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RNA Episode 119 - Is age discrimination worse in agency or internal recruitment?
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RNA Episode 119
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Transcript
Introduction to AI in Recruitment
00:00:11
Speaker
Have you checked out Bullhorn Amplify? It's the AI game changer for recruitment teams. Amplify delivers 17% faster submit times, 22% higher fill rates, 49% better candidate matches.
00:00:24
Speaker
If you want to boost your productivity, visit bullhorn.com to learn more about Amplify.
Controversy in WA Election Staffing
00:00:31
Speaker
This is the news for the twenty second of July, I'm Adele Persol Kelly's execution of its contract with the WA Electoral Commission for the state election held in March this year is facing scrutiny after the WA government received the report from its special inquiry into a range of election date issues.
00:00:52
Speaker
Complaints of long wait times at polling booths and a shortage of ballot papers at some locations prompted the Labor Premier, Roger Cook, to order the inquiry earlier this year.
Defense and Inquiry into Election Staffing
00:01:02
Speaker
In a statement following the election, the WAEC said Persol Kelly had deployed the personnel requested in line with the project's requirements and that all 682 polling locations were staffed and operational.
00:01:14
Speaker
Persol Kelly maintained its position that the scale of outsourcing was not new or uncommon. It said its role was limited to recruiting and onboarding staff. Persol Kelly's contract is worth a maximum of $86.9 million, dollars according to the abc Questions have been raised about the Commission's ability to conduct elections after its Director of Election Operations resigned and the WA Electoral Commissioner took leave until the end of 2025. We look forward to the outcome of this special inquiry into the planning and delivery of the 2025 WA state election and welcome learnings that will come as a result, a Persol Kelly spokesperson said.
00:01:51
Speaker
The report is expected to be released when Parliament resumes after the winter break in mid-August.
Recruitment Industry's Financial Challenges
00:01:58
Speaker
Page Group reported global second quarter gross profit declined by 10.5% to ยฃ195 million pounds on a constant currency basis when compared to contract recruitment dropped PERM recruitment declined the asiac pacific region only dropped point six percent to thirty one point two million pounds ah significant improvement over the eleven percent decline in the first quarter of
00:02:26
Speaker
2025. Page Group Australia sales dropped 13%. Page Group shares have recovered 18% since hitting a 52-week low four weeks ago. The third largest global staffing firm, Manpower Group, reported Q2 revenue declined 3.5% in constant currency and gross profit dropped 5.8%.
00:02:46
Speaker
The operating loss of $67 million dollars was due to an $88 million dollars impairment charge. Sales in the APAC and Middle East division declined 8% in constant currency.
Legal Disputes in Recruitment Tech
00:02:58
Speaker
Employment Hero has accused SEEK of anti-competitive conduct after the job listing giant terminated the billion-dollar ah HR tech company's access to its hiring platform.
00:03:09
Speaker
Founded in 2014, Employment Hero provides payroll, ah HR and recruitment software to small and medium-sized businesses. One of its key features is the ability for customers to post job ads directly to Seek from within its platform, a convenience powered by Seek's job posting API.
00:03:26
Speaker
Employment Hero confirmed it received formal notice from Seek in late June 2021 that the integration would be shut off on 25 August. The company says this termination has forced it to take legal action in the Federal Court.
00:03:39
Speaker
Seek is a critical integration for many customers and our foremost priority is continuity and confidence for every employer, the company said in a statement to Smart Company. To this end, we have reluctantly commenced Federal Court proceedings to apply for an interim junction to stop the termination.
00:03:54
Speaker
Seek first invested in Employment Hero in 2018 via its venture arm now known as Seek Growth Fund. Earlier this year, the fund sold a $95 million stake in Employment Hero to buy out firm KKR, while Seek retained a meaningful stake in the business.
Trends and Biases in Hiring Practices
00:04:11
Speaker
Hiring rates and hiring difficulty both dropped last month, although job ads were up, according to June update of JSA's Recruitment Experiences and Outlook survey. The recruitment rate in June was 44%, 6 percentage points lower than in May.
00:04:26
Speaker
The decline was most pronounced for businesses with 20 or more employees, dropping from 79% in May to 69% in June. The recruitment difficulty rate also declined by 6 percentage points to 44% of recruiting employers in June.
00:04:41
Speaker
The proportion of recruiting employers who are unable to fill their vacancies within a month rose in June by two percentage points to 39% of recruiting employers. Compared to the May result, the proportion of employers expecting to increase their staffing numbers in the next three months remained unchanged at 19% in June, one point higher compared to June last year.
