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:

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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…

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…

HireLabs ProfileSense 3.0

ProfileSense™ is an employee assessment tool created to provide HR personnel with powerful data to make the most accurate hiring decisions faster than ever before. Unlike current assessment products, ProfileSense™ adapts to your specific needs, allowing you to measure applicants against your “perfect” employee.
ProfileSense is our flagship product that makes it really easy to manage, identify and filter out the best of the best from a pool of applicants applying for a position in your company. ProfileSense makes the difficult and time consuming process very simple and at the same time very effective, providing top notch comparative analysis of applicants in real time, so you can spend more time doing business than finding people. Read more…

Experts - Performers

Just last week, a friend asked a question about the way I classify employees with respect to what they deliver to their organizations. So I decided to write a post about it. When thinking about the candidates organizations may be interested in hiring, I like to keep things simple and classify them into two categories. Experts or Performers. Yes I know what your immediate reaction will be Hassan, don’t make things so simple because they aren’t. Yes, I agree often they aren’t but trust me guys – at times they are that simple. I like to look at a potential hire with these two lenses because it makes my job easier and simplifies my hiring decision. 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…

In his interview with Jehan Ara on “In the Line of Wire” Saleem Qureshi, President & COO HireLabs Inc., talks about the need for employment assessment so that people are placed in the right professions, in the right departments and at the right level of competency.

Saleem and his company work mainly with large organizations to ensure that all employees and potential employees are assessed to determine that they are right for the jobs they are being placed in. I asked him if similar assessments could be used to determine which disciplines kids should select when entering university and what kind of professions they were suitable for.

Saleem answers this and many other questions in this episode of ITLoW.

What is HireLabs? According to Saleem, HireLabs is the leading innovator of pre-employment assessment services. Their goal is to streamline and simplify the HR decision-making process to maximize talent alignment while minimizing company costs. HireLabs works in collaboration with data collected from the US Department of Labor and Stanford University to create the next generation in employment assessments. 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…