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Episode 146 - How can you start 2026 powerfully?
83 Plays15 days ago
RNA episode 146 has news for 29 January 2026, featuring CEO leadership moves, perhaps the beginning of the end of Sourcr, WFH case study and the latest on FWO court action against a labour hire business. Question of the Week, "How can you can start 2026 powerfully?"
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Transcript
Sponsor Shoutout and Leadership Changes
00:00:08
Speaker
A big thank you to our sponsor, Wingman Recruitment, the smarter way to scale your recruitment business. They're fully trained, remote professionals, take care of sourcing, admin and compliance, freeing your consultants to focus on placements and performance. It's time to grow with intention, not just grind.
00:00:25
Speaker
To find out more, visit wingmangroup.com.au and visit the services tab. This is the news of the 2nd of February, 2026. I'm Adele Last.
00:00:35
Speaker
And I'm Ross Klenit. All right, Ross, let's kick off with some leadership changes in the recruitment industry because there's been a lot happening recently. There sure has, Adele. It's one of those times of year where quite a bit happens. Let's start with the Launch Group. Those of you don't know, Launch was founded back in 2006 by Rebecca Wallace, focuses on recruitment, RPO solutions and statement of work project consulting in IT.
00:00:59
Speaker
Sarah Keely has been promoted to CEO of Launch Group, stepping into the role after Damien Ross announced he was leaving. Yeah, Damien had been there for about 18 months, stepped in in mid-2024 after Rebecca Hartshorn moved sideways and she ultimately left launch at the end of 2024.
00:01:19
Speaker
Damien announced the move on LinkedIn last week, but he's not leaving the industry. He's heading to Melbourne-based SAP Project and IT Recruitment Consultancy Natural Selection Group, where he's taken on the CEO role.
00:01:32
Speaker
And it's certainly a clean handover at Launch. Sarah Keely already knows the business. She joined Launch as COO in July last year. Before that, she was COO at ah HR and Safety Recruiter, the next group for nine months.
00:01:49
Speaker
And that's after a long stretch at Hayes from 2010 to 2024. Five leadership roles finishing up as Head of Operational Excellence for Hayes ANZ. It sure looks like Sarah has the background to take on that CEO role.
00:02:03
Speaker
All right, moving on, another big CEO appointment, this time across franchised recruitment brands. Yes, Adam Hislop Reynolds been appointed Group CEO of Frontline Recruitment Group across Australia and New Zealand, incorporating Frontline Recruitment, Express Employment Professionals and Express Healthcare Staffing.
00:02:23
Speaker
Frontline Recruitment Group was founded by Deb Davis in 1995, grew into the most successful recruitment franchisor in Australia and New Zealand, and was sold to Express Employment Professionals in 2020.
00:02:36
Speaker
His slot Reynolds replaces Arthur McColl, who was FRG's CEO for five years until September last year. And just a bit about Hislop Reynolds. He joined the recruitment industry back in 2002. His most recent role was COO at Healthcare Australia, and that was between July 2021 until March 2024. Before that, he was executive GM in the same company for eight and a half years. So clearly he's got deep healthcare recruitment leadership experience, which no doubt express hopes will help them grow their local healthcare franchise division.
00:03:13
Speaker
Yes, the chairman, CEO and president of Express Employment International obviously agrees as he welcomed Adam into the role saying they're confident of his leadership as they continue to grow all three brands across the ANZ market.
00:03:27
Speaker
And finally, one out of WA, there's a leadership change MPI, formerly Mining People International. Yes, Steve Heather, founder of Perth-based mining recruiter MPI, has appointed Anthony Lambert as CEO replacing himself.
00:03:44
Speaker
Steve, who served on the RCSA board from 2011 to 2021, founded Mining People International back in 1995, and the business now has 25 employees.
00:03:55
Speaker
Lambert was most recently CEO of 2XM Healthcare, care a recruitment business, and before that he spent just over five years with Sugarman Australia, now known as Talent Quarter, the business headed up by long-time industry owner Sue Healy.
00:04:11
Speaker
Steve told ah RNA he had had 70 serious expressions of interest from executives across recruitment and technical sales and services, but notably none from senior women in the local recruitment sector.
00:04:24
Speaker
Steve said he chose Lambert because he wanted someone with a record of growing businesses through attracting and developing quality people. Steve's not disappearing, though. His focus now shifts to growing MPI through a potential merger or acquisition.
Strategic Shifts and Legal Challenges
00:04:39
Speaker
But, Del, on to one of my favourite topics, seek. It appears Seek-owned Sourcer is being scaled back as a standalone brand.