00:05:04
Speaker
Meanwhile, online job ads in June rose 1.9% in seasonally adjusted terms according to the latest Internet Vacancy Index update. Ads increased across all major occupation groups, with technicians and trade workers at 3.2% experiencing the largest lift.
00:05:22
Speaker
Growth was also observed across all skill levels and in all states and territories except for the ACT. Compared to June last year, job ads declined 6.7% nationally, with capital cities experiencing a slightly greater drop compared to regional areas.
00:05:40
Speaker
A new report, jointly produced by the Australian Human Rights Commission and ARRI, found almost one quarter of HR professionals now classify workers aged 51 to 55 as older.
00:05:52
Speaker
Just to two years ago, only 10% took that view, suggesting many employers are sidelining experienced professionals. in an economy suffering skills shortages. The report, Older and Young Workers, What Do Employers Think?, is the fifth national survey of employers and HR professionals.
00:06:09
Speaker
The report surveyed 138 employers across Australia, providing a snapshot of how workers were perceived, supported and included in Australian workplaces. Australia's Age Discrimination Commissioner, Robert Fitzgerald, said the country must acknowledge that it is an ageing society and embrace employing older workers.
00:06:27
Speaker
The tragedy is so many employers still have biases and stereotypes, make recruitment decisions based on age and there is an inbuilt prejudice, he said. The Commissioner stated that the Human Rights Commission had received hundreds of complaints related to the Age Discrimination Act, primarily concerning the use of age in employment and recruitment decisions, including workplace harassment, aimed at encouraging retirement.
00:06:50
Speaker
The Chief Executive of RE, Sarah McCann-Bartlett, said the report found many employers were reluctant to hire workers under 24 or over 50, which restricted their access to valuable skills and experience.
00:07:02
Speaker
There is a very strong message that if we want to lift productivity in Australia, we need to make better use of the talent that's out there, and this means that we should be forced focusing on hiring based on skills, not on assumptions around age, and trying to keep experience in the workforce, she said.
00:07:18
Speaker
while older workers rated higher for their loyalty at 74%, reliability 64%, and ability to cope with stress at 62%, compared to younger workers, they were rated lower for their ability to use technology and their career ambition.
00:07:32
Speaker
The report made 18 recommendations in recruitment, training, workplace inclusivity, health and wellbeing initiatives. These include age-neutral job ads, audits of AI resume screeners for biases, and career transition support for mid- to late-career employees.
00:07:48
Speaker
Three European academics have released the results of research suggesting that AI assessment may alter candidates' behaviour during the recruitment process. Researchers from the Institute of Behavioural Science and Technology at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland say that most companies, when considering ai assessment tools, focus on the gains the tools bring in terms of efficiency and quality, but are largely blind to the potential behavioural change of candidates during the assessment process.
00:08:14
Speaker
The research, published in the Harvard Business Review last week, examined over 13,000 participants across 12 studies covering both laboratory and field assessments in collaboration with Equalchair, a game-based hiring solutions platform.
00:08:28
Speaker
The results show that job candidates consistently emphasised analytical traits when they believed AI was evaluating them, while downplaying the very human qualities empathy, creativity, intuition, that often distinguish outstanding employees from merely competent ones.
00:08:44
Speaker
This motivated candidates to present a different and potentially more homogenous version of themselves, in turn affecting who was likely to succeed in an AI-enabled hiring process. New transparency regulations, such as the EU's AI Act, which require organisations to disclose the use of AI in high-stakes decisions, make these outcomes all the more likely, the researchers assert.
00:09:07
Speaker
When candidates are aware that an AI is assessing them, they are more likely to change their behaviour. The researchers recommend that employers not just disclose the use of AI in candidate assessment, but be explicit about what it evaluates, specifically emphasising that AI-driven assessment can and does evaluate diverse traits, including creativity, emotional intelligence and intuitive problem solving.
Gender Differences in Graduate Employment
00:09:30
Speaker
The unemployment rate for recent male graduates in the United States has risen steeply from less than 5% to 7% over the past 12 months. However, for young female graduates, joblessness is unchanged over the same period, according to an article in the Financial Times last week.
00:09:46
Speaker
The article by Data Chief Science writer John Byrne Murdoch goes on to say that recently graduated young men are now unemployed at the same rate as their non-graduate counterparts, completely erasing the college employability premium in the US.
