01What
HIHB has been established as a workshop format since 2018: two hours, all key stakeholders in the room, a complete briefing as output. From this format we are building a web application that enables companies to prepare high-impact hires independently.
The application pursues four measurable goals:
- significantly reduce the risk of a bad hire
- shorten recruiting cycle times
- raise quality across the entire recruiting process
- increase the probability of a high-impact hire - a person who exceeds goals and expectations
02How
The application provides an interface for hiring managers and recruiters to build the briefing step by step. Through systematic and context-aware questions, a complete picture of the role emerges: requirements, risks, potential, and embedding in the organisation.
At the end, the application delivers all the documents required for an effective, systematic recruiting process: job posting, candidate exposé, interview guide, scorecard, 90-day plan, and flowboarding guidance for the first year.
The system learns: about the specific organisation in which it is deployed, and anonymously across all engagements. With every placement, the quality of questions, suggestions, and benchmarks improves.
03Why
McKinsey reports that more than half of all key-position hires fail within 18 months. The cost to a company is at least half a million euros per failed hire, often substantially more once opportunity costs, time and market loss are included.
Beyond the McKinsey perspective, a further question remains: how well are the other 50% placed - those that do not fail outright? Other studies estimate that no more than 20% of hires fall into the high-impact category.
The leverage between a bad hire and a high-impact hire is greatest in key roles. It exists for every position. Today, companies do not exploit this leverage systematically. The application closes that gap.
04The Solution
The USP of HIHB as a web application lies in the moment of deployment: HIHB starts at the very beginning, when the need for a new hire emerges. If half of all key-role hires fail after 18 months, that says a lot about the quality of the decision made during the interview process. But the decision is not made in the interview. It is prepared earlier - when the need for a new hire arises.
HIHB positions itself as the tool that makes recruiting better: saves costs, lowers risks, increases the chances that contribute to company success. It is also the tool that enables recruiting to collaborate methodically with hiring managers. For the first time, hiring managers can bring their full knowledge, assumptions and thoughts about a specific role into a structured process. These are placed into the context of the entire role, challenged, and prepared so that placing a fitting person becomes possible in the first place.
Additionally, the application provides benchmarks and best practices on role design: the ratio of tasks to objectives, the enablement of high-impact roles, organisational anchoring. Companies benefit from consolidated knowledge of successful role architectures and from the full experience of HIHB engagements.
The web application as a learning agent system
Phase 1 of development covers the HIHB web application as a learning agent system: the methodology from 200+ workshops, translated into a guided briefing interface with context-aware questions, automatically generated recruiting documents, and a learning layer that improves anonymously from every use.
The skill-based job portal
The next stage is a central portal that aggregates the job postings of connected companies. Goal: acquire fitting candidates for the company and open an additional revenue channel.
The USP of the HIHB job portal is a skill-based job search. From the web application, structured data on tasks, capabilities, experience and objectives of every role is available. These four dimensions are normalised and form the data basis for search and matching scores between a job and a job-seeking person.
05Outlook
The application develops into a permanent part of companies and expands in two directions: organisational development and automated candidate acquisition. From fully automated search, pre-qualification and interview-stage orchestration, all the way to organisational development without fixed roles.
The end state: a marketplace for tasks, capabilities, experience and objectives that enables a flexible, adaptive and future-ready organisation of work. Combined with a learning culture that learns ahead of the market.