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Episode 35
347 Plays1 year ago
News for the week beginning 30 October 2023 and Question of the Week: Have you experienced a candidate lying through the recruitment process?"
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Transcript
Introduction and Weekly News Overview
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Speaker
Hi, I'm Adele Last and this is the news for week commencing 30th of October, 2023.
Legal and Financial News Highlights
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Speaker
Former Harrier Group CEO Kelly Reynolds, formerly Kelly Quirk, has failed in her adverse action claim against her former employer in the Federal Circuit Court after Judge Alison Latoms released her verdict last week as reported by Industry News Service Shortlist. Judge Latoms assessed the actions of Harrier Chair David Sobit's
00:00:34
Speaker
in firing Reynolds for alleged misuse of her company credit card as justifiable and ruled against Reynolds' claim that she was fired for complaining about bullying and an unsafe work environment. During Harrier's investigation, it discovered that Reynolds had requested Amex points accrued on a company credit card be transferred to her personal Qantas frequent flyer account, however she had continued to fly business class at the company's expense without using these points.
00:01:01
Speaker
She had also used Amex rewards to redeem 11 $100 Freedom Furniture vouchers for her personal use. Despite Reynolds claims that she had repaid the personal expenses, the judge ruled that her conduct nonetheless breached her employment contract, seriously risked Harriet's reputation and viability and justified summary dismissal. Five publicly listed recruiters have recently released updated financial results.
00:01:29
Speaker
New Zealand listed recruiter, Accordant, reported revenue of $112.1 million for the six-month period ended 30 September 2023, a fall of 8.8% compared to the same period a year ago. Accordant's Blue Collar brands, AWF and The Work Collective, reported a 3.4% rise in revenue. However, the company's White Collar brands, Madison Recruitment, Absolute IT, Jackson Stone & Partners, and Hobson Levy,
00:01:57
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reported a collective 14% sales decline. ASX listed talent marketplace Freelancer Limited reported group cash receipts for the third quarter ending 30 September 2023 of $13.7 million up 1.2% year on year. The company has a market cap of $88 million.
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Speaker
ASX listed talent platform Air Tasker reported revenue for the first quarter ended 30 September 2023 of $11.1m up 5.6% year on year. Group EBITDA stood at $1.1m compared to a loss of $2.3m the year prior. The company has a market cap of $84m.
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Speaker
RANSED reported that organic revenue per working day was down 7.3% year on year in the third quarter, 2023, resulting in revenue of 6.26 billion euros. The Asia Pacific region was the only region to report year on year growth, 2%, although revenue in RANSED ANZ was down 2%. Global gross profit declined 13%, and operating profit dropped 22% to 245 million euros.
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NASDAQ listed executive recruiter Heidrick & Struggles 2023.75 revenue rose 3.1% on a reported basis, although Executive Search, the company's largest business line, saw revenue fall 7.9% year-over-year in constant currency. Heidrick & Struggles had 417 executive search consultants at 28 consultant rise compared to a year previously. Net revenue per consultant was 1.9 million
00:03:40
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US dollars during the most recent quarter compared to 2.2 million US dollars a year ago. In the APAC region, revenue and executive search dropped 20% in constant currency for the third quarter 2023. Hydrogen Struggles has a market cap of 495 million US dollars.
00:04:00
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Industry News Service shortlist reported the loss of the Defence RPO contract caused manpower group Australia's revenue in the September quarter to drop 34% year on year, although operating profit was up 64% as a result of a laser focus on operational efficiency and strategy in specialisation, diversification and digitisation, according to local MD Penny O'Reilly.
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The decline in revenue versus prior year was expected and reflects the successful transition, O'Reilly told Shortlist.
Innovations and Market Developments
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Local HR and payroll platform Employment Hero has secured a fresh $263 million capital raise, a figure that prepares the venture for deeper international expansion. The Series F round was led by Californian giant Technology Crossover Ventures, which has previously backed global titans like Airbnb and Spotify.
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The investment arrives just months after Employment Hero released Swag, an app combining traditional rostering, payslip and leave request functions with advanced recruitment tools. The company's vision is for Swag and its new artificial intelligence-powered talent acquisition system Smart Match to lead a new era of Employment Hero's expansion internationally. Within 12 months, Employment Hero will transcend the traditional confines of HR and payroll, said founder and CEO Ben Thompson.
