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Episode 80
130 Plays3 months ago
News for the week beginning 16 September 2024 and Question of the Week, ""How should recruitment agency owners deal with requests for extended leave?"
#RNA #RecruitmentNewsAustralia #RecruitmentPodcast
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Transcript
Introduction to Engage Conference
00:00:09
Speaker
On Thursday, the 6th of March, 2025, Bullhorn will be hosting Engage, Australia's leading recruitment conference at the WinkStand Royal Randwick Racecourse, and Recruitment News Australia will be there. Discover how to more effectively engage talent and learn about the future of recruitment at Engage. It's the perfect place to make new connections and learn from the brightest minds. Early bird tickets for owners and employers of recruitment agencies are now on sale for $249 each. For more information, you can visit engage dot.bullhorn dot.com.
Weekly News Overview
00:00:40
Speaker
This is the news for the week beginning the 16th of September 2024. I'm Ross Clennett.
New Anti-Discrimination Laws in Queensland
00:00:46
Speaker
Queensland employers will face a legal requirement to prevent discrimination in the workplace from the 1st of July next year after the passage of a major workplace protections bill through State Parliament.
00:00:58
Speaker
Amendments to the State's Anti-Discrimination Act passed last Tuesday through the Respect at Work and Other Matters Amendment Bill which will impose a positive duty on businesses, organisations and government agencies to prevent discrimination. This upgraded responsibility means Queensland employers must work to prevent discrimination from occurring in the workplace instead of just reacting to improper conduct when it happens.
00:01:22
Speaker
The reforms represent some of the strongest state-based legislation focused on curtailing toxic workplaces. In a statement, Premier Stephen Miles said the rules put the onus on an employer to create safer environments. It's simply unacceptable that this sort of harassment could take place in the workplace, which is why I'm sending a clear message that it must stop, he said.
00:01:44
Speaker
Under the legislation, employers face a legal requirement to prevent discrimination on the basis of gender, race, age, religion and sexuality. The Queensland legislation goes beyond the 2022 Federal Respect at Work legislation, expanding the positive duty to include prevention and elimination of discrimination on the basis of all protected attributes, not just gender.
APSCO Awards Finalists Announcement
00:02:11
Speaker
APSCO's 2024 awards finalists were announced last week. There are 15 categories and here are some of the nominees. Best performance of a small company, keen consulting, recruitment sorted, and recruitment hive. Best performance of a medium company, one medical, medax healthcare care and wisdom. Best performance of a large company, cornerstone medical, people bank and talent. In the specialist agency category, the nominees are Calio,
00:02:38
Speaker
ah Elias Recruitment, Sapture International, Talent, Talent Quarter, and The Network. And in the category of Staffing Specialists, the nominees are Aditya Chavda, John Kam, Liam Filoni, Michael Higgins, and Mohammed Samson. We wish all nominees the best of luck. The winners will be announced at a gala dinner at Carousel, Albert Park, Melbourne on Thursday, October 17. For event details and to purchase tickets, visit the APSCO website.
Defence and Veteran Suicide Report Findings
00:03:08
Speaker
Military officers would have their performance appraised and promotions tied to meeting benchmarks for culture, health and wellbeing as part of 122 recommendations from the Royal Commission into defence and veteran suicide. The Royal Commission's report, tabled in federal parliament last Monday, also wants a stronger line taken against sexual misconduct, saying it was a systemic issue and it criticised the ADF that some perpetrators were allowed to remain in the military.
00:03:38
Speaker
The Commission was scathing of culture and command, saying many personnel were deterred from making complaints because they feared being ostracized and it had uncovered significant gaps in leadership competencies. The Commission urged a greater focus on selecting officers with emotional intelligence and tying their promotions to specific wellbeing targets. The Commission also recommended enhanced mental health screening for new recruits and reducing the frequency of postings to provide personnel with greater stability.
