Highly influential Boards such as those at GE and Google have always kept talent development in mind when looking at long-term strategy. The Boards of these companies have relevant expertise, but most importantly they have access to several key line managers (the succession pipeline) who provide the raw data needed to construct a long-term strategy. HireLabs study of a recent McKinsey survey has revealed a few very interesting facts about how more and more Boards are actively pushing for greater involvement in talent development.

Of 586 corporate directors of Fortune 1000 companies surveyed, they indicated that they spend only 11% of their time on Talent Management. Furthermore the survey also indicated that more half of those surveyed want a increased involvement in Talent Management. This is not surprising as noted by a HireLabs study on the psychology of a member of the Board, which discovered that an individual who accepts a seat in the Board wants to use their experience to shape the company. “I accepted a seat at the Board so that I can influence the management to become an industry leader” states a Board member at an oil company.” Read more…

The cliché “Hiring the right person for the right job” continues to be loosely used by the HR industry. In order for HR to recruit “mister/miss right”, HR would need to put emphasis of conducting a job analysis, which will help HR in understanding the current and future situations that impact the position. Unfortunately, this seldom happens.

Once HR understands the situations that surround a position, they will be able to reduce the risk of a wrong hire, which subsequently increases the chances of a right hire. At HireLabs, we call this Situation-based Hiring (given that there is no violation of EEOC).

Let us look at an example of situation-based hiring:

A leading airline wants to start a low-fare program, and needs to hire a cabin crew.

The first step would be to conduct a job analysis keeping in mind the situations that the new cabin crew will encounter. Some of these situations include:

Read more…

If you are a recruiter in San Francisco, then the only way that you can still afford to pay $3 a gallon these days to fill up your gas tank, is if you start increasing your placement rate. That’s easier said than done, because you have a growing talent pool (the unfortunately unemployed), and a slow-recovering job market, where other recruiters are fighting to fill the same position. At a time like this some recruiters become extremely creative, which helps them stand out from the crowd.

There are several ways to be creative, our research at HireLabs suggests that if you improve the quality of applicants that you send for the interview, then you increase the placement potential as well as attain a certain level of respect in the eyes of the hiring manager.

Since HireLabs is in  the business of creating customized assessments, we tried to see if the assessment industry could lend a hand to recruiters. We asked our research team to conduct a small experiment: Read more…

As we researched along the year, our team came up with some important debatable topics on which some expert opinions were a requisite. The discussion was posted on 6 Social Networking sites and the responses we had were amazing.

The topic stated “Which of the two holds more importance in Recruitment? Skills or Behavior?” LinkedIn alone provided us with more than 300 comments on the topic. Facebook and twitter generated some heavy traffic with interests.

As a result of such an enthusiastic participation by Industry experts in the discussion, we decided not to waste away such valuable comments and convert them into a featured video on our global platform. Read more…

The era of the two-job employee (let us call him “Sam”) has emerged as a result of the global recession. Sam is a new breed who developed entrepreneurial survival skills to battle the recession, and learned how find and keep a second job.

You, the employer, do not need to be too alarmed if Sam takes on a second job as a baker, or a mechanic, because this would require Sam to be physically present at that location. However the situation is more complicated if Sam takes on a second job that he can do from any remote location.

Suppose that Sam takes on a consulting project to do bookkeeping, or write code for a website, or maybe even develop a training program, how do you think that Sam’s productivity will be affected at your work place? Read more…

Dear Recruiters and Bloggers,

Thank you for the overwhelming response on our social media discussion, “Which of the two holds more importance for recruiters in pre-employment assessments: Skills Tests or Behavior Tests”.

With more than 250 comments on 10 different social media sites, it has attracted one of the hottest recruitment-related discussions on the internet this month. Read more…

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…

Just like a fine tailored suit, customization is a new feature that is added to the assessment tool that helps assessments fit to your needs.

Our research discovered that companies that were using a generic assessment to test applicants were screening people ineffectively, and they continued recruiting less capable applicants. This was because a generic assessment was being used to test a sales position at a luxury goods store New York, oddly enough, that same generic assessment was used to test a position for a sales person at a software company in Singapore. The flaw here is that when using generic assessment, it is assumed that both Job Descriptions for both the sales position were the same.

To address this major flaw and help companies in screening effectively and recruit the best talent, HireLabs develops customized assessments for that reflect your: Read more…

Australian Employment Rate

As the Australian job market continues to outperform by adding 24,500 new jobs in October, instead of the expected 10,000 jobs, Prime Minister Rudd, and the Labor Government have something to celebrate about on their 2-year anniversary.

We expect job growth to continue in the long-term. Project such as Gorgon in Western Australia will continue to increase the number of jobs. According to the ACIL Tasman report, an additional 10,000 direct and indirect jobs are on the horizon, although it is believed that not all these jobs will go to Australians.

Other indicators paint a rosy picture for the Australian labor markets. We expect that unemployment, which was at 5.8% in October, may rise, but will curb at 6.4% in 2010, which is far lower than what the market expected peak of 9.1% earlier. Read more…

A few days back, we ran a discussion on several social networking platforms to reach out to the recruiting community and asked them if recruiters should develop their own assessment tools or hire the services of assessment specialists. A strong majority shared the same idea – focus on what you do best i.e. understand the client’s needs, pool in candidates, perform pre-screening to generate qualified leads etc. and allow specialists to take care of the assessment design and development. Read more…