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Episode 163 - Has AI become the new generational divide at work and how will this impact recruiters?
48 Plays4 hours ago
RNA episode 163 has news for 2 June 2026, with the outlook for Hudson creditors looking grim, more senior departures at Davidson in Melbourne, Luke Hemmings back in the news for all the predictable reasons and SEEK's share price plumbs new lows. In the wake of booing at US commencement ceremonies when speakers mention AI, Adele and I share our respective Gen Z daughters' disdain for AI, which prompts our question this week.
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Transcript
Challenges in Recruitment: Administrative Overload
00:00:06
Speaker
Adele, what's one of the biggest challenges recruitment agencies are facing right now? That's easy, Ross. Recruiters are spending too much time on admin and not enough time talking to clients and candidates.
00:00:17
Speaker
And that's where Wingman Recruitment comes in. Wingman provides tailored recruitment support professionals who can help with sourcing, market mapping, CRM management, candidate screening, and a whole lot more. So your consultants can focus on what they do best, winning business and making placements, essentially more time on revenue-generating
Solutions for Scaling Recruitment Operations
00:00:34
Speaker
activity.
00:00:34
Speaker
If you'd like to see how your agency could scale without adding more local headcount, visit wingmangroup.com.au and go to the Services tab. This is your news for the 2nd of June, 2026. I'm Adele Last.
00:00:49
Speaker
And I'm Ross Klenit.
Hudson Australia: Facing Liquidation Risks
00:00:51
Speaker
Adele, it's looking grim for employees and creditors of Hudson Australia right now. What's the latest, Ross? Second creditors meeting scheduled for last Wednesday was adjourned after a proposed docker was withdrawn before the meeting. There weren't any other proposals or offers tabled for the creditors consideration.
00:01:11
Speaker
The deadline for offers has now come and gone and it seems the administrators are without any proposal they deem worth presenting to creditors. Okay, so what's the process from here?
00:01:23
Speaker
The administrators said that they expect to release a supplementary report outlining the details to be voted on when the second meeting reconvenes within 45 days.
00:01:33
Speaker
In simple language, this means the administrators are still seeking offers and proposals. However, if none are received or deemed worthy of creditors' consideration, then the only option left will be to liquidate the company. and What does that mean for employees and creditors?
00:01:51
Speaker
Hudson currently continues to trade as it is in voluntary administration. When a company is liquidated, it ceases to trade. After it ceases to trade, the administrators become the liquidators. A liquidation process involves many things, but primarily the main job is to sell the company's assets so there is more money to pay creditors. What about the employees specifically though?
00:02:14
Speaker
As soon as the company is liquidated, the current staff become ex-employees and join the list of priority creditors, although almost all of the current Hudson employees are already on that priority creditor list. Wow. Let's hope a white knight swoops in and saves the day, but that seems unlikely now.
Davidson's Leadership Challenges: Senior Exits
00:02:33
Speaker
Melbourne-based senior search partner for large white-collar recruiter Davidson, Seamus Scanlon, finished his nearly 10-year stint with the company late last month. Hasn't there been other senior recruiters leaving Davidson recently, Ross?
00:02:47
Speaker
Yes, that's right, Adele. Scanlon's the third search partner to have left Davidson's Melbourne operation in just over a year. His predecessor as national senior partner of search, Jared McLaughlin, left in April last year to start Hazel Executive and Boards.
00:03:03
Speaker
Partner of experience management, Cameron Norton, also departed Davidson in April last year, firstly for a brief stint with SHK. before establishing his own search business, Wedge-Tailed Talent, three months ago. That's tough news for Davidson's national managing partner, Claire McCartan, whose hollowed-out Melbourne team will rely on her more than ever before. It seems that Davidson shareholders, who sought private equity investors in 2021, are facing the prospect of more unwelcome competition from former employees in Melbourne.
00:03:36
Speaker
Is Scanlon going to set up on his own, do you think, Ross? I did email him last week, Adele, seeking comment. He responded with, um let's call it a template response.
00:03:48
Speaker
ah This is what he said. I'm proud of what we've built over my time at Davidson and thankful for the great people I've had the opportunity to work with and learn from along the way. I'm excited by the next challenge and the opportunity to continue to grow. sounds like a yes to me.
Luke Hemmings: Controversial Podcast Strategy
00:04:04
Speaker
Adele, have you been following the news about Australia's most controversial recruitment agency owner, Luke Hemmings, and his latest attempt to launder his image? I have. It seems he reached out to Bill Barker, the host of Gen Z reality show podcast, Sensory Overload, to discuss his early life struggles and the high-profile allegations against him in what is really a pathetic attempt to win some sympathy.
