...you'll need to go after people who want to succeed in that kind of environment and will need to probably conduct a really extensive interview process in order to find them.
Have you put any thought into what sort of questions you would ask during the interview to find these kinds of people? I've worked in a place where they thought of their employees as numbers or even a liability so I understand where you are coming from.
Kind of? I'm not even remotely at the point where I can hire people, but I do think about it. I read the Ask a Manager blog (
http://askamanager.org) pretty much daily - it's a rare blog, kind of like this one, where the comments are almost as valuable as the posts. I would go there and check out some of their discussions.
One that comes to me off the top of my head is to ask about a project for their company that your potential employee would like to work on, but just hasn't had the chance to work on yet (kind of like asking what they'd like to do in their fuck-around time). I would wager that anyone who is motivated and self-directed has a few pet work projects like these - something they'd love to spend time on, but just can't, for whatever reason.
You might also ask them about different work scenarios or problems and what they'd do in them or to solve them. I'm not taking about things like, "How would you find out how many people live in Manhattan?" or Google-esque questions like that. Maybe ask how someone has resolved conflicts with co-workers (and even with bosses) in the past.
It's hard, because it's difficult for the iconoclasts who would thrive in this type of environment to know if you're the kind of employer who would reward that behavior by making a job offer, or if you're the kind who would think, "Wow, this person is a whack job, they are so not getting hired."
You can also be very explicit about your cultural requirements when you're thinking about your job descriptions. Too often, I see job descriptions that are just a list of skills that employers would like employees to have. I would think about the kind of person you would fall all over yourself to hire, and then figure out how to write a job description to self-select for those people. For example: in my last job, I had to write a job description for brand-new, entry-level sales people. It didn't make sense to require that people knew how to use our internal CRM system, because you can teach someone how to do that: but it did make sense to look for people who were cheerful, resilient, and didn't get discouraged when people hung up on them, because our sales people would have a lot of people hang up on them, at first. Previous job descriptions had nothing about that in there, and as a result, the sales department had a pretty high rate of turnover.
And seriously: if you need someone to handle your company's communications in any capacity, I'm completely available to do so. :)