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. HireLabs recently launched a new version, ProfileSense 3.0 by hosting a webinar on 21st of October that addressed the issue of “Recruiting during the recovery” and received an overwhelming response for registrations from all parts of the world and had an attendance of 500 people watching our show live.

The concept of Occupational DNA was developed on the philosophy that every individual possesses a talent within his DNA. Just like every individual has a unique DNA, they have a unique competency too. ProfileSense 3.0 has been developed on this concept to help employers identify the unique talent that is best suited to the job requirements.

How the concept works:
At HireLabs, the concept is put to work in the following 3 steps:

• Identify the current needs of the position.
• Select the Occupational DNA traits that reflect the needs of your position.
• HireLabs will custom design assessments for each Occupational DNA trait that you selected.

Customized assessments:
Here’s a feature that puts competition aside. Our research shows that the talent assessments did not screen the applicants effectively. This was because generic assessments were used for all types of businesses missing out the importance of 3 major factors:
• Corporate culture
• Industry language
• Local environment.
The user can also suggest more questions, which can be included in the test. Imagine the precision that can be brought to your recruitment process.

Benefits of using ProfileSense 3.0:
Here’s how you can benefit from the system:
• HireLabs has created the most user friendly assessment testing tool for the HR industry.
• The interface is designed to assist you in the entire process of screening.
• Create an account and get ready to start assessing the hundreds of resumes that are in your inbox.
• Create a new assessment, select the occupation you want to test for, There are 4500 occupations you can choose from. Add as many tests you would like the applicants to take.
• Customize to suit your local and corporate culture.
• Finally add the names and email addresses of the applicants who you would want to be assessed and the invitation is automatically emailed to them to take the assessment online.
• You are notified as the applicants complete the tests.
• You can view the graphs and charts to evaluate the performances. The reports are color coded with letter grades A, B, C, D, E and F. This way you can focus on interviewing candidates who got A, B and C, ignoring those who didn’t make the cut.
• Imagine how simple things be if all the resumes in your inbox could just sort themselves out as YES, MAYBE and NO.

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.

Believe it or not, I have been pretty darn good with this. Let’s see why I believe so. Experts are perfectionists. These are the folks with years and years (at times decades) of experience under their belt in the field of their specialty. They are mature in their thinking – too mature maybe for a customer-responsive, innovative and growth-savvy  organization.

Experts weigh in their knowledge and advice on important decisions. Theirs is the carefully chosen path. Risks mitigated – all corners covered. They take pride in their expertise and profession. Often like to work in organizations with established hierarchy and a set career path. Intuition is the element that’s long been suppressed – rationale is what they relish. Organizations with mature work processes find them to be a perfect fit. In my eyes, they are process-improving machines where problems are pushed in and a rational solution will come out the other end.

Performers are the ones who are never short on ideas. You often hear them ask the WHY question in the cafeteria. You might often find them jumping the gun on tough decisions but if encouraged, their idea train would take you places you h

adn’t dreamed of. They are usually the fresh perspective guys – irrespective of the longevity of their careers. They just have the attitude of ‘why not’ and ‘what else’. Often Performers are young blood – the fresh graduate, the newly transitioned into an industry or new to management. They may be short on sound and calculated advice at times, but never short on commitment or energy. Think of the pizza delivery guy who wants to work extra hours just before the Spring break – yes that’s them. If you lead them, you don’t need to bring a sense of urgency to every task – because they do it for you. They thrive when systems, processes and structures are still taking shape and evolving.

So who should you hire!

Market trends show that a particular type of organizations is hiring Performers and it has no co-relation to the size of the company or the state of its business growth. So what sets these organizations apart? Their attitude! Yes, I call it the Responsive Attitude. It is not the one with the reactive attitude, one that waits for the competition to beat them to the next product or market before they call in the emergency board meeting. It’s not even the one with the proactive attitude, one that would be trying out too many new things in search of the Killer App or next iPhone. These organizations are structured enough to have a strategic focus and flexible enough to revisit it from time to time – just the right balance. Having the Responsive Attitude means you are following up on your plans but you are constantly in touch with your customers in various markets to see what they are saying about you, your products, your delivery process and your customer service. These organizations are seeking Performers because they are ready to put out a product that is 80% ready TODAY then release the fully tested one NEXT WEEK. Performers help them make that decision. Experts would still be covering corners, mitigating risks while the competition would be working on their second Beta release. So review your clients and see which ones have the Responsive Attitude and then you would know what to do.

I don’t mean to claim that this is the Holy Grail of talent acquisition but this has been the result of our team’s research. I would be interested in your take on the subject.

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. Some of the comments that people shared were:

1. Executive search firms and staffing firms have a large number of tasks that they need to perform from client need identification, job postings, talent pooling and talent pre-screening etc. Designing and developing their own assessments would require them to shift their focus from areas that are their core expertise.
2. Building their own expertise on talent assessments would incur a fixed cost while partnering up with a specialized assessment firm would at most bring in a project-based expense, improving the bottom line against each hire.
3. The competition in the industry is increasingly become intense. There are retained search recruiters, transactional recruiters and cross-industry recruiters – all are offering their services to YOUR client. You only get ONE shot to deliver the right candidate and hence conducting the right assessment has become critical to the hiring decision.
4. As new online assessments are popping up on the screen, cross-border talent acquisition and geographically-separated candidate screening is more cost effective than ever. The ROI on online assessment platforms is comfortably high and clients appreciate the value of assessments in the on-boarding process
The trend is shifting – talent assessment is a key process in talent acquisition and talent management. Recruiters, job boards, ATS providers and staffing firms – all are partnering up with specialist assessment firms to add it to their portfolio of service offerings. Executive search firms and staffing firms that traditionally were using their own generic assessment tools are not moving toward specialized, job-specific assessments to get the most out of it.