Labor Rights and Employment Legislation Updates
00:04:08
Speaker
Defence Minister Richard Miles failed the government would respond to the report in a timely manner and support of the general thrust of its findings. Our priority is ensuring that those who pursue a career in the ADF have a safe and inclusive workplace and are supported from the time they join through transition and after service, Mr Miles said. A major raft of industrial relations reforms came into effect late last month, changing how workers engage with their employers, disconnect once they leave work and participate in the multi-billion dollar gig economy. Monday, August 26 was the commencement date for several key industrial relations reforms. Workers now have the right not to respond to work-related communications outside their standard work hours, with certain exceptions such as in an emergency. The law is designed to protect workers who choose not to conduct uncompensated work outside their normal working hours. Employers are not forbidden from contacting employees, but they may face penalties if they breach a stop work order
00:05:07
Speaker
issued by the Fair Work Commission. The changes also included a redefinition of casual, which was demonstrated by not having a firm advance commitment to continuing and ongoing work, and by being paid a casual loading under the award or employment contract. The Fair Work Commission has also gained new powers to set standards in the gig economy. From the 26th of August, it can consider orders and guidelines for rideshare drivers and food delivery riders, which could see those workers gain new entitlements.
00:05:35
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Employers are encouraged to review contracts, policies and procedures to ensure they are compliant.
AI vs Human Summarization Study Results
00:05:41
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A federal government trial of artificial intelligence has found that it is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work. Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia's corporate regulator ASIC using submissions made to an inquiry.
00:05:58
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The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a question on notice at the Senate Select Committee on Adopting AI. The test involved testing generative AI models before selecting one, META's open source model LAMA 270B, to ingest five submissions from a parliamentary inquiry into audit and consultancy firms and produce specific outputs.
00:06:19
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10 ASIC staff of varying levels of seniority were also given the same task with similar prompts. Then a group of reviewers blindly assessed the summaries produced by both humans and AI for coherency, length, ASIC references, regulation references, and for identifying recommendations. They were unaware that this exercise involved AI.
00:06:41
Speaker
These reviewers overwhelmingly found the human so summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and submission, scoring 81% on an internal rubric compared with Gen AI's 47%. The reviewers' overall feedback was that AI summarize summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact check and refer to original submissions, which communicated the message better and more concisely.
00:07:08
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This finding also supports the view that Gen AI should be positioned as a tool to augment and not replace human tasks. The report concluded.
Manpower's US Expansion Strategy
00:07:18
Speaker
The world's third largest recruitment company, Manpower, is expanding its sourcing channels by opening branch offices inside seven Walmart stores across the US. They are designed to service active job seekers or casual shoppers who may want to explore employment options in their area.
00:07:34
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A manpower spokesperson said the in-store branches will handle administrative clerical, industrial and skilled technical roles. The first two Walmart stores to have manpower branch offices opened last week in Wisconsin and North Carolina. Additional branches in Texas, Minnesota and Georgia are scheduled to open in the next eight weeks. Based on demand, more branches are planned to open next year.
US Labor Market Trends in August
00:07:56
Speaker
The United States' August labor market update, released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics earlier in the month, indicated that total non-farm employment rose by 142,000 in August on a seasonally adjusted basis. This was 20,000 short of the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
00:08:15
Speaker
The August result was 30 percent below the average monthly gain of 202,000 jobs over the prior 12 months and 37 percent down on the 2023 calendar year average monthly jobs gain of 255,000, indicating a significant medium term cooling of the US labor market.
Workplace Ethics and Legal Decisions in China
00:08:35
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The United States unemployment rate remained at 4.2 percent in August.
00:08:41
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A Chinese court has supported a local employer's right to terminate two married employees who were having an open affair. Two employees sued their former employer, a pharmaceutical company in southwestern China, after work colleagues complained in writing to the company's GM about the couple's behaviour at work, including openly kissing, leading to the sacking of both employees in late 2020. In the lawsuits, the company defended the sackings, stating that the employee handbook clearly states it has the right to break the labour relationship with employees who are morally corrupt, tarnish their company's reputation and have a negative influence on the company. The courts supported the company's right to terminate each employee based on company policy and dismissed both lawsuits.
RCSA's African Talent Placement Program
00:09:25
Speaker
RCSA is seeking expressions of interest from corporate members interested in participating in a new programme to access and place remote African based talent into the Australian and New Zealand labour markets. The programme announced at the recent SHAPE conference allows RCSA member firms to receive incentive payments for successful placements in addition to an agency agency's regular fees and commissions. RCSA is partnering with Global Careers Africa to deliver the programme.
