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Are there too many recruitment industry awards?
103 Plays28 days ago
News for 22 October 2024 and Question of the Week, "Are there too many recruitment industry awards?"
#RNA #RecruitmentPodcast #RecruitmentNewsAustralia
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:09
Speaker
Recruitment News Australia is proudly brought to you by Bullhorn. Bullhorn has dedicated itself to building industry-leading cloud-based software through partnerships with 10,000 staffing customers globally. Bullhorn has built a vast knowledge base of recruitment best practice and deep domain expertise to help Aussie agencies scale their businesses. If you are considering your CRM options, connect with Bullhorn. Visit bullhorn.com.
Employment Growth Trends
00:00:38
Speaker
And this is the news for the week commencing the 21st of October, 2024 I'm a dell last. The most recent labour market releases all continue to signify good news for the recruitment industry. Last Thursday's employment data from the ABS showed strong jobs growth with 64,100 jobs added in the last month on a seasonally adjusted basis and a growth rate of 82% higher than the monthly average across the last 12 months of 36,200.
00:01:07
Speaker
Unlike August, when all the gains were in part-time positions, two-thirds of September's growth was in full-time positions. Victoria recorded the highest month-on-month rate of job growth at 0.6%. The national participation rate reached another record high of 67.2%, while the unemployment rate remained at 4.1%. More good news came from national job ad data with monthly ads increasing by 1.3% in September, according to the Jobs and Skills Australia internet.
00:01:37
Speaker
vacancy index. This is the second consecutive month to record an increase after August's 4.8% rise. The trend of the IVI data was reinforced by SEEK's September employment report released two days later, showing a 0.5% monthly rise in job ads, the third consecutive month of job ad growth. SEEK noted it was the first time job ads had risen for three consecutive months since May 2022.
Awards for Excellence in Recruitment
00:02:04
Speaker
The 2024 winners of Apsco Australia's Awards for Excellence were announced last Thursday evening. The winners were Best Brand, Cornerstone Medical, Candidate Experience, Sapture, Client Service, Horner, Compliance, Wisdom, MSP, Commensurer, RPO, Manpower Group, Health and Wellbeing, Manpower Group, Workplace Culture, Horner, Specialist Firm, Talent,
00:02:33
Speaker
D-E-N-I, Rainy Day. L&D, Cornerstone Medical. Innovation, Robert Walters. Best Performance, Small Team, Recruitment Hive. Medium Team, Medax Healthcare. Large Team, People Bank. Staffing Professional, Aditya Chavda from Zeep Medical. And Partner of the Year, as voted by APSCO members, Legal Firm, Squire, Patton Boggs.
Occupation Shortage List and Workforce Issues
00:03:02
Speaker
The 2024 occupation shortage list, formerly the skills priority list, was released last Monday with 33% of occupations officially classified as skills short, a 3 percentage point decline from 2023. The top five skills short occupations are aged or disabled carers, primary school teachers, secondary school teachers, truck drivers and electricians. Where one gender makes up at least 80% of the occupations job holders,
00:03:30
Speaker
the more likely it is the occupation is experiencing a shortage. By contrast, more balanced workforces, those with at least 20% representation of both genders tend to avoid shortages. In addition, 73% of employers continue to advertising positions in the same places despite facing unfilled vacancies and only 1% adjusted pay rates indicating many employers are just not adjusting their behaviour in the face of local labour market realities.
Recruitment Firm Financial Performance
00:03:59
Speaker
Hay Zane Z net fees fell by 20% on a like for like basis for the September 2024 quarter, compared with the same period last year. Temp net fees were down by 13% and perm fees down by 32%.
00:04:14
Speaker
By country Australia was down 18% and Hayes New Zealand down 42%. By region New South Wales recorded the largest year on year decline of 24% with other states recording similar drops. Only Queensland at down 5% bucking the trend. Hayes' largest local specialism construction and property decreased by 19% with its second largest IT falling by 12%.
00:04:41
Speaker
Hayes ANZ consultant headcount was flat in the quarter and down 27% year on year. Globally, Hayes reported net fees declined by 11%, temp down by 10% and perm down by 20%. Page Group's APAC Q3 gross profit was down 16.8% against 2023, with Australia the worst regional performer recording a 31% year on year quarterly decline in net fees.
00:05:11
Speaker
Globally, Page Group reported a 13.5% decline in net fees for the September quarter compared to the same quarter last year. Robert Walter's APACQ3 net fee income was down 12% with ANZ down 23% compared to the September 2023 quarter. Globally, Group net fee income for the third quarter was down 12% in constant currency with headcount down 4% quarter on quarter.
