Posts by Ross Clennett

Hays Australia has long been the largest recruitment agency in Australia, by any measure you wish to use. Their performance in converting gross profit into operating profit, and then into cash, is outstanding, not just locally but globally. Hays publishes some local fees-by-specialism data but without knowing the size of aggregate agency spend within that…

Proving that, yet again, when it comes to a government decision between its mates and playing fair with the rest of the market you can always put your money on the mates winning out. Last week I wrote about the LNP Federal Government looking after its monied mates at the top end of town who…

When the pressure is on, and lots of money is at stake, you get to see the true values that underpin an organisation. Mark Zuckerberg has been on the receiving end of employee anger this week. Many inside Facebook have staged a protest or resigned in response to their Chief Executive’s very public hands-off approach…

Last week the recruitment industry engaged in a collective shudder when the Full Federal Court delivered their judgment in WorkPac Pty Ltd v Rossato [2020] FCAFC 84. WorkPac has been ordered to pay Mr Rossato his full leave entitlements that are owed to him as a permanent employee. The court agreed with Rossato’s claim that…

Two weeks’ ago in my blog Leaders need to investigate these two critical areas of their business, I recommended a basic framework for how a recruitment agency owner or leader might usefully review their business given the impact of COVID-19. Very helpfully, local industry vendor, JobAdder, has provided an almost immediate insight into what industry…

On Tuesday, Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, rather than release the scheduled 2021 Federal Budget, instead gave his Ministerial Statement on the Economy to Parliament. This was, in effect, a mini budget as a holding pattern until the real budget is released in October. As expected, the forecast for the current (June) quarter was grim. “Household…

In any crisis leadership plays two critical roles. The first role is ensuring that resources (eg time, tools-of-trade, money and people) are immediately deployed and managed in a way to best respond to the crisis. In the COVID-19 world of the past eight weeks this has revolved around cost reduction, transitioning employees to working remotely…

Over the past four weeks I have spoken to a large range of recruitment agency owners and executives, ranging from those who have no employees to those who leading some of the biggest agencies in the country. The general mood, perhaps surprisingly, is quite upbeat. I put that down to six factors: leaders of recruitment…

The old saying “A week is a long time in politics” is sure to be replaced, at least temporarily, with “A week is a long time in the COVID-19 world”. The success of social distancing, a partial shutdown and stay-at-home orders has seen a flattening of the Australian COVID-19 ‘curve’ that’s well ahead of most…

It seems hard to believe that the initial Covid-19 restrictions, enacted by the Federal Government and the respective state governments, came into effect only three weeks ago. Normal life, as we knew it, already seems a distant memory. It’s hard to contemplate how we might be feeling this time in June if the current restrictions…