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…

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…

How do talent assessment tools help in the selection process?

A competency-based assessment aims to better hiring decisions by moving it away from intuition-led process. Talent assessment tools aim for objectivity than being subjective in method. This process is continuous. And with the number of researchers and psychologists Read more…

A competency-based assessment aims to move hiring decisions away from the classic intuition-led process.

Candidates are not primarily assessed or rated based upon their aspirations, opinions, or similar. Rather, the underlying premise is that we can anticipate how a candidate will behave in a role in the future through an assessment of their behavior in the past.

As a recruiter, you are required to use psychometric testing as some of clients require you to do so.

Now, know the advantages that Read more…

Adapted from How to Use Assessments To Hire Effectively by Dana Borowka.

This is mainly because of a lack of basic foundations in the subject, and a lack of exposure to the scope of employee assessment programs.

But how do you choose the most beneficial assessments?

Add to that,  the lack of regulation in this sector has only added to the confusion. Only organizations that have keep official departments that are focused to human capital development can value such a critical tool in the hiring process.

The SMEs and the smaller private firms lack the necessary insight into what could possibly end up saving them up to 40% in Read more…

Select the Best: A How to Approach

Behavioral interviews are the best tool to identify candidates with the ideal behavioral traits and characteristics that you have selected as necessary for job success. Additionally, certain behavioral questioning will tend to be situational instances. The best behavioral-based questioning, however, will not give away the behavior being verified. As you read the following Read more…

The mechanics of talent assessments provide organizations with a valid and consistent model that help to save valuable costs & resources by targeting specific internal and external benchmarks that can help organizations improve efficiency in  candidate evaluation without getting side-tracked.

HireLabs recommends setting up the following model as an Read more…

Employee Assessments – A Six Sigma Approach

Developing competencies like ROI projections and VOC surveys make it easier for businesses to tackle critical  business challenges. But these challenges take more than just the business systems & tools. The thing that ultimately makes all the difference is the level of employee engagement. Employee assessments help, to a great  extent, in  finding the existing motivation levels among employees.

Six Sigma implementation calls for such assessments, as it involves organizational changes at the root level. It is important to understand the two main components in a Six Sigma employee assessment plan: the ‘Preliminary survey’ and the ‘Comprehensive Survey’. Both these surveys serve the purpose of a smooth change management. The surveys involve select employees who are interviewed individually by the management, and/or a team and their unit managers and leaders. A variety of generalized questions are asked to find out if the implementation has reduced their workload, made them more efficient, has brought about positive changes in their work, has helped reduce waste, etc.

These questions help management to understand the perceptions that employees might be having about the ongoing Six Sigma implementations, and ultimately helps them devise better policies.