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Episode 72
157 Plays4 months ago
News for the week beginning 29 July 2024 and Question of the Week: "What is an appropriate level of performance pressure in a recruitment role?"
#RNA #RecruitmentPodcast #RecruitmentNewsAustralia
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Transcript
Weekly News Introduction
00:00:09
Speaker
This is the news for we commencing the 29th of July, 2024. I'm Adele Last.
Fraud Charges Against Luke Hemings
00:00:14
Speaker
Serial con man and owner of multiple recruitment agencies, Luke Hemings, was charged earlier this week with three fraud offences relating to dishonestly inducing delivery of property worth around $100,000 on the Gold Coast. Hemings operated Canberra-based Coceptive recruitment, which entered liquidation in 2021, owing creditors $760,000, according to the Daily Mail. Hemings left Canberra for the Gold Coast and set up a business as White Fox recruitment in Southport last August. Queensland Police arrested Hemings following a search warrant at his Southport office, the Gold Coast Bulletin reported. Hemings, known by at least half a dozen aliases, has a past stream with failed ventures, unpaid creditors and court appearances. Hemings' profile on the White Fox website claims a range of award wins, memberships and affiliations
00:01:03
Speaker
including being a JP and a finalist in various recruitment industry awards. Previously, Hemings claimed to be an official ambassador for Beyond Blue and Lifeline. Both organisations said the claims were untrue. When contacted for comment about the latest charges, Hemings was quoted by Daily Mail Australia as saying, I exercise my right to silence. Please confer with my lawyer for comment. Hemings will appear in Southport Magistrates Court on August 8th.
Recruitment Industry Revenue Decline
00:01:29
Speaker
Randstad, the largest global staffing firm, reported Second quarter revenue fell 8% on a year-on-year organic basis to 6.08 billion euros with perm fees decreasing by 18%. Total revenue in the Asia Pacific region was down 8% organically year over year to 588 million euros. Revenue in ANZ was down 17% while both Japan and India recorded revenue rises of 2%.
00:01:59
Speaker
Germany was the worst performing European market for Randstad with revenue down 16% year over year for the quarter. Randstad's largest market North America reported a 13% year on year revenue drop for the quarter. The world's ninth-largest staffing company, Robert Half, reported Q2 revenue fell 10.1% compared to Q2 last year with $1.47 billion dollars when adjusted for currencies and billing days. Gross profit dropped 8.5% and operating profit tumbled 36% to $68.2 million. dollars By service line, contracting income dropped 14.5% and permanent fees declined 12.2%.
00:02:41
Speaker
Robert Half's IT services, business, and poverty delivered the best provisional result with a 0.9% revenue decline.
Global Employee Engagement Levels
00:02:50
Speaker
Last month, Gallup released its annual State of the Global Workplace report, reporting that in 2023, global employee engagement stagnated and overall employee wellbeing declined. While both measures are at or near record highs, their lack of improvement is notable as they follow multiple years of steady gains. The result is that most of the world's employees continue to struggle at work and in life directly affecting organisational productivity. The headline result was that 23% of employees are engaged, 62% are not engaged and 15% are actively disengaged. This engagement result matches the record high from the previous year of 2022. Gallup estimates that low engagement costs the global economy $8.9 trillion US dollars or 9% of global GDP.
00:03:38
Speaker
Gallup's latest meta-analysis of more than 183,000 business units across 53 industries and 90 countries, finds that teams in the top quartile of employee engagement achieve 23% higher profitability than those in the bottom quartile. This is because they are better at retaining top talent, serving customers, achieving higher quality output, and accomplishing numerous other outcomes that led to profit. The company's research has also shown that the relationship between employee engagement and business performance is somewhat stronger during economic recessions.
NZ Migration to Australia
00:04:11
Speaker
earlier in the month statistics new zealand released its latest international migration update which contain bad news for the country's new government and employers the number of long-term departures from new zealand to australia rapidly accelerated in the twenty twenty three calendar year The annual net migration loss from New Zealand to Australia averaged about 30,000 from 2004 to 2013, plummeting to only 3,000 annually from 2014 to 2019. However, it has rapidly accelerated in the past three years from 5,400 in in 2022, and it jumped to 27,000 last year.
