Transcript
Speaker: Do you know who helps recruitment agencies recruit, Adele? It's Wingman Recruitment, flexible recruitment support built by recruiters for recruiters. More capacity, less pressure, better results.
Speaker: Learn more at wingmangroup.com.au and visit the services tab.
Speaker: Welcome to Recruitment News Australia. This is your news for the 22nd of September, 2026. This is Adele Last. I am flying solo at the moment whilst Ross Clennant is away on extended leave. I'm going to catch us up on the news and lead us into a question of the week that we pre-recorded.
Speaker: Onto the news. People in revenue from continuing operations fell 4.3% to million dollars after late divestments of tech force personnel and health and community.
Speaker: Gross profit rose 1.3%, Tom is now CEO, and Infowork Acquisition in New Zealand is ahead of expectations, and Queensland Infrastructure and Pre-Olympic Work is lifting their build hours. Their shares are at 63 cents, which is down from a 93 cent high.
Speaker: On to news about Expert 360. There has been a sale, reported sale, for about $16 million dollars to SwipeJobs, an AI-based recruitment firm said to be preparing for an AXX listing.
Speaker: The founder, Bridget Loudon-Harris, and other early investors get nothing while later-round investors share in the proceeds. Expert360 had absorbed roughly $30 million dollars in funding since 2013. And SwipeJobs founder, Katrina Leslie, says the deal will speed up growth.
Speaker: On to news about Sinead Hoorigan, the former Robert Walters Global Head of Talent Advisory and the past RCSA president, has launched her own advisory business called Sea Advisory. She left Robert Walters last month after more than 23 years and her new advisory firm will offer tailored advice rather than off-the-shelf solutions. We wish Sinead the best of luck.
Speaker: Visa worker wage scam penalties. There is news around a Sydney firm, Innovative Associates that's been penalised, $148,000 and its director, Dilla Ramcarroll, a further $29,000 in relation to an account or an an incident of an assistant accountant,
Speaker: on a temporary graduate visa who was unpaid for her first 10 weeks and later forced to hand back $32,000 in a cashback. The firm also issued 14 false pay slips to Fair Work inspectors and the judge found their breaches were deliberate and noted the two-year delay before repayment began.
Speaker: On to news from Seek Jobs. Job ads rose 0.5% month on month for August. We always get the results the following month, of course. And that ends 12 months of consecutive declines, while the annual rate of decline slowed to 4.5%. Seek's chief economist said it was the first modest rise in worker demand since mid-2025, with Victoria being the major contributor.
Speaker: The labour market appears to be softening, but it is still busy. Unemployment rose to 4.5% in July, yet more than 212,000 jobs were advertised nationally, and annual job mobility fell from 7.7% to 7.2%.
Speaker: That means fewer people are switching jobs, which matters for candidate supply. the August labour force figures are due on the 24th of September, so later this week, which will update for you next week.
Speaker: And final news, Fair Work enforces some ah penalties in relation to visa workers. The Fair Ombudsman almost doubled its proactive investigations in 2025-26, which to more than investigations. And recoveries from those investigations exceeded million dollars for workers.
Speaker: That's the news up to date for the 22nd of September. Stay tuned now for Question of the Week.
Speaker: Question of the Week. Is it smart to discriminate against job hoppers? Oh, Adele, that question that everyone asks, no, they don't really They just discriminate against them anyway. But anyway, today we have some hard data about whether job hoppers are justifiably the DNUs that recruitment industry and clients label them as.
Speaker: We and all recruiters know that when a candidate has a history of frequent job changes, it's traditionally being viewed as a red flag because we worry these candidates won't stay or they can't be relied on.
Speaker: In a Harvard Business Review article, The Case for Hiring Job Hoppers by Rebecca Keogh and F. Scott Bentley, provides recent empirical evidence about whether that is a reasonable position to take based on performance.
Speaker: The researchers tracked the moves made by 8,693 hedge fund managers in the United States across 2,129 firms between 2004 and 2019. They weren't just looking at whether people stayed or left. They tracked monthly performance data before and after each move so you can see the shape of the transition, not just the outcome.
Speaker: And the headline finding? Almost everyone dips in performance after a move. That's expected and, honestly, reassuring. It validates that onboarding friction is real and universal. But the size and length of that dip depended heavily on how many prime moves someone had already made.
Speaker: The frequent movers, people who change firms four or more times, had a shallower dip and bounced back roughly twice as fast as those on their first or second move. So from a pure talent acquisition standpoint, the candidates we've historically been trained to red flag are the ones who ramp up fastest.
Speaker: In certain contexts, yes. And that certain context piece is really the crux of the whole thing. This isn't just a blanket job hopping is good conclusion. It's more nuanced than that, right? Okay, well, we better explore those nuances then.
Speaker: There are three specific contexts the researchers highlight. Firstly, organisations with strong, deeply embedded cultures, the kind where there's a lot of tribal knowledge and unwritten protocol.
Speaker: New hires typically struggle to read that terrain. Frequent movers, because they've had to decode unfamiliar norms repeatedly, tend to adjust faster. Sure. I mean, i absolutely can see how that would be broadly true. As a predominantly temp recruiter, I always preferred to place candidates who had experience in on-hire or contract work for exactly that reason. They were typically quick to adjust to a new work environment.
Speaker: The second context the researchers highlight is the new worker who is moving into an unfamiliar professional environment adjusts relative to their own employment history.
Speaker: In other words, the broader the range of industries the person has worked in with different organisational structures and different cultures, the more likely it is that frequent movers can successfully identify and navigate those differences to start performing in line with expectations.