00:04:30
Speaker
Yes, it appears to be a calculated move to address the fallout from the July 2024 raid on his White Fox recruitment officers in Southport, South East Queensland, and the various blog posts of mine in which I detail all the scandal that follows in his way. I know you have covered his controversial past in some detail in previous blogs, Ross, but for people who haven't heard of him, who is Luke Hemmings?
00:04:54
Speaker
The short version of L is that the man currently known as Luke Hemmings has previously been known by about half a dozen aliases after stints in radio programming as a music promoter. And in real estate, Hemmings turned his sights on the recruitment industry.
00:05:08
Speaker
He operated Canberra-based Coceptive Recruitment, which entered liquidation in 2021, owing creditors about three quarters of a million dollars, according to the Daily Mail.
00:05:19
Speaker
Hemmings left Canberra for the Gold Coast and set up business as White Fox Recruitment in Southport in August 2023. In mid-2024, Queensland Police raided the Southport office of White Fox.
00:05:33
Speaker
The Gold Coast Bulletin reported in January this year that Hemmings, now 32, was initially scheduled to have a committal hearing over the three fraud charges associated with the raid.
00:05:44
Speaker
which is alleged to have defrauded three companies out of a combined nearly $548,000 between April 2023 and March 2024. But instead of a committal hearing, Hemmings Barrister told the court the matter between the parties would proceed to justice mediation and the magistrate according to the Gold Coast Bulletin, ordered Hemmings to repay the $548,000 by the end of August this year.
00:06:10
Speaker
He promoted the podcast interview with Barker as an honest and open conversation. Instead, he went to the sob story angle of a tough upbringing, claiming his father basically drained all the accounts and left his mother with nothing.
00:06:24
Speaker
Yes, Adele, Luke appears to have daddy issues as he's described his father's world of the red light district of Sydney, drugs, alcohol violence, which led to a lot of childhood trauma that wasn't dealt with appropriately. You don't say, Luke.
00:06:40
Speaker
Seems he likes to pass the blame. He even had a bite at you, Ross, claiming your reporting is unfounded and you never contacted him for comment. He spent a lot of time in the interview avoiding a clear response or even contradicting the facts. I heard him say that he now doesn't owe money, even though he has been ordered to do just that by the court.
00:07:00
Speaker
Seems his twisting of the truth continues. Sure does, Bill. Bill Parker's attempts to discuss the failure of his business in Canberra went nowhere, Hemmings just obfuscated, saying he had to make a decision that was best for all stakeholders without offering a real apology or any explanation.
00:07:21
Speaker
When asked about the ongoing fraud allegations, he said he couldn't comment because the matter is still before the court. Thankfully for any potential defamation case against you, Ross, he claims your coverage and the coverage of the Walkley award-winning journalist Kathleen Skeen has worked in his favour and he hasn't lost any business.
00:07:41
Speaker
Towards the end of the interview, Barker asked Hemmings, is there anybody you feel in business that you might owe an apology to or that you practised in a way that might not be in the positive favour of others?
00:07:52
Speaker
Predictably, Hemmings offers a word salad response with not a hint of an apology to anyone for anything he's done. Here's what he said. 100%, I think you know that's probably a lot with what happens essentially with the liquidation. Businesses go into liquidation every day. It's not an easy thing to do. There's obviously victims on all sides of the table, the business, credit to staff, all that kind of stuff. Notice he says business as a victim before anyone else. But at the end of the day, I think there's a hell of a lot of lessons learned and a great deal of mistakes made. I own that.
00:08:26
Speaker
Has he really owned up to any mistakes, Ross? Not a single one of them, Adele. Luke Hemmings is completely full of it. The man is, as I headline my blog, an unstoppable narcissist.
Market Shifts: Seek's Share Prices and Recruitment Trends
00:08:41
Speaker
Seek's share price troubles continue, Ross, dipping below $12 last week before recovering slightly to open this week at $12.45. It's had a remarkable fall, Adele. when You consider the stock was trading at about $24.50 just six months ago and its post-COVID peak in late 2021 was over share.
00:09:05
Speaker
The decline has accelerated since Seek wrote down the value of its investment in Chinese job board platform Xiaoping by more than $350 million dollars earlier this year.
00:09:17
Speaker
And it's not just shareholders feeling the pain. Seek's directors increased their personal holdings at prices above $16 per share only three months ago. so they'll be watching recent market movements with some concern and a big personal investment loss, well, on paper at least.
00:09:35
Speaker
With unemployment edging higher and economic forecasts remaining subdued, investors are clearly questioning how quickly recruitment activity will rebound. For now, seek Share Price is telling a story of a market that's become much more cautious about the outlook for hiring and job advertising revenue. The latest JSA recruitment experiences and outlook survey suggests employer demand continues to soften Ross with fewer businesses recruiting in April.