00:10:01
Speaker
Drilling down into sector-specific employment reveals that the facts do not support the narrative about significant AI job displacement in male-dominated tech jobs as the decline in hiring entry-level programmers and software developers in the US has sharply reversed in recent months.
00:10:17
Speaker
In fact, relative to the pre-generative AI era, early career coding employment growth is now outpacing the rest of the economy. Looking across all sectors, the key dynamic appears to be that female graduates continue to opt for healthcare jobs in large numbers, where employment trends steeply upwards, seemingly immune to the cyclical fluctuations that affect most male-dominated sectors, even at the graduate level.
Age Discrimination in Recruitment
00:10:42
Speaker
And that's the news for the 22nd of July 2025. I'm Ross Clennett. Stay tuned for Question of the Week.
00:10:58
Speaker
Question of the week, is age discrimination worse by agency or internal recruitment? And why are you asking this, Adele? Well, I'm a little surprised at this news article we just reported, Ross. A report by the Australian Human Rights Commission and ARRI from a survey they conducted found that ah HR professionals, like almost a quarter of HR professionals, classify older workers as 51 55. I mean, this um This has got me in an outrage around that result, but I'm also a bit disappointed that given the size of those organisations and their reach, they only got a response of 138 employers to this very important survey.
00:11:40
Speaker
It is disappointing. I had a look at the details of the survey. So it was 148 respondents. So clearly there were 10 that were um in an employer with a colleague that responded.
00:11:56
Speaker
About half were from the private sector. And just over half and just under half were public and not for profit. So that's not representative of the Australian workplace because only 19% of Australian employees work for one of the three levels of government.
00:12:16
Speaker
So it's, you know, you've got to take it with a grain of salt. But frankly, the overall result is still pretty disappointing, I would have thought. Well, it's essentially saying that there is age discrimination going on within ah HR professionals in a range of employers, albeit, as we've said, not a huge cross-section of of the total number of employers. But there's this idea that HR professionals, which I'm going to go ahead and say out on a limb that majority are relatively young, you know, under 35-year-olds probably in that ah HR profession. It doesn't say what level, but
00:12:54
Speaker
let me assume that they're relatively young in age, are discriminating in the process of recruitment. And that's that's a big deal for us. that are you know Internal recruitment age discrimination is a big deal.
00:13:08
Speaker
Well, I would certainly support what you've said. In my experience, and I'm married to a former ah HR professional, and a number of her friends are in that space, is that most ah HR professionals do not like recruitment.
00:13:22
Speaker
And the more senior someone gets in HR, generally, the less inclined they are to get involved in any recruitment. And so they delegate it further down the line. And so unfortunately, typically, in many organisations, the people who are the um person responsible for recruitment, whether they're called internal recruiter or whether they're an ah HR officer, so tend to be young.
00:13:45
Speaker
They tend to be under 35 and frankly, not trained in recruitment, not experienced in recruitment. And also my experience, they don't have great influencing skills.
00:13:59
Speaker
Now, this is interesting if we look at this within the recruitment sector. So comparatively, then our question is saying, you know, which side of the fence is more discriminatory on age. So let's think about that, Ross. We don't have demographic data for the recruitment sector in Australia or New Zealand. But if you and I were to have a guess, we go to lots of events, we are involved in the industry, we have lots of clients in the industry. So what would you summarise the demographic age of the recruitment industry, Australia, New Zealand to be?
00:14:30
Speaker
So a complete guess, Adele, but I would guess that of all the employees of the recruitment industry who undertake recruitment work, in other words, they're doing client-facing work or candidate-facing work, I would guess two-thirds would be under 35 and one-third would be over 35. Okay.
00:14:55
Speaker
Now, see, i think that's a little different in my personal opinion. I think that was the case. I think certainly a large portion, you know, when when we were on the desk, so to speak, Ross, I think, you know, it wasn't uncommon to have a whole team of people, you know, one manager that might have been over 40 and then the rest of the team, all of us were under, you know, under 30, under 35.
00:15:18
Speaker
So I think that is evident in a lot of recruitment agencies, maybe the larger ones and maybe, um I think, some time ago. But I'm seeing a shift in this. I'm seeing certainly older recruitment. And when i say when I'm saying older, I'm saying more than 35.
00:15:33
Speaker
So I'm saying 40-year-olds who might have 10 years of recruitment experience going off and starting their own recruitment businesses. I'm seeing people um gaining more senior positions within recruitment organisations or staying on the desk even when they're more experienced. It used to be that traditional model of you know, you worked on a desk and then you became the team leader and you you you came back off the desk a little, you managed a team and then you went into a more senior role, more senior role.