00:04:53
Speaker
The economic outlook in New Zealand continues to weaken, with the deficit in the 12 months to June this year widening to $11.1 billion dollars from the $9.3 billion dollars previously expected. Next year's estimated shortfall is more than double the $6.1 billion dollar gap projected six months ago, suggesting the flood of New Zealanders crossing the Tasman is almost certain to continue for the foreseeable future.
00:05:21
Speaker
The Fair Work Ombudsman has secured a total of $168,000 in penalties in court against the CFMEU and one of its officials for improper conduct that included obnoxious bullying interactions at a construction site in Melbourne. The Federal Court has imposed penalties of $150,000 against the CFMEU and penalties of $18,000 against Paul Seamus. The CFMEU admitted breaching Section 500 of the Fair Work Act by acting improperly at the Westgate Tunnel Construction Project in Melbourne in December of 2019.
00:05:54
Speaker
In the largest public sector trial of the four-day week in Britain, South Cambridge District Council reported performance improvements in 11 out of 24 areas, little or to more nor no change in 11 areas and worsening of performance in two areas. The productivity analysis was conducted by academics at the Universities of Cambridge and Salford. The trial involved about 450 desk staff and garbage collectors between January 2023 and April this year. Two key results were staff turnover fell by 39%, saving ยฃ371,500, mostly on agency staff costs, and scores for employees' physical and mental health motivation and commitment all improved. Mike Davie, the leader of Cambridge City Council, described the trial as a win-win-win situation with improved service delivery for residents, reduced staffing costs for the council, and a better work-life balance for council staff.
Demand for Tech Skills
00:06:55
Speaker
The freelance skill with the fastest growing global demand in the second quarter was computer security according to freelancer dot.com. The number of job postings on the talent platform requiring computer security skills rose 27.1% to 1,103 jobs from quarter one to quarter two this year. Freelancer also reported the most in demand skill in terms of total job postings was graphic design, which was requested in over 117,000 posts. Data for the report is based on 251,000 jobs posted to the freelancer dot.com platform between 1 April and 30 June.
00:07:34
Speaker
More than a dozen Chinese companies face legal action for allegedly asking job applicants to take pregnancy tests, Chinese state media has reported, although no companies were named. Prosecutors found that 168 women seeking positions at 16 companies in Nantong, a city in the eastern province of Jiangsu, had been tested illegally as part of their pre-employment physical check. The case highlights a contradiction at the heart of the Chinese economy. While the country is trying to boost record low birth rates, some companies are reluctant to hire pregnant workers. Chinese law bans employers from administering pregnancy tests or discriminating against pregnant workers. At least one woman who was found to be expecting was not hired, the prosecutor said. According to Chinese law, companies can be fined up to 50,000 yuan, about 10,000 Australian dollars for gender discrimination.
00:08:28
Speaker
The International Monetary Fund, um IMF, has reported global growth is projected to be in line with the April 2024 World Economic Outlook forecast at 3.2% in 2024 and 3.3% in 2025. Relative to the forecast contained in the April 2024 WEO, first quarter growth was unexpectedly up in many countries, although downside surprises in Japan and the United States were notable. Looking ahead, the um IMF revised its forecasts for both China and India upward based on strong private consumption data in both countries. Economic conditions look brighter in the United States after continued strong job growth and accelerating business activity with the July S and&P Global Flash Composite Output Index rising to its highest level since April 2022.
00:09:21
Speaker
Hiring confidence remains robust in the United States with last week's Express Employment Professionals Harris poll, finding that 60% of hiring managers surveyed plan to increase headcount in the second half of this year, with 15% planning significant increases and only 6% planning to reduce headcount. And Recruitment News Australia podcast is back at SHAPE. RCSA's 2024 SHAPE conference is being held in Noosa. um the 20th to the 22nd of August and we have secured a thousand dollar discount for our listeners who may be non-members of the RCSA. If you're considering going, you could use the code
RCSA Conference Discount
00:09:59
Speaker
RCSARNA at the checkout to get the discount of 24% off the non-member price. And don't worry if you don't think you'll know anybody there, you will know Ross and myself, so please seek us out at the event.