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We will open doors to a world where talent flows like water through a pipe right to your doorstep. That's the future we're building. Businesses can seamlessly plug into our unparalleled reservoir of talent with automatic compliance and compensation mechanisms. The company states the new raise puts employment heroes valuation in the $2 billion ballpark. Seek New Zealand reported job ads fell 2% in September after rising in August.
00:05:51
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Volumes are now 1% higher than they were in September 2019, but 25% lower year on year. The decline was driven by a decrease in job ad volumes in the largest urban regions, including Auckland, Wellington and Canterbury, as well as the largest industries. Applications per job ad fell for the first time in seven months, but the 4% drop sees levels still at historically high levels 118% higher than August 2019.
00:06:20
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The largest sector in New Zealand to record an increase in job ads in September was sales up 4%, followed by community services and development up 1%. The winners of APSCO Australia's 2023 Awards for Excellence were announced last Thursday in Sydney. There were 12 different recruitment agencies represented among the 15 category winners, and the winners were Best Brand, Talent, Candidate Experience, SAPSHA, Client Service,
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Truco, MSP of the Year, Manpower, RPO of the Year, Talent, Health and Wellbeing, Allegious, Best Workplace Culture, Cornerstone Medical, Specialist Firm of the Year, Patch Personnel, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Acuent, Learning and Development, Manpower Group, Innovation, Leaders, IT, Small Team, Sapture, Medium Team, Wisdom, Large Team, People Bank,
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and staffing professional of the year, Melanie Wallace-Smith from Page Group. Congratulations to all the winners.
Economic Challenges and Workforce Adjustments
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The gloom in the tech sector continued this month, with layoffs announced recently at two significant recruitment industry platforms. LinkedIn, the largest online job advertising firm in the world, announced it is laying off approximately 668 people across its engineering, product, talent and finance teams.
00:07:41
Speaker
LinkedIn's revenue surpassed US$15 billion for the first time in a fiscal year for the year ended June 30, 2023. Recruitment CRM Bullhorn also swung the axe two weeks ago, firing 150 workers after a company LinkedIn post shared a message from company founder and CEO Art Pappas announcing the 9% reduction in headcount. We felt this action was necessary to align our workforce with the economic environment the industry is facing, Pappas said in his message.
00:08:11
Speaker
According to TrueUp's tech layoff tracker, there have been nearly 390,000 employees fired at nearly 1,800 tech companies so far in 2023. Recruiter and hiring manager scepticism appears to be even more important than ever if results from a recent survey of job seekers is any indication.
Recruitment Practices and Dishonesty
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Recruitment industry vendor Resume Lab surveyed over 1,900 US-based workers in August this year to examine job applicant behaviours.
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The study was seeking insights into lying during recruitment, the scale of the phenomenon, and the reasons why applicants decided to lie despite the risk. When asked, have you ever lied on a resume, 37% of respondents claim that they lie frequently. Education proved to be the only demographic predictor of the likelihood of lying, but maybe not in the way that you think. Job applicants with master's or doctoral degrees self-reported the highest incidences of frequently lying on resumes,
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58% frequently lie compared to all other respondents, 29% without a college degree, and 30% with a bachelor's degree frequently lie. There were no other disparities within different demographic groups for frequent resume lies after the responses were segregated by gender, age, political affiliation, religion, and work industry. Respondents were then asked, what did you lie about on your resume? And the top six nominated answers were,
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Embellishing responsibilities in general, nominated by 52% of job seekers who admitted to lying on their resume. My job title to make it sound more impressive, 52%. Fabricating how many people I managed, 45%. The length of time I was employed at a job, 37%. The name of the company that employed me, 31%. And made up the entire position, 24%. When asked, have you ever lied in a job interview,
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44% of respondents claim that they lie frequently. Again, the highest level of education was a statistically significant variable in predicting interview lies, with 63% of those holding a master's or doctoral degree admitted to frequently lying. And that's the news for the week beginning the 30th of October, 2023. I'm Ross Clennett. Hey, are you liking listening to our podcast, Recruitment News Australia?
00:10:34
Speaker
If you are, it would really help if you could give Ross Kleiner and I a five star review on whatever podcast app you listen to it on. Please hop onto the review section and give us a review next time you're listening on your favorite episode. And thanks for listening. So for the back of that last news article this week around the survey in the US about candidates lying.
00:11:02
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It's not an interesting question of the week, it might be about our own experience in this space, Ross. I'm interested to know, have you ever encountered a candidate lying in the recruitment process?