00:04:49
Speaker
This is based, or my conclusion, is based on an email that Sourcer sent on Monday the 12th of January. It advised customers that from the following day, their Sourcer profile would transition to a Seek recruiter profile.
00:05:04
Speaker
The message was direct with pretty short notice. One trusted profile, no action required. and all existing links redirecting automatically. They also use the moment to announce a new feature, recommended recruiter on a seek recruiter profile, which is designed to help recruiters stand out in the directory.
00:05:23
Speaker
Yes, clicking on an agency's Sourcer company page or even searching for recruiters directly via the Sourcer website now directs the user straight to seek, which strongly suggests Sourcer as a separate destination is being quietly wound down.
00:05:41
Speaker
R&A spoke to several high-volume Sourcer users and the reaction to SEEK's communication has been mixed, right, Russ? ah Very much so, Adele. One user said they were informed midway through last year that the review side of Sourcer would be more actively linked to SEEK and job postings. Another recruiter said the email on the 12th of January was the first notification they'd received, and another said they'd received no notification at all from Sourcer about any changes.
00:06:10
Speaker
And when RNA contacted SEEK for comment, a senior SEEK spokesperson did acknowledge the changes to SOSA, but they declined to provide any further detail on future plans, saying SEEK's intention is always to inform clients first and that more details will be available in around six weeks. So for now, I guess it's just a wait and see.
00:06:30
Speaker
Well, yes, but direction to me feels pretty clear. Less Sourcer as the standalone brand, more Sourcer capability embedded directly into Seek.
00:06:41
Speaker
This aligns with Seek's broader strategy, simplify the ecosystem, keep users on one platform and surface recruiter credibility right at the point of search.
00:06:52
Speaker
How recruiters feel about all this will probably depend on how much value they've placed on Sourcer as an independent brand. Either way, it's a meaningful shift and one will be watching closely over the next couple of months.
00:07:06
Speaker
Working from home is still making headlines with news of an employee in Melbourne who was unsuccessful in his unfair dismissal claim after refusing to adhere to the company's return to office policy.
00:07:18
Speaker
Richard Johnson, a product engineer at software company Papercut, argued that his contract permitted him to work solely from home despite the company's directive for employees to return to the office three days a week.
00:07:30
Speaker
The Fair Work Commission ruled that Johnson's dismissal was not harsh, unjust or unreasonable, stating that his contract required him to comply with reasonable and lawful directions. The Commissioner found no basis for Johnson's interpretation of an unconditional right to work from home. It's worth noting Papercut had engaged in a lengthy process including issuing warnings, and offering transition options to encourage Johnson to comply with the hybrid work model.
00:07:57
Speaker
Johnson's consistent non-compliance with these directives ultimately led to his dismissal. And Adele, on to a case of fraud which relates to wage theft and a falsified paper trail.
00:08:09
Speaker
Queensland labour hire provider and its manager facing legal action in the Federal Circuit and Family Court over allegations they knowingly supplied false documents to Fair Work inspectors auditing pay on a strawberry farm.
00:08:23
Speaker
Corserve Pty Ltd, which supplied labour to farm operators in Queensland and one of its managers, have been sued by the Fair Work Ombudsman. The Ombudsman alleges that the company and its manager breached the Fair Work Act by providing false records in December 2023 and January The documents allegedly include falsified pay slips, falsified payment evidence from the company's bank account and piecework agreements required under the Horticultural Award bearing falsified employee signatures for 14 workers on the farm.
00:08:59
Speaker
According to the FWO, the false information purported to show the company had paid the workers when in fact it had never made those payments, having outsourced the payments to subcontractors.
Wage Growth and Recruitment Strategy for 2026
00:09:11
Speaker
All right, Ross, let's finish with a quick but interesting data drop from the ABS, the Employee Earnings and Hours Survey. Yes, this is a biennial one. Latest release, Adele, gives us a snapshot of earnings and paid hours across Australia as at May 2025.
00:09:31
Speaker
And there's some good news, quite an encouraging story emerging for younger workers. Across the board, average weekly earnings survey cash earnings for full-time workers grew at an annualised rate of 3.9% between 2023 and 2025.
00:09:48
Speaker
And the critical factor there is that that 3.9% outpaced trimmed mean inflation, which ran at 3.4% over the same period. So we're seeing modest but real wage growth with wages increasing for all age groups.
00:10:06
Speaker
Workers under 35 saw the strongest gains anywhere from 3.7% to 6.4% per year. While industries like IT, media and telecoms and construction are seeing fast earnings growth across all age groups, younger workers in particular are benefiting the most.