00:10:14
Speaker
And that's the news for the week beginning the 29th of July, 2024. I'm Ross Clennett.
00:10:32
Speaker
Question of the week this week is, what is an appropriate level of performance pressure in a recruitment role? And this question has come up because of an article that we both read from Hong Li in his online blog, which was on linked LinkedIn called This Week in Recruiting Issue 174. And he's ah attended an event and he's summarizing one of the speakers presentations at the event. And it's around ah mental health and wellbeing um in relation to performance. And we we both enjoyed the content of this and want to talk a little bit more about what we believe is an appropriate level of performance pressure in a recruitment role. And I just want to quote something from that article to provide more context.
00:11:21
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whom said Simon made another rather profound observation. If our motivation for employee wellbeing is better performance, we corrupt the relationship by having such an agenda. Someone is helping you because they want you to perform, not because they care about you. I don't have a developed theory on this, but I suspect that a large contributor to mental illness is because we are not valued for who we are, only for what we can do for others. we may be inadvertently compromising the success of any wellbeing program by tying it so closely to business performance. And I think that absolutely is a risk in the recruitment industry, Adele. And the very first thing, ground zero for avoiding this is hiring people with the right competencies to be a recruiter, because let's be honest,
00:12:16
Speaker
recruitment consulting is not an easy job. There's only a very small proportion of the population that's suited to this job. And we need to reflect and be honest on Achievement drive being a critical motivation competency. People who succeed as recruiters are people who have a higher than normal level of achievement drive. People with a high level of achievement drive care about a standard of excellence. In other words, they like being measured. They like seeing performance targets. They like meeting and exceeding performance targets.
00:12:53
Speaker
And along with that, they're resilient because people have high expectations of themselves. They understand there's going to be ebbs and flows and they are going to be people that experience disappointment knowing that that's part and parcel of succeeding. That's part and parcel of pushing. and having high standards. And I think that as a as a starting point is where many recruitment leaders who recruit people, they default to nice people and extroverts. And that's not necessarily correlated to people with a high level of achievement drive. Yeah, that point you make from the article about um about caring, ah about
00:13:37
Speaker
people that care about your own motivations, I think is really relevant as well, right? As a leader, that's a really important conversation to have. And reflecting on my own experience, that I was very fortunate in when I reported to Greg Savage for a number of years, Greg could be, well, as anyone who see has seen him speak would probably understand, he could be pretty blunt and uncompromising in performance conversations. But what made me able to hear Greg's feedback and to reflect on it and take action on it was that
00:14:21
Speaker
He had more than performance conversations with me he talked with me about other aspects of my life he talk about me playing cricket or what i did on the weekend and so what he demonstrated to me was the cared about me as a human being. He wasn't just caring about me as an income producer. And I think this is where many leaders inadvertently undermine the mental health of their people, particularly those who are not performing, because what happens is all their conversations with their underperforming employees become performance conversations.
00:14:57
Speaker
they don't have those other type of what I would call normal social or normal human conversations. Or if they do, there are very, there's a very small number of them. And so therefore the person who's underperforming is unconsciously receiving the message. I'm only really talking to you because of your performance or lack of it. And you deserve a different type of conversation when you're performing better. And I know that's not the intention of the leader, but I suspect that's exactly what's being pointed to in that article of Hoong's. Yeah, it's interesting the mental health um notes you know that you're making. There's another point of the article I want to reference where ah Simon, the the speaker, is talking about the fact that we may have made a mistake in mixing up comfort for wellbeing.
00:15:53
Speaker
So he says, in our efforts to better understand mental health, we've increased our knowledge, built a vocabulary and developed our concepts, but we may have inadvertently become overly sensitive to normal life experiences and human interactions, which produce discomfort. Our well-intentioned motivations to improve mental health may lead to the avoidance of discomfort, leading us to spend too much time in safe spaces, which then become echo chambers in which we always get validation, but never growth. I find this concept really interesting because I think there is this expectation that you've got to be sensitive to people's mental health. And there are certainly people who definitely need more support from a mental health perspective. But we should stop aiming for this perfect scorecard on mental health, 100% perfect mental health all the time, because it's unrealistic, particularly in a performance-based job like recruitment. There are going to be ebbs and flows. There's going to be the highs and lows. And it's not a bad thing.
