Posts by Ross Clennett

National business and economic activity data released in the past week confirm the ongoing strength of the 2021 economic recovery. To save you the hassle of combing through the ABS’s national accounts data and the May update on the Labour Market Information Portal I have cherry-picked the most relevant data and graphs for recruiters and…

Twenty-one years ago I received the most significant promotion of my career. I was elevated from the role of GM, Adelaide (1 business unit, five staff) to GM, Sydney (4 business units, 30 staff). The company was going through a significant transition after Greg Savage’s departure the previous year and, after expecting to be in…

Last Friday night my wife and I went to the Palais Theatre in St Kilda to see comedian Urzila Carlson’s show; Token African. We, along with nearly three thousand other patrons, laughed non-stop at Carlson’s 80 minute stand-up routine. After the show, it occurred to me that one of the things that I missed most…

Recruitment-specific books by local authors have always been thin on the ground. Geoff Morgan and Andrew Bank’s Flourish and Prosper, Greg Savage’s The Savage Truth and Mandy Johnson’s Winning The War for Talent are the three I know. All three are excellent and I highly recommend each of them. Equivalent books for job-seekers, written by local authors, have been equally…

The contradictory messages being heard around the job market make for a confusing time for both jobseekers and employers. Last month both vacancies and job ads reached record highs in Australia. Discouraged jobseekers have returned with the labour force participation rate also reaching a record high last month. The number of unemployed jobseekers per vacancy…

Last century I often heard the business strategist mantra of “Quality; speed; price: Pick two.” The general reasoning being that it was nigh on impossible for a business to be profitable delivering a high quality product, quickly and at a low price. In the new century internet entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Tony…

(Above, MONA’s Corten Stairwell and surrounding artworks.) Last Monday my 20 year-old daughter and I visited the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in the city of my birth and upbringing. It’s almost impossible to overstate how transformative MONA has been for Hobart (and by association, Tasmania’s) image and economy. In the 1980s Hobart’s…

L-R, Sam, James (my son), Ned, Lola, me (Mornington, December 2019)   In 1998, Mavis Robertson, witnessed a breast cancer fun run overseas and was inspired to create something similar in Australia. Along with her co-founder Louise Davidson, she planted that seed among her network in the superannuation industry. At the time, Industry Superannuation firms…

Last week I posited that the boom was back. On Sunday one of the dads in my son’s soccer team, who owns a local café told me he had to shut for two days last week because he didn’t have enough staff to open. On Monday a study was released that documented the struggle that…

“The market is going nuts” “I have never been so busy” “Do you know any recruiters; I can‘t find any” “I can’t believe how we have gone from famine to feast in what seems like weeks” “Are other agencies just as busy as we are? What happening out there?” These are the most common things…