Posts by Ross Clennett

Last week’s Ignite AGM went down a well-worn path with a third failed attempt by activist shareholder Octavium Capital Investment (OCI) to have their nominated directors (Daniel Altiok-Brown and Trevor Robertson) voted onto the board. OCI remains unconvinced that Ignite CEO, Tim Moran can, 18 months into his 3-year strategic plan, deliver net profits in…

Long-time readers may recall the very prominent case of resume fraud from 2014 that featured retailer Myer firing a just-hired senior executive Andrew Flanagan (pictured, right) after he was exposed as lying about his previous employment to both the recruitment agency that represented him, and to Myer. It’s not that hard to believe that a…

Barry Iddles (second left), owner of Queenscliff restaurant 360Q, with staff members Susie Burston, Ken Ferrier (front) and Kenton Savage. CREDIT: The Age   The Australian labour market does not suffer from a shortage of workers; far from it. Australia’s labour force participation rate is 66.6%, compared to our Kiwi cousin’s 71.7%. The vast difference…

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter was followed by his first email to employees banning remote work unless they have a specific exception (managers will send the exception lists to Musk for his personal review and approval) and setting out the expectation that staff will be in the office for at least 40 hours per week.…

Innovation is important. Innovation is necessary. Without innovation, a company is almost certainly doomed to compete primarily on price. However, innovation is also overrated. Innovation is overrated because many companies, in my experience, aren’t even getting the basics right. Qantas is a classic case in point. Yesterday, the announcement of the annual Choice Shonky Awards…

Yesterday Andrew Banks gave me an insight about interviewing that had never occurred to me, yet it was obviously correct the moment he uttered it. In the Confessions of a Recruiter podcast, co-hosted by recruitment agency owners Blake Thompson, and Declan Kluver, Banks shared; “The best thing ever out of an interview is that you…

Four months ago I wrote about the importance of improving Australia’s labour force participation rate given, with 480,000 vacancies. Even if Australia’s participation rate rose only one percentage point (to 67.7%) that would still represent an additional 210,000 immediately available workers. There are one million Australians who want to work but have barriers preventing them…

Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, by economist Tyler Cowen and tech entrepreneur Daniel Gross provides a fascinating piece of information pertaining to hiring low-skill workers. In their book Gross and Cowen explore personality and its relationship with talent, noting: “Personality and conscientiousness matter most at the bottom of the…

Any agency leader attempting to incentivise, urge, or encourage their consultant to do “more BD” will be familiar with the response coming from their harried team member. “I don’t have time; I’m too busy filling jobs.” Consultants wanting to avoid picking up their phone to make BD calls know that the lure of another placement…

In my recent blog on the 2022 RCSA SHAPE Conference I outlined how I saw the need for the mindset of recruiters to evolve due to ‘conformist’ candidates now being outnumbered by ‘individualists’. To use a powerful metaphor offered by Nuriah Jadai on the first morning of last week’s RCSA SHAPE Conference – we need…