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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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…

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…

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…

Are you starting to make money in recruitment again? I don’t mean the nickels and dimes, I mean are you starting to make some serious money that you made earlier in this decade? If not then, maybe you should see how to reposition yourself.

The first thing you should do when repositioning yourself is understand where the economy is heading and what the economy will demand in the coming quarters. One of the best resources for recruiters who want to follow recruitment trends is the Monster Employment Index.

This is a real-time review of millions of employer job opportunities gathered from career sites and job boards, and presents a snapshot of employer online recruitment activity nationwide. 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…