00:16:51
Speaker
To have a period of you know mental health that might be that you're struggling with or have a downtime or a rut that you're in, it's about how you get yourself out of that. The the bounce back to be able to recover from that is far more important than trying to aim to you know never be unhappy or never be down or depressed or anxious or any of the the other feelings you might have around mental health. I think we've got to reset that expectation. And that is where, pointing to the word discomfort,
00:17:22
Speaker
circling back to hiring people. That's where you want to probe. You want to understand where the person has experienced discomfort. And the two types of discomfort that I was particularly keen to hear about and that I valued in someone I was considering hiring as a recruiter was independent overseas travel, in other words, backpacking, and hospitality experience. because if you've gone off as a backpacker and you've gone away for months and you're in countries you've never been to before, you've got a limited budget, and of course, this is before things like TripAdvisor and anything you could find online.
00:18:07
Speaker
what were people doing when they experienced those inevitable moments of challenge when they were a long, long way from home, not surrounded by friends and family, and potentially not even speaking the language of the people in the country that they were visiting. That, to me, was a pretty strong pointer to people who were willing to experience discomfort and work through it. And it's the same in Hospitality, as anyone who's worked in a hospo job knows, you're dealing with people, whether you're in the kitchen and you're dealing with a bad tempered chef, whether you're front of house and you're dealing with unhappy or upset customers or maybe an unhappy owner, all those things are going to create discomfort. How did you deal with it?
00:18:58
Speaker
How did you manage to get through that? How did you learn from that? How did you grow from that? I think those are the sorts of things that I'd suggest leaders need to look at when they're recruiting people for themselves, people to become recruitment consultants. That discomfort factor is going to be a pretty strong indicator as to how those people will deal with discomfort when it inevitably comes along when they're on the job as a recruiter. So thanks to Hongli for the article. We both enjoyed that post that you made this week. But have we answered the question, or Ross, what is an appropriate amount of performance pressure in a recruitment role?
00:19:41
Speaker
Well, an appropriate amount is commensurate with the responsibilities of the job and the capabilities of the person. You shouldn't be putting enormous pressure on someone in week six because they're just beginning, they're just getting to grips with the job. You need to put an appropriate amount of pressure. Now it's going to be different if you've got an experienced recruiter, a high performing recruiter who's going through a prolonged lull. They've got more resources to draw on.
00:20:19
Speaker
to deal with appropriate pressure, pressure commensurate with how much money they're being paid and also the importance of their individual performance in terms of the team target. So it's not treating everyone the same in terms of performance pressure, but it's being fair to people based on their level of capability, ah tenure and what performance standards that you're expecting off them. yeah And I think that's a really good final point to make around setting the standards, setting the expectations, communicating that really clearly. And like you'd said, hiring well in the first place, you know supporting people well, having those good conversations, remembering the training,
Balancing Performance and Wellbeing
00:21:06
Speaker
remembering the performance development piece, even for your high performers, and then you know applying that pressure appropriately, as you said.
00:21:14
Speaker
And the final point that I'd leave people with is if you're a leader, make sure that you're having an appropriate mix of performance conversations with each of your team members and what I would call normal social. conversations, because if all you're doing is having performance conversations, you're sending a message, whether you like it or not, that all you care about with respect to the people who report to you is their performance. You don't care about them as a human being. And when you're sending a message that you care about them as a human being and then having appropriate performance conversations, you're going to minimize the likelihood that you're causing damage to their mental health.
00:22:02
Speaker
To stay up to date with every episode of Recruitment News Australia, subscribe via our website recruitmentnewsaustralia.com.au, follow our LinkedIn page, Recruitment News Australia, and subscribe via your favourite podcast app. For more details about my services, simply go to rossclenet.com. And for more information about what's happening on my desk, you can visit carealassoo.com. or the captainstable dot.com.au website.