00:09:54
Speaker
All candidates in the talent pool possess tertiary qualifications, a minimum of two years relevant experience, and they've undergone employability training designed to meet the expectations of Australian employers.
00:10:08
Speaker
As a first phase, RCSA is seeking to engage members to determine program design and the industries, occupations and job families most likely to be compatible with offshore African talent. For more information about the program, please contact the RCSA.
Recruitment Industry Post-COVID: Leave Policies
00:10:26
Speaker
And that's the news for the week beginning the 16th of September, 2024. I'm Adele Last.
00:10:43
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Question of the week, how should recruitment agency owners deal with requests for extended leave? Adele. Yeah, it's become much more common, obviously, certainly post COVID and my children are still at school. So I don't have an example ah in my own family, but but my niece, who's in her early twenties, I know just recently took some time off.
00:11:08
Speaker
Unexpectedly, she actually was planning to resign from her job, full-time employment to go overseas for love. She'd met somebody um in Europe and was going to explore the relationship and didn't know how long she was going to be gone for. So decided to resign. And in that conversation, her employer said, don't resign, take an extended leave of absence and you know go and do your travels and contact us when you come back, which she did. So she went away for about two and a half months and came back to Australia and went back to her job.
00:11:38
Speaker
Well, that's similar to my daughter. My daughter, who's a chef in a childcare center, was prepared to resign her job to go off to Canada to be a camp counselor. She was going to be away or has been away, she's just returned for 11 weeks. And her employer said, ah no, ah please don't resign. ah We'd prefer you to come back to us. So we're prepared to give you that amount of time off. And what's extraordinary about that is that she'd only been in the job for 14 months when she made that request.
00:12:17
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and it was granted and she went back to work a week before last, having returned from an enjoyable Canadian summer and she was thrilled to be back. She was welcomed warmly on the first day and she was happy that she was returning to the job and certainly has every intention of continuing in that job for the foreseeable future. So we've got a couple of positive examples there, Ross, not in the recruitment industry, understandably, but um Does this come from some information? I believe you've got some research around this concept. I have. um The Worklife website is actually a great website for those of you looking for a good newsletter related to work to subscribe to worklife dot.news. And here they have a whole article about it.
00:13:12
Speaker
And in fact, here I'm quoting 53% of managers in a recent survey by the Chartered Management Institute. So that's in the United States, a management training firm. So their companies allow for them. And specifically, the reasons it says it improves employee well-being, mental health, cultivates a flexible work culture,
00:13:39
Speaker
Bolsters employee engagement helps with retention and it enhances company loyalty. Sounds like all very positive things, but it's a bit of a headache, right? Like the stress of that from an employer perspective and in recruitment, you know, I can imagine there's agency owners listening to this kind of thinking, yeah, that still sounds great. And we understand its benefits, but, you know, geez, what a pain in the bum, you know, someone's going to just come out off their desk and what do I do? And do I have to, do I replace them? Do I not replace them? You know, it must be something that's seen from an employer perspective as a negative actually. Well, I mean, it's very different compared to my daughter as a chef, like it's, she can, or as her boss did, employed a temp, could do the,
00:14:29
Speaker
cooking work inside the childcare centre for... 10, 11 weeks and Nikki comes back and everything resumes as per normal. It's not as clean in a recruitment agency because of course, when you have a new employee or even someone with a year or two's experience, they've got existing candidate relationships. They've got existing client relationships. They're running jobs. They're in a team. Like it's, it's much messier. It's much harder. It's like, it's certainly not cut and dried.
00:15:01
Speaker
And I think particularly for recruitment agency owners, well, let's face it, a majority of recruitment agency employees are in their 20s and early 30s. And this is typically when they're gonna request extended leave to go travel, request a gap leave, ah request a gap year to take extended leave. I mean, the thing is, once you set a precedent, does that mean half your employees are going to request extended leave. I don't know. It's like, once you let the genie out of the bottle, what happens? Well, it certainly, you know, wasn't something that we had access to, you know, certainly not in our twenties and probably for, you know, any other Gen X's and even baby boomers, you know, in generationally, you know, you had to resign, you left a company and and you didn't go back. So,
00:15:55
Speaker
It's something that's pretty rare for us to understand. Oh, sure. I can just imagine if I'd said to Greg Savage, Oh, Greg, can I have a gap here? He would have looked at me blankly. Sorry, Ross, are you resigning? Are you in or are you out? Exactly. Exactly. Are you in or out? Like I don't, I don't get it. So yeah, I won't say it's confusing. It's not confusing, but it's clearly a very different thing.
