Our Philosophy

Shane Douthitt and Scott Mondore founded SMD based on a simple goal: provide world-class HR consulting services with a proven ROI. After successful careers as executives in HR, strategy and operations at global Fortune 50 companies (UPS, Bank of America, IBM, Maersk), they recognized the need for other organizations to harness their proven approach to building a stronger link between the investments made in people and the bottom-line.   

Harnessing their HR expertise, business experience and advanced knowledge of statistical methodologies, Shane and Scott published their first book “Investing in What Matters: Linking People to Business Outcomes” with SHRM. This book provided the roadmap organizations could use to creating an HR strategy by linking employees to the bottom and calculating an ROI. Their most recent SHRM-published book “Business-Focused HR: 11 Processes to Drive Results” took their approach one step further by applying their methodology to widely used HR practices (e.g., employee surveys, succession planning, career development).

Furthermore, SMD has successfully applied their methodology to numerous partner organizations. By helping clients quantify the relationship between HR processes and the bottom-line, SMD’s partner organizations are able to make significant employee investments based on facts, data, and an expected ROI.

A Gap in the Marketplace

While speaking with thousands of HR professionals from small and large organizations, it became clear that leaders desired to better connect HR with business outcomes. However, they lacked the analytics capabilities required and a simple means to collect and harvest their employee data.

As a result, SMD created Talent Link-a world-class Talent Management platform that incorporates SMD’s analytics approach to make appropriate linkages to the bottom-line with industry best-practices. SMD’s Talent Link is an integrated talent management platform that directly connects HR processes to business outcomes including:

• Competency Building
• Hiring
• Performance Management
• Employee Surveys
• 360
• Career Assessment and Development
• Succession Planning
• Integrated Scorecards/Dashboards

SMD’s Talent Link Vision

The vision for Talent Link was simple:

• Link HR processes to business outcomes
• Calculate an expected ROI
• Reduce HR Costs
• Simplify analytics and reporting

SMD wanted to create a simple, power talent management platform that would allow HR professionals to quickly 1.) identify their greatest opportunities to impact the bottom-line, 2.) execute HR processes easily and effectively, 3.) quantify the impact of their investments 4.) spend more time improving organizational performance and less time executing processes, and 5.) reduce their HR costs by providing a less expensive, but more effective technology platform.

The launch of our new Talent Link platform, makes our vision a reality and helps organizations improve their performance, one person at a time.