Posts by Ross Clennett

Building a recruitment agency into a profitable, sustainable business is tough work that, typically, takes many years. It almost always starts with a founder, (sometimes two or three co-founders) who, after a number of successful years with a leading agency, departs to hang out their own shingle. Most of these agencies start small and grow…

If 1992 was Queen Elizabeth II’s annus horribilis then 2016 was surely PageGroup Australia’s equivalent. The genesis of PageGroup’s (PG, although still best known as ‘Michael Page’) year from hell occurred in September 2015 when long-time PG employee, Simon Meyer signed off as PG Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand, four years after taking…

On Saturday afternoon I watched by youngest son play Under 11s soccer. He plays for his local club in the top grade for his year group. The team is coached by a jovial and committed dad who knows his soccer and drills the team in how he wants them to play – as a quick…

The Australian recruitment industry gained some unexpected worldwide publicity late last month with the social media frenzy over an email sent by Mars Recruitment owner and MD, Marcus Wood, to his Sydney employees two Friday’s ago. The email, subject line reading Friday observation, was: Morning guys, Quick observation that is really getting on my tits.…

The Australasian Talent Conference, held in Sydney last month, was another fascinating and stimulating couple of days. I immersed myself in conversations about talent with a wide range of people across the worlds of agency recruitment, corporate recruitment and recruitment technology vendors. The theme of the conference was Thriving with A.I. and having read a…

Earlier this month I received a professional request that was a first. The request was from a former recruitment industry MD. His specific request was that I remove two of my blogs that contained extensive commentary about a company that he was the MD of (at the time of writing the blogs in question). I…

After you have been around the recruitment industry as long as I have (29 years and three months thanks for asking) you come across lots of recruiters. And what you probably aren’t surprised to know is that it’s not uncommon for recruiters to share the same name. Although we are coming up to a very…

°Aaron James, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine recently published A**holes: A Theory (Anchor Books, 2014). In the book James defines an a**hole as such; “Allows himself to enjoy special advantages in social relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people”.…

Across twenty nine years in recruitment I have read plenty of material on interviewing and candidate assessment. After this many years it takes a pretty special piece of writing to have me jump up and take notice. It happens rarely these days. However it did happen four days ago. I read this outstanding piece of…

In July last year I first blogged about how SEEK’s ownership of Onploy was causing waves with some of its recruitment agency clients. Subsequent to that initial blog I wrote a number of follow-up blogs, starting with a look at the behavior of SEEK’s part-owned subsidiary, Sidekicker, SEEK’s PR response to the agency pushback, I…