00:10:26
Speaker
Mining is a big one. Full-time wages for 21 24-year-olds are grew by 8.1% in a year and for 25 to 34-year-olds by 6.6%. A lot of that's been driven by strong outcomes under enterprise agreements.
00:10:43
Speaker
And then there's the female-dominated industries. The Fair Work Commission's gender-based undervaluation review has lifted award wages in areas like healthcare and social assistance. And as we know, younger workers are more likely to be award-reliant, so they've benefited disproportionately from those increases.
00:11:01
Speaker
So the headline takeaway, younger Australians are finally seeing wage growth that's not just strong, but actually beating inflation. And that's the news for the 2nd of February, 2026. Stay tuned now for Question of the Week.
00:11:26
Speaker
Question of the Week. How can you start 2026 powerfully? great time of the year to ask this question, Ross, and really start making sure you've got all of your ducks in a row for the year.
00:11:39
Speaker
And my first answer to this one is about cleaning house. What do you mean by that? I mean your database and your candidate pipelines. Everyone knows that. Everyone says, oh yeah, I'm going to clean up my database, but they never do it. So why should they do it? Like what difference will it make if they do it early in the year?
00:12:00
Speaker
Well, I think it's a good time, obviously, candidate mindsets um at a peak as well. People start to look for change at the start of the year. But you really want to make sure that you are engaging with candidates that you know and trust. You know, there's no point trying to attract new candidates when you already have great candidates in your database. You just haven't contacted or engaged them. That's for Yeah, i agree with that. So I think that's, you know,
00:12:27
Speaker
a great reason to do it. And you're right, a lot of people say this and they talk about doing it every year and and then
Authenticity and Brand Building in Recruitment
00:12:33
Speaker
they don't. But I think now more than ever, with obviously the prevalence of of AI in, you know, the process and in applications, you know, not everything is what it seems. You need to go with what you know. You need to look at the true um and and true tested and tried and tested candidates, people you've met, people you've screened and reference checked. So all your silver medalist candidates would be a great way to start focus on candidates you know understanding where they're at,
00:13:02
Speaker
re-engaging the relationship with them and looking at where you can place them in 2026. I completely agree. And this is even more important than ever, Adele, because it's getting harder and harder for employers to work out who the good candidates are based on job applications. Everyone's AI upped their resumes and their cover letters. And the evidence is very clear that employers are more disappointed than ever when they meet candidates after having viewed a resume and booked interviews based on resumes, that people are presenting themselves at a level that they really are not at. So I think agency recruiters have got a huge advantage. If you've known candidates over a period of time, and you can endorse them because you've got ah reference checks, you've checked their qualifications, their right to work, or whatever it might be, surely that's going to make it easier to use that recruiter rather than going out and putting an ad on Seek.
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah, and especially given, you know, the costs of advertising are increasing every year, as we know, um and they're not producing the quality of results that our clients want, often that we struggle with as well. So they're producing volumes, but not quality. and Absolutely.
00:14:16
Speaker
You know, that's a huge game changer for the client. You can definitely come in with the quality when they're just sitting amongst, you know, volumes of resumes. And that's only going to become a bigger problem for clients. So I'm predicting there's going to be a swing back to using recruitment agencies where agencies aren't drawing new pools of candidates from job boards, where they're continuing to cultivate and grow their existing candidate pool via referrals and growing it selectively.
00:14:46
Speaker
So for me, there are a couple of things. But firstly, your, I hate to say it, but for want of a better word, your personal brand. How are you known? Are you someone who returns calls?
00:14:58
Speaker
Are you someone who will tell clients and candidates the truth about the market? Do you know how to be respectfully honest? Do you know how to manage a client's expectations about the type of role that they're attempting to place? Do you know how to manage candidates' expectations about the type of role that they're a valid candidate for?
00:15:21
Speaker
I think there's a history of clients and candidates being serviced by, let's call them, people-pleasing recruiters. And I know because I was one of those recruiters until I learned that that wasn't serving me and I learned to be a straight shooting recruiter.
00:15:41
Speaker
respectful. And I'd like to think someone who still was empathetic, but I knew that ultimately it's better to tell people the truth. And i think with so much blandness out there and so much frustration in the market with both candidates and clients, if you can be a recruiter who's known for telling the truth, then you will be sought after.
00:16:05
Speaker
How would you go about finding out what people do think about You you mentioned your brand personal branding and reputation, if a recruit is listening and they don't know the answer to that, how would they find that out?
00:16:17
Speaker
Well, you could ask ChatGPT. You can go on to your favourite recruiter review website. Clearly, recruiters who request reviews are going to know what's said about them. LinkedIn recommendations.