00:16:25
Speaker
compared to the norm when I was sort of in my heyday as an agency recruiter in the 90s and early 2000s. But I think you know for Gen Z and and you know millennials and other generations, ah this is something that they're seeking out. they they They have these multiple career ideas. They have side hustles. They have this exploratory kind of vibe about them to go off and do something and come back you know to work when they're done. so For them, it's not so unusual. And I think agency owners have to be open to that idea that, you know, this adult gap year concept, not just for uni students, but, you know, for adults that might want to go away and come back because it could be hugely beneficial, like that article is saying, right? There are so many benefits to the employee and then the employer relationship.
00:17:16
Speaker
I think it's something that you would be, you know, naive to kind of ignore completely. All right. But should you be on the front foot as an employer ideal? In other words, should recruitment agency owners formulate a policy? Should they promote it? In other words, should they kind of almost encourage employees to do that? Like, is this something that they think overall, despite it being inconvenient,
00:17:44
Speaker
um that's going to be a plus for the agency, or do you think they should just kind of deal with the requests on a one-on-one basis as they come in? I think that's a hard one, depending on the size of your company, because if you're a smaller organization and somebody's gone for a year, you know, it's quite impactful to ah compared to a larger organization. So I think it depends on your size and your structure, but it could really be a differentiator in in an employment you know EVP. If you think about you know having this kind of controlled and constructed policy that says, we encourage this and we we're open to at least the conversation. I mean, you don't have to go out there and say, we want you all to take a year off. you know Two years in, we want you all to disappear for a year. But you can certainly have an idea that that it's an open conversation. So not everyone's going to want to do it. Not everybody will understand you know what they want to do in that time. But
00:18:40
Speaker
I think you could maybe control it better. And that's the thing. If they're going to do it anyway, and you're going to be thrown the unexpected re request, you're then scrambling to deal with it, and and in some cases, not dealing with it well. I think it could help to be on the front foot about this. Open the the conversation by having kind of an open policy around it, under your flexible work arrangements policy, and then control the manner in which it's done, because then you'll feel much better about how how it impacts your business and and then you know what risks you need to mitigate around clients and candidates. I had a look um at some of the Hayes literature and although they don't
00:19:17
Speaker
publicly at least speak specifically about this concept. They certainly promote the fact that they can facilitate their employees moving across states or across countries if they want to go off and see another part of the world and perhaps work in another market. I'm not quite sure how that extends in terms of their support for appropriate visas, but certainly Hayes make quite a big deal of the fact that I mean they're in 30 30-something countries, I think, and clearly it's a business model that's the same all around the world. So I'm sure Hayes would see it as a plus that their employees would go to another market, go to another Hayes office, can go and fit into that market or fit into that office culturally, ah be successful and then spread the word that this is a great thing and obviously reinforce
00:20:15
Speaker
the loyalty to Hayes because they've facilitated that sort of move. Well, that's another idea that you've sort of thrown up there. If you're not Hayes and you're a smaller agency, maybe you could partner with another organization on the other side of the world and actually facilitate your employee doing, you know, almost like a, you know, work experience program, you know, a job swap ah situation so that, again, you're still kind of controlling the situation. If if the request is around, I want to go live overseas and do some work while I'm over there. You know, maybe as an employer, you can facilitate that on their behalf to some extent, you will gain huge loyalty. they' They're definitely going to come back and work for you. They're not going anywhere else after that. I think the only caveat really, and not I'm sure employees are well aware of this, that
00:21:02
Speaker
there would need to be some performance benchmarks to be met. So if you're a struggling an employee, then I doubt that it would be automatically granted that there would be extended leave provided. I think you'd certainly have to have some clear performance benchmarks that would need to be met because otherwise it may just be kicking the can down the road in terms of a decision that needs to be made either by the employee or the employer about that person's suitability for the job.