00:11:15
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Tell me about what happened. Have I ever? Well, perhaps because there's so many, I think I'll just recount the very first instance that really actually fortunately happened to me, but not because of a candidate I placed. This is back when I started in London and I took a call from a client about a candidate that had been placed by a colleague of mine who had subsequently left.
00:11:39
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And this candidate was allegedly a qualified accountant. And as it turned out, once some digging had been done, the accountant was not only not qualified in terms of being a chartered accountant, he didn't have a degree
00:11:56
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And his assertion of A-levels and O-levels proved to be only accurate as far as the O-levels went, not the A-levels. So that really shook me up as a 23-year-old to imagine that someone could lie about something that was so significant, like being a qualified accountant when they weren't.
00:12:19
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But my own experience was actually quite a bit later in my recruitment career and I placed an HR manager. Well, when I say placed, she didn't start and this is why she didn't start. I'd been desperately trying to find an HR manager for this role with a very particular client and I'd had an offer turned down. I finally got to this candidate that my client was happy with.
00:12:45
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So he offered her the job. It was like quite a senior role. I mean, this is like around a hundred K and this is like 20 years ago, so like very senior HR role and I was following up reference checks and The candidate gave me a mobile number and I asked about a landline. She said oh, no, no my
00:13:09
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former boss is on leave at the moment, but he's happy for you to call him about the reference. So anyway, I called this boss in Averacommas and asked the normal sort of questions. And then at the end I said, oh, and just for checking purposes, what's your landline number?
00:13:31
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And he ummed and hard and said, Oh, you know, we've recently got a new, um, landline in and, um, I don't have it with me. And so I put the phone down. I just made a little note to follow up in a couple of weeks. And so the candidate was working out or supposedly working out notice. And when I rang this, uh, boss back on the landline,
00:13:59
Speaker
I spoke to this person, let's call him David Smith. Hi David, this is Ross Clannett. I took a reference on, let's call her Samantha Brown, three weeks ago and I'm just calling up just to validate that it was you I spoke to. There's this pause. And he said, Ross, I've never spoken to you in my life.
00:14:24
Speaker
And my heart stopped. I'm like, oh, you know, Samantha Brown, he goes, yeah, I know who you're talking about. But no, we've not spoken. I've never given a reference check on her. And frankly, I probably wouldn't. And I'm like, oh. And so I.
00:14:47
Speaker
I rang the candidate and confronted her with this information. And she basically said there must've been a mistake. Anyway, I won't go through the whole story. Anyway, I found out that the person I was talking to was her fiance. And so I had the very tough job to ring my client and tell him about the candidate that he'd been waiting
00:15:16
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some time to start, you know, what the results were. But of course it was much better than I called him before she had started rather than after she had started. So obviously the offer was withdrawn and yeah, so that was quite, and why I remember it so strongly is because of course this is an HR manager. Like this is someone that you'd expect wouldn't be lying, but she'd lied completely.
00:15:45
Speaker
And it was, I mean, again, a big fee. It was like a 1820 K fee that I finished up again, having to do another six weeks worth of work before I finally placed the role. But so anyway, that that was my or sorry, my two experiences that I'm worthy of sharing. So Adele, what about you? What what sort of significant or memorable experience or experiences have you had in this area?
00:16:11
Speaker
Yeah I hate to say there are a few to choose from so I guess our own experience confirms what that survey said that it is actually more frequent than people realize that people are lying through the recruitment process which is why you need to be very diligent as a recruiter of course in the process in what you're doing but one that really stands out to me was really significant and it wasn't that long ago and it was a candidate who
00:16:37
Speaker
presented with some very high level qualifications in relation to a safety role, in fact. So it was a role that required them to have a number of different qualifications in safety, accreditations, and a relevant level of work experience of which this person all presented with on their resume. We had actually conducted the interview, a colleague and myself, and then after the interview had trouble getting in touch with this person via email.
00:17:07
Speaker
And so we were trying to send through, I think, the job description or something to him and it wouldn't go through. And in any case, we contacted him and asked him for an alternative email address, very innocently saying, is there some other way we can get this document to you? And he provided an alternative email address, which actually had a different surname. So it was the same first name that he had, but a different surname.
