Recruitment

I had to stop and read the sentence again. Then again. “A new Robert Walters report revealed that more than half (57 per cent) of surveyed men don’t believe women are underrepresented in leadership roles, while only 2 per cent of women agree. The survey included over 2,000 ANZ professionals as part of the recruitment agency’s Women in the Workplace report.”…

The world’s sixth-largest staffing company, London-based Hays plc, last Friday announced that Dirk Hahn (pictured, right) had resigned as CEO and as a director, effective immediately, for personal reasons. In a company that, over its near-six-decade history as a pure-play staffing business, had only two previous CEOs, this is a major shock. Hahn, who started…

“My god, Ross, PEOPLE!” “Do you want to come and manage my team, Ross, because I am OVER IT?” “A person (who started in June) quit after I declined their last-minute request for three weeks’ leave in January. WTF!” “How can someone have a degree and still not be able to write a coherent, professional…

Australia’s most shameless recruiter, Luke Hemmings, has avoided trial for at least six months after a mediation agreement was endorsed by a court last month on the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast Bulletin reported last month that Hemmings, 32, was initially scheduled to have a committal hearing at Southport Magistrates Court on 20 January over…

My youngest son has recently secured a new part-time job. After ‘falling off the roster’ at Zambrero late last year (a topic for a post at another time), he applied for a range of roles via SEEK. He received crickets from almost every advertiser. One of his mates thought there might be a job at…

A recent GoFundMe post (including the photo, above) has publicly revealed the huge human cost of a mental health breakdown that led to the severing of the business relationship between xrecruiter cofounders, Blake Thompson and Declan Kluver, in 2025. The page was established on Tuesday by Angela Smith, a friend of Declan and his wife,…

Two and a half years ago I started working with an owner to help him build his own recruitment agency. He previously co-owned a successful business in the creative sector where he was now planning to recruit in. This type of move within a sector is not unusual – moving from client to vendor. What…

Astute Payroll founder and former CEO, Nicholas Beames passed away last Thursday, aged 50. Beames was an outgoing and popular figure in the local recruitment industry, although he was rarely sighted at industry events after leaving Astute ten years ago. Like many Australians of his vintage, Beames’s overseas travels in the late 1990s led him…

2025 marked my 37th year in the recruitment industry. It also marked the year in which my youngest child turned 18 and finished secondary school. When he was absent for eight days, attending Schoolies, his mother and I were temporarily ‘empty nesters’. After 26 years of being legally and morally responsible for at least one…

Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) has just released its ranking of the top 30 staffing firms in Australia by revenue, including year-on-year growth, noting that generalist companies were lagging the performance of more specialised businesses, especially those with a focus on the mining and renewable energy sectors. According to SIA research the five largest staffing firms in Australia, based…