00:10:03
Speaker
Seems so, Adele. Just 46% of employers were hiring or had recruited in the previous month, down from 48% in March and 51% in February. Slowdown was most noticeable among smaller employers, while larger businesses remain generally more active in the market.
00:10:23
Speaker
The survey also found recruitment is becoming a little easier, with 45% of employers reporting hiring difficulties and down from 53% year ago.
00:10:34
Speaker
and perhaps most concerning is the future growth figure. Only 15% of employers expect to increase employee headcount over the next three months, well below the 23% recorded at the same time last year.
00:10:53
Speaker
And despite all the talk about labour shortages, recruitment is still largely being driven by replacement hiring rather than expansion. with almost two-thirds of employers recruiting solely to replace departing staff.
00:11:06
Speaker
Recruiters, at the moment at least, the message is hard to ignore. Most hiring activity is being driven by attrition, not business expansion.
AI's Impact on Recruitment: Generational Perspectives
00:11:16
Speaker
And that's your news up to date for the 2nd of June, 2026. Stay tuned now for Question of the Week.
00:11:30
Speaker
Question of the week, has AI become the new generational divide at work? And what does this mean for recruiters? Well, we're asking this because Harvard Professor David Deming, when commenting on the various reports of graduating students' vocal negative reaction to various guest speakers who were presenting AI as very positive, has made this issue um a bit of a battleground. because what Deming said is that AI has now become symbolic as something as a generational divide.
00:12:06
Speaker
Older workers, leaders particularly, are typically baby boomers, and they're talking down to I think graduates are seeing it, to graduates and saying, hey, you should see this as an opportunity, not a threat. And graduates quite rightly are saying, well, it's easy for you to talk given from your position, but what about me when I'm out there applying for jobs and I'm getting nothing back?
00:12:32
Speaker
It's a really emotive argument, I think, and and perhaps to some extent, you know, fair comment from younger workers and graduates, because i think if you were staring down the barrel of Leaving university or finishing school, starting out your career and looking at AI potentially as a competitor instead of a tool that advances you, i think it would be pretty scary. I think so. And the US really is the canary in the coal mine, particularly in California and other states with big tech workforces like New York and Texas. And thousands and thousands of graduate jobs are not there in numbers that they were before.
00:13:14
Speaker
And clearly, US, it's a very significant public issue in Australia, less so but no doubt it will come Well, we are seeing some of the larger consulting firms reducing the numbers. I mean, even right here in Australia, you know, recruitment agency, the large ones, the hazes of the world often took in large numbers of graduates each year. And we know that that's not happening in the same volume that ah that it always did.
00:13:42
Speaker
I think that's absolutely true. And when I hosted the Future of Recruitment panel at TalentX a couple of weeks ago, both Clara Fallon, the MD for Drake in Australia and New Zealand, and Susie McInerney, the CEO of Six Degrees Executive, ah both agreed with the statement that recruitment agency owners and leaders are much more likely to attempt to generate productivity savings through ai before they increase headcount.
00:14:09
Speaker
So this is essentially a shrinking of those entry-level positions, those ah first rung in the career ladder kind of situation for a lot of graduates that they rely on to make that leap from study into work. Some of these positions are drying up now. Well, it would seem so. And the level to which they're drying up in Australia, we don't have whole of market data as yet. But I'd imagine next year when we start to see the results of How did the 2025 graduates go in the 2026 job market? I think that will start to be instructive. And then the year the year after that, what we start to see, I suspect, is not a a dramatic shrinkage of opportunities, but certainly compared to the number of graduating students, proportionately fewer jobs to go around, therefore much greater competition. It's a really interesting...
00:15:04
Speaker
scenario around people's exposure to AI and their adoption of it and their general attitude to it. I kind of think about my own personal situation. I live in a multi-generational household. So my mother lives with us. ah we are My husband and I are Gen Xs in the middle and my children are um Elphas. So I've got this multi-generational household and our exposure to ai is very different and our adoption as as I said, and our attitudes, it's quite interesting to me. So i feel like this is quite accurate. I feel like the Gen Xs and interboomers have jumped on quickly. We've we've really loved the technology. We've started to play with it. We've seen the benefits of it. Many of us are, you know, really using it in a day-to-day sense. You know, I myself personally now work with, you know, Atlas, which is a recruitment ah platform that is purely AI-based. Like, to me, this all just makes sense.
00:16:03
Speaker
I see the top end of that spectrum being you know the parents, which are my kids' grandparents, who see it as a bit of fun. I don't see them doing anything too overt on it. they're not you know They're not looking for jobs. They're not really working as much on it. both All my my parents are retired now, but so they're doing more of the fun stuff, making quirky photos and images and doing all the fun stuff on AI.
