Posts Tagged ‘profit’
More powerful lessons from The Rare Find: Think through the assignment
After writing last week’s article summarising the lessons from George Anders’s fabulous bookThe Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else (Portfolio/Penguin, 2011), I re-read my favourite chapter of the book and I thought the lessons of that chapter were worthy of further analysis in these pages. I am referring to Chapter 2: The Talent Problem. This is such…
Read MoreHow tight are your terms?
Already this year I have had a number of enquiries or questions from members and readers about client behavior with respect to their terms and conditions of business. It seems pretty clear to me that clients are taking a long hard look at the terms being presented to them and the terms they…
Read MoreDual Desks: A drag on consultant productivity and company profit
When I first started as a recruitment consultant, back with Hays in London in 1989, I was a perm accounting consultant. I worked in a team with 6 other perm consultants. All of us only recruited perm jobs. When I returned to Australia and joined Temporary Solutions, I was one of a team of three…
Read MoreSEEK’s new ‘executive’ pricing: smart or monopolistic?
Just as everyone was winding down for the summer break, the undisputed #1 Australian job board, Seek, decided to liven things up a bit with a pricing announcement that has made a few waves. Having axed Seek Executive at the beginning of October 2011, a decision was taken to incorporate a $150k job tab into…
Read MoreThe leadership difference: why effective leadership pays and how
Those recruiters who attended the RCSA International Conference in Port Douglas a few months ago, were fortunate enough to witness Steve Vamos speak on the last afternoon. Given Steve’s background in technology companies, you would be forgiven for expecting that his presentation would be hi-tech in format and tech-heavy in content. In fact it…
Read MoreRecruitment PSAs gone mad: WTF is going on in Canberra?
I am sure the successful recruitment agency winners of the recently announced Federal Health Department’s temp/contract panel must be delighted with their win. The whole process began in the middle of August last year when the Department called for tender submissions to provide temp and contract recruitment services to the head office in Canberra and…
Read MoreCandidate interviews: the dud KPI
When I am running my ‘Building a Profitable Desk‘ workshop and it comes around to the discussion of High Pay-Off Activities (or KPIs, if you prefer), I will inevitably have a participant nominate ‘interviews’ as a high pay-off activity. When I disagree, there is often a slight pause and then this look of confusion appears on the…
Read MoreWho are your stakeholders and what do they REALLY want?
Two weeks ago I wrote a summary of the 2011 RCSA Conference, held in Port Douglas. I compiled a list of what I regarded as useful and insightful quotes that were uttered by the various presenters. Today I return to one of those quotes for a greater examination of it because as the…
Read More22 signs you are slowly going the way of the dinosaurs
The past four weeks have been a very productive period for my own professional development. I have attended the ATC Sourcevent , the RCSA Conference and Greg Savage’s Cunningham Family Fund fundraiser presentation, Old Skool v New Kool . I love hearing from a range of people about the sector I…
Read MorePlay More Beach Volleyball to Bill More Fees
Two weeks ago, one of my favourite recruitment bloggers, Jonathan Rice, posted on his blog The Whiteboard, a smartly written post, provocatively entitled Smoke More Cigarettes to Bill More Fees. The essence of Jonathan’s post was that when he worked at Hays, a large majority of the biggest billers were smokers, but it…
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