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Another one bites the dust: The rise and fall of HJB
Last Thursday morning the inevitable happened when ASX-listed recruitment company HJB called in the corporate undertakers. During his sixteen months in charge, CEO Grahame Doyle has not been able to halt the long term decline of what was once one of the strongest brands in the Australian recruitment market. The closure of both the Parramatta…
Read MoreWhat a Nobel prize-winning economist discovers about interviewing
Last week I recommended Daniel Kahneman’s fantastic book on decision making; Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman won his Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making. In summary, Kahneman’s book explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is…
Read MoreRecruitment business model crisis: RCSA and ATC conferences summary
Four days of conferencing is full-on. It’s not just the formal sessions, it’s the networking and socialising that barely gives you a moment to stop and think about and process what you have heard. The contrast between the two conferences was huge. For the first two days, I was mainly surrounded by corporate recruitment and…
Read MoreDo you know which of your candidates is lying, big time?
Three years ago I wrote an article about the extent of candidate misrepresentation and outright lying that goes on without most recruiters being aware of it. When I am training rookie recruiters one of the topics I cover is the areas that recruiters need to be most alert to in terms of candidates’ mistruths. This…
Read MoreClient, dead client or prospect? Mind your language, recruiters
The most overused word in a recruiter’s lexicon is ‘client’. It is frequently used by recruiters to denote any form of customer or prospective customer whether or not the person or company in question has actually engaged the services of said recruiter or paid for any services provided by said recruiter. I believe it’s very…
Read MoreToo ugly or too blonde: The dilemmas and traps of looks discrimination
Recently I read about the Victorian Equal Opportunity Commission’s employment-based complaints from potential employees relating to perceived appearance-based discrimination. In the past five years there have been 107 complaints about discrimination based on obesity, 96 complaints about being too ugly or blonde and 22 for tattoos or piercings, to name just three specific discriminatory categories. My first…
Read MoreHow post-school education helps your work prospects and earnings
Four week ago I wrote about the recent release of Australian Jobs 2013. As mentioned it’s the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations’ most recent edition of their comprehensive annual Australian labour market update. In that blog I highlighted a range of statistics about employment relevant to recruiters. Today I highlight one…
Read MoreNo temp-to-perm fee? You’ve got to be kidding!
One of the more odious internal recruitment practices being seen with increasing frequency around the country these days is the inclusion in recruitment PSAs or tenders of the ‘no temp-to-perm fee’ condition. I saw it again this week when industry news service ShortList brought attention to the Glenorchy (Tasmania) City Council’s current recruitment tender document including such…
Read MoreDo you have an ‘almost pathological need to confront brutal facts’?
Acting on the urgings of Jonathan Holmes during his final episode of ABC1’s Media Watch, I decided to make a commitment to pay for quality journalism by subscribing to Business Review Weekly. The most recent cover story features US business author Jim Collins, who is most famous for his books Good to Great (2001) and…
Read MoreMining jobs boom definitely over: DEEWR
In May this year, Australian Jobs 2013 was released. It’s the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations’ most recent edition of their comprehensive annual Australian labour market update. The most significant news story amongst the welter of statistics was that the mining jobs book is over, according to DEEWR. In the five…
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