00:16:29
Speaker
To me, this is a pretty easy one to ask for a LinkedIn recommendation. And the easiest way, of course, to do it is after someone, a candidate or client, has said good things about you in an email or in a phone call or a text message and thanking them and requesting that they produce a LinkedIn recommendation for you. These are the things that can make a difference. And in my world, it's just as important, probably more important now than anything.
00:16:59
Speaker
It's called social proof. It's one of Dr. Robert Cialdini's levers
Enhancing Candidate Engagement and Data Utilization
00:17:03
Speaker
of influence. What do people find out about you and how does that influence the way in which they engage with you? Another one for me would be to have a look at the candidate experience itself. So having a look at How easy or difficult is it for a candidate to connect with you, engage with you, find you, have a conversation with you and look at that process with with really genuine outside eyes, you know, go ahead and apply for a job to your company and see just how difficult it is, how many friction points there are, how many forms they've got to fill in We're still in 2026 creating processes that in some cases are so unnecessary And just create that friction for a candidate to say, I can't be bothered with this. And it's always the good candidates that will do that. um You know, the candidates who haven't got a job are often the ones that will sit there and go through all of those, you know, hoops, jump through the hoops. Not always the case, but often. ah So have a look at your process. Use this time to map out what that looks like and remove the friction points.
00:18:07
Speaker
And make it easy for candidates to think that, hopefully it's the truth, that you're a really good recruiter and that you're someone who's proactive, that you are focused on the human element. You do call them, that you're proactively in contact. I mean, I see it.
00:18:24
Speaker
my my My wife's an employee. um Over the last few years, she's sought and gained other jobs. So she's on the books of quite a few recruitment agencies. And it just astonishes me how few...
00:18:36
Speaker
of them contact her and she's an ah HR. She's a senior HR person. Like she's someone who if not is hiring inside an organisation, she's a key influencer. It just boggles my mind how little proactive contact there is with, well, I know from my wife because I talked to her about these things, but I'm sure her experience is not isolated.
00:18:58
Speaker
What else have you got, Ross? focus, narrow your focus, use data to work out where you should be spending more time and less time. So classic example would be, um how many jobs did you fill in 2025?
00:19:13
Speaker
How many jobs did you work on and not fill in 2025? And then what's your job fill percentage? What's common to the jobs that you filled?
00:19:26
Speaker
You're looking for themes. Was it the types of jobs? Was it the types of employers? Was it the location of the employers? Was it the um salary in relation to market for what the client was looking to pay? Was it the speed with which the client worked through the recruitment process? Was it your willingness to ask for a retainer or exclusivity?
00:19:53
Speaker
And then on the flip side, the jobs that you worked on on loss, what are the themes? Because I promise you there will be themes in both camps. And this should help you focus your energy on gaining more of those jobs where you can see that you've got a great track record of filling.
00:20:12
Speaker
And the jobs that you don't have a great track record of filling, it's not that you shouldn't work on them. But what you should do, and this is a classic mistake that recruiters make, is that they work on a low probability job like it's a high probability job. They get fooled. They look at the fee that is potentially available for filling that job.
00:20:33
Speaker
They look at the high profile employer maybe, and they get fooled and they let those things blind them outside the reality of whether the job is a low or high probability job. And I think for many recruiters, that's a piece of low hanging fruit that they don't pick.
00:20:50
Speaker
And it really gives you that yardstick, the measurement that you can use throughout the year to say, does this role fit into that category? Is it fitting into my high probability roles? And is it one I'm likely to fill Or could I limit the amount of time I'm spending on that role? There's no doubt because you most recruiters who work in the contingent market would be lucky, certainly in terms of permanent recruitment, to fill half their jobs. And so, I mean, if you did fill half the jobs you worked on, you'd be doing really, really well. I'd say if you looked across the whole recruitment industry – a large majority of recruiters don't fill the jobs that they work on. And if they looked at that data, what would it tell them about things they should or should not do in the coming year about the the types of jobs that they accept and then how much time they work on them?
00:21:40
Speaker
Okay. So summarising our key points, we're saying make sure you've got strong relationships with good quality candidates and nurture and build those as much as you can this year. Narrow your focus on the jobs and candidates that you're working on. So we're suggesting narrow and deep focus rather than broad and wide.
00:22:00
Speaker
Clean house. Make the commitment to yourself, to your database, to your system, to your ops person that you're going to clean up what's in there. Get rid of, um you know, do do the spring clean and get rid of what doesn't need to be there and be really clear on your reputation. Understand what you want to be known for and make sure you're playing in that lane.