Speaker: Again, my experience as a temp recruiter validates that finding. And the third context? Highly collaborative roles. The study found the effect was most pronounced when managers joined teams where they had to coordinate closely with others rather than perform independently.
Speaker: Success there hinges on how fast you can build trust in working relationships, and that's a skill frequent movers have had more practice at. So, as recruiters, the real signal isn't this candidate changed jobs a lot, it's this candidate has had a lot of practice becoming productive quickly in unfamiliar environments, and whether that skill is relevant to the role being filled.
Speaker: That's precisely the reframe the authors are pushing. Job hoppers aren't better performers in general. the data shows performance converges once everyone's settled in. The advantage is narrow but real speed of adaption.
Speaker: Okay, let's get tactical because I know as soon as a recruiter or hiring manager assesses a resume is belonging to a job hopper, they won't read that resume any further. So what's the advice here? First recommendation, stop using length of tenure as an automatic disqualifying filter in key selection criteria. If a candidate's written off purely because someone had four jobs in five years, you risk filtering out exactly the adaptability signal this research suggests has value.
Speaker: Yes, I strongly recommend looking at the skills first. And if the candidate has the required skills for the role, the screening conversation can inquire into reasons for leaving, which we'll circle back to shortly.
Speaker: Definitely. Second, tie the evaluation to role context. If it's a turnaround mandate, a high growth scale up, a client facing role or anything with a really short runway to impact, prior mobility should be treated as a plus factor, not a minus.
Speaker: We should be coaching hiring managers to ask, does this role need someone who has the capacity to ramp up quickly in a very different environment? If the answer to that's yes, then this candidate's pattern is relevant evidence, not a warning sign.
Speaker: I'd suggest building interview questions around how candidates approach previous transitions, how they built relationships in a new team, how they figured out unspoken norms, what they did in their first 90 days, some we knew. You're validating whether the adaptability the job hopping patterns suggest may exist, does exist. Don't just assume it because of a pattern.
Speaker: So instead of judging people by job titles or how long they've been in a role, you actually assess it as a skill, which helps cut down on bias. The researchers point to the importance of effective onboarding as this affects retention post-hire, which reflects on the recruiter, whether we like it or not.
Speaker: The recommendation is tailor onboarding intensity to the size of the adjustment a new hire is facing. Someone moving from a very different industry or into a tightly knit incumbent culture may need more structured, deliberate support early on. For example, introductions, explicit explanation of norms, and relationship building time, amongst others, rather than the generic one-size-fits-all onboarding most organisations deliver.
Speaker: Which is useful for recruiters to flag to clients because a suitable well-matched hire that fails in the first six months due to poor onboarding still counts against us and could, I guess, depending on your terms, trigger a replacement fee or even worse, a refund.
Speaker: Right. And there's a secondary point. This adaptability can also be built internally through job rotations, cross-functional projects, that sort of thing. So it's not purely an argument for hiring job hoppers over developing existing staff. It's really an argument for valuing and cultivating adaptability generally.
Speaker: This all feels a little too good to be true though, Ross. Every recruiter listening to it is saying, come on, there's more to job hoppers than what we've said. Of course, there's the one we all know and the authors address it specifically. They state that the traditional flight risk concern doesn't disappear. Someone with a pattern of short stints is still statistically more likely to move again.
Speaker: That's part of conventional wisdom that does hold up. This research doesn't erase that risk. It just says we shouldn't let it be the only variable in the decision. And there's obvious scope limitations with this research too. This was all within one profession, highly paid professionals in investment banking.
Speaker: Right. Hedge fund managers moving within the same industry and occupation. So we don't yet know if the same benefit holds for someone switching fields entirely, where they're absorbing new technical skills on top of the culture of a new industry.
Speaker: The authors are upfront that this was not part of their research and therefore remains an open question. So for recruiters and hiring managers, the responsible takeaway is use mobility as one input weighed against role demands, not as an automatic green light or red flag.
Speaker: That's exactly Weigh it weighed against what the job actually requires. High adaptation ah demand roles with prime mobility, that kind of deserves real credit. But low adaptation, highly technical, long runway roles, retention risk probably still carries more weight.
Speaker: Say that again. That's exactly it. Weight against what the job actually requires. High adaptation demand roles. Prior mobility. High adaptation demand roles.
Speaker: that right? That's exactly it. Weighed against what the job actually requires. High adaptation demand roles, prior mobility deserves real credit. For low adaptation, highly technical, long runway roles, retention risk probably still carries more weight.
Speaker: Right. Say it again. That's exactly it. Weighed against what the job actually requires. High adaptation demand roles, prior mobility deserves real credit. For low adaptation, highly technical, long runway roles, Retention risk probably still carries more weight.
Speaker: I think the biggest cultural shift for recruiters and hiring managers moving from job hopping equals unreliable to job hopping equals a specific variable adaptability skill set that's valuable in the right context.
Speaker: There's a much more evidence-based lens than what most of us are used to. And as we all know, probing reasons for leaving will help understand what factors have contributed to short-term stints of employment.
Speaker: the obvious concerns are when a candidate is always blaming their employer with such justifications for their departure as you know the role was misrepresented, the expectations were unrealistic, the culture was toxic, I was underpaid, or even i had a shit manager.
Speaker: The evidence shows that people who move jobs receive, on average, about twice the rate of improvement in earnings over a year compared to those who stay put. So, in these tough cost of living conditions, I think people moving for money is understandable.
Speaker: although three moves in two years just for more money, is likely to make most recruiters and hiring managers extremely wary. So in short, context matters. Don't make assumptions. Assess the specific role requirements applied to the specific culture of the team and match it to the candidate's competencies.
