March 2010 Blog Posts (17)

Companies are using incentive and award programs to improve employee health. As everyone knows, the cost of healthcare has skyrocketed. To help in this ever growing problem, the incentive industry has assisted clients by implementing programs designed to motivate their employees to make good choices, exercise more, eat better, and manage their health better. The objective is to reduce the…

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Some leaders are beautiful to dance with – their lead is clear, direct and yet comfortable and soft. Other leaders are rigid with tension and move harshly in ways that can damage the follower. I have seen leaders berate their follower (unbelievable but true) for failing to do what they ‘lead’, and I have watched beautiful leaders bemused as followers blithely ignored their lead and…

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After being passed by the Senate, then sent back to the House of Representatives where it was modified, and then sent back to the Senate, where it was passed by a bipartisan vote of 68 to 29, The Hire Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Jobs Bill has been signed by President Obama.

The HIRE Act is designed to encourage companies to bolster their employee base through two tax breaks: $18 billion in savings on 1) payroll taxes and 2) one-year of tax credits on new…

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Doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from or what economic status you fall under; the Health care argument is a topic that none of us can ignore. Today, a historic vote is about to take place. Will it end with this vote? Does any piece of legislation ever end with one vote, of course not!



No one is an expert. Guess what, if you… Continue

It’s Friday. A day that many of us look forward to. A chance for people to wind down the week and prepare for the weekend. A time to ENJOY. But not for everyone…

8.5 Million Jobs have been LOST since the start of the economic downturn…

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The renowned Center for Effective Organizations, at USC's Marshall School of Business, is partnering with the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) to conduct a critical new study on the evolving state of HR practices and the future of human resources. Prof. Ed Lawler, author of Achieving Excellence in Human Resources Management, and i4cp's Jay Jamrog, winner of the Walker Prize for "Building a Strategic HR Function," will be conducting an exclusive webinar for those who complete… Continue

As Sunday comes to a close for South by Southwest, I'm taking the opportunity to look back and reflect over the last three days of the conference festival. For those of you not familiar with SXSW, it's an interactive festival held in Austin, TX that celebrates media, music, and film each year. More than 20,000 people will grace Austin…

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Some time before I wrote a blog entry on another blog (that I have stopped writing on now due to some reasons). I wrote about conventional HR departments working in most of the Pakistani organizations. I got good response and so many comments

from people. Most of them were youngsters who wanted to know more about

HR and its scope in Pakistan so that they could make a choice for their

career. Here are some suggestions for our aspiring new HR…

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Highly influential Boards such as those at GE and Google have always kept talent development in mind when looking at long-term strategy. The Boards of these companies have relevant expertise, but most importantly they have access to several key line managers (the succession pipeline) who provide the raw data needed to construct a long-term strategy. HireLabs study of a recent McKinsey survey has revealed a few very interesting facts about how more and more Boards are actively pushing for… Continue

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… Continue

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… Continue

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 situation, lets

shed light on how this could happen, and what signs… Continue

At Stanford University, we developed a concept called OccupationDNA. I

am sure that several others may have already experimented with this

concept, so we decided to take it to new level.



Just as any living thing has a DNA, similarly every occupation has a

DNA too - its what the occupation requires for it to be fulfilled. We

collaborated with data provided by US Dept. of Labor and developed the

OccupationDNA (made up of a collection of 275 traits that… Continue

The VCs must ask themselves if their companies are run by management

teams that are capable of driving companies as the recession eventually

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… Continue

The American Management Association (AMA), in conjunction with the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), is conducting a study to examine leadership initiatives that organizations have taken to coordinate actions across global locations. We're looking for your input on the topic. In return, you'll receive the preliminary results report once available. Please take this survey… Continue

I've come to the conclusion that most of life is just like dating--the job search, climbing the corporate ladder, or working as a consultant. Generally speaking in life everyone is out to make a connection, a sale, more money, or their soul mate. The law of attraction is widely accepted and thought of in a romantic context. And since most business relationships require a form of emotion, attraction,…

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How LBi Software successfully load tested its applications using open source tools



What is Load Testing?

Load testing is the process of putting demand on an application and measuring its response. It usually refers to modeling the expected usage of a software application by simulating multiple users logging on concurrently. As such, this testing is critical for multi-user systems, often ones built… Continue