Kari Härkönen

The founder of MindFit Consulting, Kari Härkönen, has worked for technology and financial fields for over 20 years starting from development and moving on to management and business development. For the past over 10 years he has been a full time personnel analyst and headhunter for the industry. He graduated in 1992 as electric technician. After computer studies he started working for Ericsson as a software developer, specializing in Graphical User Interfaces and Usability Issues.

At Ericsson Kari noticed that inspiring people was more of his area of interest than the technology itself and he moved on to work as a project manager while continuing to have the main focus on projects related to User Interface design. He also worked with recruitment interviewing new job candidates.

From Ericsson Kari moved to mobile application business in 1999. He also worked as an independent ‘Day Trader’ using on-line stock trading services. Kari felt on-line trading applications quite interesting and they inspired him to develop new ideas for the field. These insights lead him to work as a development manager of Helsinki Stock Exchange (HEX), starting at early 2001. At HEX he was responsible for on-line trading systems, user interface development, project management, product management, account management and business development in general.

As a life-time learner and enthusiast research & development minded person Kari studied psychology and cognitive science beside the work with stock markets. Kari created concept for evaluating professionals in 2003. The personnel evaluation service was ready to be launched at the end of 2003 as MindFit Consulting Ltd. From the beginning of 2004 Kari has worked full time with personnel evaluation and headhunting. Currently he is preparing doctoral thesis related to personnel evaluation and its methods development.

Kari’s studies
• Electric Technician, Computer Engineer, Master of Philosophy (cognitive science)
• Certificate for Skills and Competence Based Personnel Evaluation, Finnish Psychology Association
• Doctoral Thesis ongoing

kari