The Obama administration will face an uphill battle delivering its promises on job growth. Replacing the 7.2 million jobs lost since 2007, will not be an easy task.

This battle becomes more complicated especially when the administration members take counterproductive measures, such as those taken by Lisa Jackson, chief of the Environmental Protective Agency. Jackson outlined a set of new smog reduction rules which will place a burden of $90 billion on private job creators. Read more…

While providing consulting services to the governments of the Middle East on how to build cities that are powerhouses of talent, we at HireLabs realized the true meaning of the saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’. The same logic holds true for talent. True talent usually has a hunger to learn and innovate, and when you create an environment where talent lives  and works in close proximity to each other, you are on your way to building a knowledge economy. Before we started our research, we made a claim: Talent attracts talent!

Our research noted how history points to Baghdad at the turn of the first millennium as a thriving knowledge economy. The next major knowledge economy was created when Venice and Florence took Europe from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance era. In modern times, England transitioned into the industrial age from an agricultural society. Read more…

A HireLabs Inc. research report
August 2009

Increasing Returns by understanding Talent

The VCs must ask themselves if their companies are run by management teams¹ that capable of driving companies as the recession bottoms. Studying the shift in the current unemployment rates in the US, HireLabs can forecast a recovery in the international labor market – lead by the US – sometime around Feb 2010. Very few CEOs of venture-backed companies have the experience of riding a company out of a recession successfully.

The first sign that a management team is not performing at optimum is when market conditions are blamed for loss of productivity. The questions that investors should ask their management team is whether the competition was able to monetize on the opportunities in the given market conditions. Read more…

While interviewing Mark Kurtz for a programming position, Debra Tobin, the head of HR had a smile on her face. The moment that she saw Mark’s resume, she knew that Mark was the high potential talent that Johnson & Company had been searching for to solidify the team. Mark was a recent Stanford graduate with a long list of impressive projects, including working with Oracle on a special integration project with the Malaysian government. Two days after the interview, Mark received an offer letter, and he started work the following week. One month later Mark handed in his resignation.

During his one month at Johnson & Company, Mark reported to Liam Watts, who was the CTO. Liam was very different from Mark, he grew up in Brooklyn, barely made it through college, and worked his way up into the management position over the last 16 years. Liam was risk averse, and his strategies were conservative.

As you might have guessed already, Mark’s short lived career at Johnson & Company was due to a clash of personalities and philosophies. Read more…

Do you remember that guy who got a funding of $3million in his the series A round, he had an impressive business plan, he displayed rapid growth and claimed he was 12 months from breaking even?

Do you remember how he delivered his commitments during the first 6 months, which was followed by a series of losses? This situation is all too common, we have all seen this, but now instead of ignoring this Read more…