00:16:26
Speaker
But I actually see a real fear in my children. I see these Gen L for kids coming through. I've got one student, one who's at university, one who's at senior high school, not using it in the same way I thought they would embrace it and almost a bit fearful.
00:16:42
Speaker
Well, my daughter, you may remember in our summer series, said she hates AI. And she was pretty vehement about that.
00:16:52
Speaker
And that shocked me because I hadn't had an extensive conversation with her about AI, but she was very resistant, didn't see it as a positive thing. And she's a creative person and she absolutely hates what AI is doing to both the creative process and also the intellectual property of artists. And I can't blame her. And I suspect many other young people, i mean, she's 20, what, she just turned 25. suspect many other young people have similar feelings.
00:17:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think my daughter's feelings are from a similar angle around ah around that feeling that it's taking away the creativity, the human element of our lives, and it it's set up almost as competition as opposed to to a support. And I think it also is drummed in when they go to university. You know, my daughter is – they're really told to be very, very careful about their use of AI And she literally will not touch it. She's studying a science degree and she has literally not touched any, you know, LLM in any way, shape or form ah because she's so fearful. Even for some things that I think she could do on it, you know, I create a table, you know, i took some data and put it in and created a table. I mean, to me, that's not cheating. That's not asking it anything. You're just getting it to format something. So she won't even do that. So it's really interesting.
00:18:17
Speaker
And recruiters at the front line of the backlash from younger candidates, because let's face it, ai at the moment, or large language models, are designed to improve volume hiring. And when I say improve, inverted commas, improve for the employer.
00:18:34
Speaker
And guess who the people are predominantly for volume hiring? They're either lower-skilled blue-collar workers or they're white-collar graduates. And no doubt, many white-collar graduates are completely peed off with not being able to talk to a human, that their application is processed by AI, they've got to go online and they've got to be interviewed, effectively interviewed, in inverted commas, really it's a screening um video discussion with AI. And they feel like I'm, I suspect, they feel like they're not given the opportunity to show the whole person and they're just categorized by ai and they don't get any chance to connect with your human on the other side of the hiring process. And if they have to go through that time after time after time,
00:19:29
Speaker
and they keep getting rejected, and they rarely have a human interview, you cannot blame them for being pretty down and angry with AI generally.
00:19:40
Speaker
It's really interesting. As humans, we tend to have a bit of a distrust about technology in general, right? You think about things like your GPS in your car. You know, you sort of take its advice, but you go, oh I'm going to go the way I want to go, and i don't really trust it's taking me the right way. And, you know, we generally, as humans, have that slight distrust around technology. but it seems to be really heightened in the in the younger generation. I think maybe there's some justification because of the way, the lens in which they're looking through it, but I think it's a really interesting discussion and I wonder whether our listeners would feel the same.
Future of Recruitment: Direct Connections and Industry Talks
00:20:14
Speaker
You know, put yourself back if you were starting your career right now. Would you see AI very differently to how we see it, you know, 10, 20, 30 years into our career where we're safely on the other side of lots of experience, a network that's been built, you know, human skills that have been developed, these young kids have been bit of an uphill battle.
00:20:33
Speaker
Well, and really as a piece of advice, I'd simply say to younger people, do what you can to connect directly with a recruiter. Yes, they may rebuff you or may put you through or direct you to some sort of AI um hiring process, but at least try.
00:20:49
Speaker
at least try and find out who the who the best recruiters are. And recruiters listening to this, please accept young people reaching out to you, attempting to contact you because they're frustrated with AI. And I appreciate you can't spend all your day talking to people who have very little experience because for most recruiters, they're not candidates that you can help. But understand that they're frustrated and do what you can. And certainly I'd say smart recruitment agencies have probably already set up a help page for graduates or people with very little work experience to help them navigate the recruitment process with AI and to do what they can to at least demonstrate empathy with those people who, let's face it, are facing a pretty tough job market at the moment. Yeah, I think it's really fair advice to not assume everybody is as au fait or as comfortable, may even have some fear of some of this technology and and help lead people through, want to get to the right candidates at the end of the day.
00:21:47
Speaker
Well, this is definitely a topic to be continued, Adele. All right, and just a brief announcement for those people who are in Sydney. i will be speaking at a free vendor event on Thursday, 11th June. in the Sydney CBD.
00:22:06
Speaker
It's going to be starting at 8.30am and going through till about 10 o'clock. And I'll be presenting my talk, why I'm optimistic about the future of the recruitment industry, but not for everybody.
00:22:20
Speaker
Oh, So if you're interested, it won't cost you anything other than time. It's been put on by SDP Solutions. Just go to the SDP Solutions website, which is sdpsolutions.com.au, and you'll see on the homepage the event.
00:22:37
Speaker
Click on that and register yourself, and I look forward to seeing you in Sydney next week.