00:16:00
Speaker
So I think you're seeing more people, you you know, liking earning the fees or having to perhaps get back on the tools because times are tough. Maybe that's more an accurate picture. But yeah, I think that's a bit, I think it's a little
Influence of Recruiter Experience on Age Bias
00:16:13
Speaker
bit different now. I think it's closer to 50-50. I think you'll find ah that there are as many people over 35 as there are are under 35 in our industry. Again, we're you and I just having a guess here.
00:16:24
Speaker
yes so Yeah, I mean, it is it is just a guess. So would you say, by and large, that the older a recruiter gets, the less age discriminatory they are and the more skills they have to influence an employer to consider a candidate regardless of their age?
00:16:52
Speaker
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head there about influence, but let me first address what you said about as they get older themselves being less discriminatory. I think that's a given. I think we've all probably can relate to the fact that when you were in your 20s, people in their 50s seemed old.
00:17:08
Speaker
You know, you would you would interact with them and the way they spoke and talk and acted and you just kind of went, that person's, you know, old and you might have even used that word. So whether you discriminated or not,
00:17:19
Speaker
It didn't matter. But when you were 20, someone in their 50s seemed old. So the older you get or the closer to 50 you get or past 50, you know, you start to change your view of that, of course, as you are 50.
00:17:31
Speaker
um You don't start to see that as old anymore. You start going, no, old's much further along the line. That's 70 or 80 years old is old. So, yes, I think as our population ages in the recruitment space, we are better at getting withstanding the biases around age discrimination.
00:17:51
Speaker
But then as you mentioned the point about influence, I think that's really key here. I think as we get older, our ability to influence dramatically increases as well. And that's where I think this intersection is happening, where we've got young HR professionals.
00:18:06
Speaker
We've potentially got at least half, you're saying even as high as two thirds of our population young recruiters, neither of which have great influence on each other.
Older Workers in the Modern Workplace
00:18:17
Speaker
So another factor, Adele, might be that as employees or workers get older, they're less tolerant of employer BS.
00:18:28
Speaker
They're less tolerant of politics of being not paid appropriately or being jerked around. And they're more likely to stand up for their rights.
00:18:39
Speaker
And many employers don't like that. They want a more compliant, workforce, ah so says the man who's just turned 59.
00:18:50
Speaker
What do you reckon? Well, another thing I found interesting in this article is it said that older employers are perceived to not be as good with technology. i mean, that's an old one. We've heard that lots of times before.
00:19:04
Speaker
But there was also mention in there about lack of ambition, which I found found really interesting because I don't think that that is the case. I don't think it's a lack of of drive or ambition. I think it is exactly as you described, the the no BS clause, right? I'm not going to take this shit.
00:19:20
Speaker
So I'm not going to sit around and keep trying to climb the corporate ladder if it doesn't suit me. We're more likely to walk if you're older because you've got that confidence to go, well, I'll get you know i'll get employment elsewhere or I'll go start my own business. I think that's what a lot of them are doing.
00:19:35
Speaker
And is a lack of ambition ah euphemism for won't work extra hours without overtime or without additional pay? Like, you know, that I suspect might also be a factor here.
00:19:53
Speaker
Well, we also know from lots of recent data that people who are, and I don't know the age range to it, but let's say older, are wanting to maintain the working from home elements of jobs and and having that balance.
00:20:07
Speaker
We know actually that younger employees across the board want to go into the office. It's actually older employees who are enjoying the flexibility of being home. We've done that. we've but been We've done the commute for 20, 30 years into the city. We don't want to do it anymore.
00:20:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think ah think that's some that's pretty true. I mean, my son has a job where he can work from home, but he really enjoys going into the office. He prefers that, although he's got a ah ah long commute. he liked I mean, he's an extrovert, so he enjoys the social aspect of the office.
00:20:42
Speaker
But overall, I think we do have a problem with age discrimination amongst internal reg recruitment professionals, as a summary.
00:20:56
Speaker
Although certainly, as we've pointed out, the um robust or lack of robust sample size might undermine some of what that report concludes. I think overall it's pretty accurate that despite the fact that we have a very low historical unemployment rate and the demographics clearly tell us that the workforce is ageing, that there's still unfortunately a fairly significant bias from many recruiters and hiring managers against older workers.
00:21:32
Speaker
We'd love to hear your opinion. If you've got a thought on this topic, feel free to reach out to Ross or myself.