00:17:28
Speaker
And we then, for, I don't know what the reason was, but my colleague said, I wonder why, you know, I guess for a woman, it's probably more common if there was a different surname, you would assume she just got married, but with a man, I suppose, or divorced, with a man, you don't assume that. And so my colleague looked up, Google searched the alternate name, and we were horrified to find that this person was actually currently
00:17:56
Speaker
in the papers being charged with fraud. He had actually completely fabricated the resume document right down to the places that he, well, actually put it this way, he had fabricated the qualifications, but he hadn't been employed in the places he'd been employed in, but he should never have been. So one of the examples was he worked for the Royal Flying Doctor's Service as a paramedic without a qualification.
00:18:26
Speaker
administrative patients. And yeah, like it was really, really scary. So we were lucky to discover it through the interview process. But then we did have the difficulty of how do we get out of, you know, the process with him after having such a positive interview and us sounding like we were going to move forward and present it to our client, how we sort of backed out of that. And again, we were fairly direct with him and sort of said, Look, we've discovered some information about you.
00:18:54
Speaker
that's publicly available and we're a little concerned, can you give us any explanation? And he tried to give us an explanation around
00:19:03
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the idea that it wasn't him, that it wasn't the same person, although there were photos on the newspaper article, so we could see it was. He tried to talk about having been married and that he had changed his name. The only reason there was a different name was because he had been married and it was lots of stories anyway. When somebody lies, then they have to create more intricate lies to cover it.
00:19:32
Speaker
That was my most significant memory around this, but I'm wondering whether both our examples are us, whether the way we handled it was the best way. I mean, what advice would we give to recruiters now if this situation arises for them or they suspect someone's lying?
Tips for Recruiters on Detecting Dishonesty
00:19:48
Speaker
How should they go about it?
00:19:49
Speaker
Well, I think the first thing is our job is to be professionally skeptical, Adele. So we should always be mindful that a resume is a marketing document. It's not a legal document. It's not actually illegal to put false information on a resume. It is the recruiter's job to validate it. So in terms of in an interview, a candidate's eyes
00:20:16
Speaker
are going to be one of the most significant indicators. And this is validated by Dr. David Craig's book, Lie Capture, and I thoroughly recommend it. It's only about 20 bucks online. And he talks about the importance of eye contact, blink rate, and
00:20:37
Speaker
When you notice a significant change in a candidate's eye contact and blink rate, when you're asking particular questions, it's not that they're necessarily lying, but you want to take note that there was a change. And may that indicate that there's
00:20:58
Speaker
an area to explore. So for example, a reason for leaving, that if you find the candidate's eye contact with you breaks more frequently, or they blink more frequently, then that's something that you should be aware of. The more specific the question, the more difficult it is for the person to make up an answer on the spot. Yeah, that's what I've always found. Yeah, I've always found that I've said to people that
00:21:27
Speaker
usually lies lack detail. People will tell a very overarching lie, but as soon as you start to pick it apart and ask some really minute details sometimes like, oh, so how many people were in that team? Or what date did that project finish? Some of those really fine details, you'll see people start to fumble over the fine details in a bigger overarching lie.
00:21:53
Speaker
Yes, the technical term in lying is called text bridging. They attempt to avoid answering specific questions and provide a general answer instead or to re
00:22:06
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direct their answer into another area of the question. So absolutely, they're the things to be wary of. And of course, the obvious one, which is when you ask for referees, that they're not forthcoming with referees that are recent people that they have reported to.
00:22:27
Speaker
I've always found that that can be a clue. So what about for you, Adil? What sorts of things have you found or would you recommend recruiters be adopting to maximize the likelihood you catch someone out if they're lying? Yeah, like even something as simple as a Google search nowadays, you know, in my example, that was the determining factor of us finding out information.
00:22:52
Speaker
Check out your candidates online. It could be as simple as Google searching their name to find out more information. Yes, do quality references. Check that information thoroughly. Ask for detailed information about anything you suspect might be a lie. Look for things like you said in terms of eye-breaking eye contact and blinking. And that's why it's really important to do interviews in person as well because those things are more easily picked up in person than over a video interview. But yeah, it's a really interesting
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
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topic. Perhaps one we could
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go on about for days and days by the sounds of it but thank you for sharing that Ross and feel free if you're listening to share any of your stories with us when you see us or via the comments and let us know if you've had examples of candidates lying to you. And remember everyone the best liars are also often the most confident and charismatic people so always be particularly sceptical of people who are especially confident
00:23:54
Speaker
And now you're up to date with your recruitment news. And for all previous episodes, visit our website at recruitmentnewsaustralia.com.au. And connect with us on LinkedIn, Ross Clannett and Adele Last.