having all the services in one place, all the candidates in one place, all wrapped into a really easy applicant tracking solution. And yeah, they come back.

Matt: Cool.  I took a look at it just now and it really is as simple as you say it is. And good luck. Thank you very much for talking to me.

Jerome: Thank you Matt, our pleasure.