Impact of Retrenchments on Employees
00:05:41
Speaker
Research published earlier this month in the Harvard Business Review suggests the impact of large-scale retrenchments on those employees who are retained in the business is much more significant and long-lasting than previously thought. Employee feedback and engagement platform Culture Amp collated before and after employee experience data from 146 companies that underwent layoffs between March 2020 and November 2022.
00:06:07
Speaker
After layoffs, a significant drop in employee engagement was seen in many key areas. Specifically, company confidence dropped 16.9 percentage points, belief in career opportunities dropped 12.1 percentage points, and confidence in leadership dropped 10.5 percentage points. Additional research was undertaken this year into the experiences of companies that conducted the layoffs in 2023 to see if these patterns were consistent with previous findings. The research found the 2023 redundancies had an even bigger impact on employee engagement. On average, engagement declined two percentage points more than in 2023 compared to the results from the 2020 to 2022 study. One of the most surprising results on the research was that high employee engagement prior to retrenchment did not protect employers from the negative impact of layoffs. The higher employee engagement is to start, the more likely it is to plummet after redundancies are made and the less committed employees are to staying.
00:07:04
Speaker
The largest declines were from employees in company scoring in the top 10% of employee engagement prior to the layoffs. The 2020 to 2022 research found it took up to 18 months for engagement to rebound after retrenchments. And for the 2023 retrenchments, the current data points to the recovery taking even longer at up to 24 months. And that's only if new employees are hired to back fill essential roles. For employees who make it through a time of wide-scale retrenchments,
00:07:33
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Their commitment to staying with the company continues to drop over time and this sentiment is a strong predictor of actual turnover.
SEEK's Strategic Moves and Privacy Concerns
00:07:41
Speaker
SEEK has entered into an exclusivity deed for the potential acquisition of Xref for an enterprise value of approximately $45 million dollars via the purchase of all the ordinary Xref shares on issue for 21.81 cents in cash.
00:07:58
Speaker
Analysts said XREF's range of reference and pre-employment checks, employment engagement and exit surveys is a logical extension of SEEK's existing product offering. In the 2024 financial year, XREF reported even a loss of $1.8 million dollars on sales of $19.9 million dollars with a net loss after tax of $5.7 million. XREF was founded by former Hayes Senior Manager Lee Martin Seymour in 2009.
00:08:28
Speaker
Former Haze ANZ Managing Director Nigel Heap joined the XREF board in 2016, the year XREF listed on the ASX. The company services over 2,000 customers in 195 countries via offices in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK. Based on the offer price, Seymour's stake in XREF is worth $6.92 million. dollars The XREF's board is recommending that shareholders accept the SEEK offer.
00:08:56
Speaker
In a new initiative, the Defence Department has outlined a new Careers Referral Program that sets up an incentive scheme to encourage members to refer people to join the ADF. The scheme provides a $1,000 payment to an ADF member who refers a person to join the ADF who then completes 12 months of service as a member of the Permanent Forces, the Department said in a press release. The two-year trial program will begin within the next month and has been designed based on the experience of programs operated by AUKUS partners, the United States and United Kingdom. According to the department, a referred person cannot have previously served in the ADF, be a close relative of the referring member, or already have a current application to enlist.
00:09:39
Speaker
Last Tuesday news site Crikey reported SEEK recently updated its privacy policy to advise job seekers their information was being used to train artificial intelligence. SEEK has copied a recent change LinkedIn made and has decided to use your personal data for AI training according to a user on social media platform Mastodon.
00:09:59
Speaker
The fine print in the privacy policy says they're going to use your data for artificial intelligence and machine learning, wrote user at Damien Wise, referring to LinkedIn's recent AI training controversy. Unlike with LinkedIn, there does not seem to be an option for Sikh users to opt out of their data being used to train AI. Crikey saw comment on the change from Sikh, but no response was received by the time of publication.
RCSA Conference Announcement
00:10:25
Speaker
And the RCSA has announced the SHAPE 2025 conference for Australia and New Zealand will take place at the luxurious Sheridan Mirage Resort on the Gold Coast from Tuesday 26th August to Thursday 28th August. And that's the news for the week beginning the 21st October 2024. I'm Ross Clennett.
Debate on Recruitment Industry Awards
00:10:56
Speaker
Question of the week. Are there too many recruitment industry awards? Oh, well, it's a very topical question, I think, because it is a ward season, as we know. We've got many of them going on at the moment and being announced and so ceremonies occurring. And there are um different types of awards, though. Right, Ross, we've got the two industry bodies. We've got the APSCO ones, which have just recently been awarded and announced. The RCSA ones were done earlier this year.
