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…

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…

Over the past few years, we’ve seen new and traditional private equity firms slowly gain interest in the HR technology space.  Private equity investment isn’t actually new to the HR vendor market.  General Atlantic Partners has been one firm that has take interest in HR over the years. humancapitalist.com, The Human Capitalist » How Important is Private Equity in Human Capital and Talent Management?, Jul 2009

You should read the whole article.

One of the most beneficial aspects of an evidence based talent assessment tool is to identify a candidate’s talent gap in a specific job role. With the range of assessment diagnostic techniques developed at Hirelabs Inc., and experience in internal development processes at our clients’ base, HireLabs can work in a consultative position with your organization to help you identify where talent exists in your organization, and then put in place effective measures to support the rapid development of your employees. Read more…