00:11:26
Speaker
ah but there's a couple of other awards outside of that. Yeah, there's ah four, ah what I'd call, vendor awards. So you've got the SEEK Awards or SARAs, they're open to anybody. You've got Talents, that's T-A-L-I-N-T, but T-ARAs, and they're open to anyone. You've got a pay to submit and they're announced next month. And then you've got the ah rating and review platforms, Recruiter Insider,
00:11:59
Speaker
And Saucer, Saucer's now owned by Seek. So both of those platforms also have their awards. They don't have award ceremonies in terms of a gala dinner, but they do announce the winners of the categories. There's also one that's no longer being operated and that's the HRD magazine, Human Resource Director magazine, that discontinued their awards in 2020. So yes, there are a lot Adele, do you think there are too many?
00:12:30
Speaker
I think that there are too many that are very similar. I think that you've got, as I said, the two industry bodies i'm aware the RCSA, one is only open to members. I think APSCO is broad. I think anyone can submit for that. As you mentioned, the TRAs require a fee um and the others are kind of either customers or or you know require um a hefty submission. And that, I guess, is my concern about there being so many of them.
00:12:58
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and the credibility of them because they require people to self-nominate and put a submission in and potentially pay a fee. And I think that's restrictive. I think for some agencies, they don't want to allocate or can't allocate that time to you know putting in a big submission and therefore they're not being seen. And that's not necessarily you know fair then. it's not It's not a full industry award program. It's not looking at the best of the best. It's looking at the best of those that can be bothered to submit and pay the fee. And there's always that tricky balance and let's both declare our vested interest here.
00:13:37
Speaker
I've been a judge on a number of those awards that we've mentioned multiple times. So I've probably, I don't know, 15, maybe 20 different awards. I've been a judge, similar for you, I would have thought, maybe not quite as many. I've been across a lot of them. So yeah, maybe not quite the same number, but certainly I've been across them both as a judge, but actually even from a submission perspective, you know, I've worked in agencies and I've prepared the submission.
00:14:06
Speaker
that's won the award, so I know the work that goes in on that side as well. And also, again, the RCSA commissioned me to do a comprehensive review of their awards a couple of years ago, and I did submit a 10 or 12 page um summary of my findings to the RCSA. So just to declare that upfront, but I think that the challenge is firstly, it's self-nomination, as you've said,
00:14:35
Speaker
And that means that when you're asking people to submit, there's the balance between you need enough information that's going to be. ah sufficient to judge different entries compared to different entries, but not too much where it becomes too onerous. Because if you're a big agency and you've got full-time people in, I don't know, tender submissions or marketing, then they can prepare these sorts of ah submissions. Whereas if you're a smaller agency, almost certainly it's going to fall on the owner or the managing director.
00:15:12
Speaker
to do that and therefore it makes or can create an uneven playing field and that makes it very hard as a judge to compare. It certainly doesn't seem level in terms of the assessment and it doesn't seem that it is purely around the outcome of you know the submission in terms of the body of work or the program or or what the submission was about because we never even hear that. you know and The judges who judged that award would be aware of what, you know, it was submitted, and but not even aware of what others are submitting in other awards. You know, you get ah an award category to judge, and that's the only thing you see. And then everybody else out there, as I said, in the public will hear about an award win. But we don't really know why that agency won't. We don't know about the good program. And then that's not really uplifting the whole industry then. It's not improving things to hear. If you don't hear what others are doing, you just hear they won an award.
00:16:08
Speaker
um I think it it just becomes a pure marketing exercise as opposed to a means of kind of striving for excellence. Well, it it it sort of leaves you, well, I shouldn't generalise, leaves me feeling like I'd like to know more. it's Like classic example, Cornerstone Medical were awarded the LND award in the APSCO 2024 awards. Now, as someone who's intimately involved with LND, I'd love to know the details of the Cornerstone Medical LND programme.
00:16:44
Speaker
I'd love to know what cutting edge, what tech might they be using, how much are they drawing from internal resources versus external resources. And I'm sure others would love to know that as well. But again, this is where we find an understandable reluctance where some agencies will just never submit. And I assume it's because either that they don't care about winning the awards or they simply want to keep everything in house. They don't want anybody, even so-called objective judges who are going to be confidential um to see any of that. Like Randstad, I don't know, I can't remember the last time
00:17:25
Speaker
Randstad submitted for an award in Australia. Maybe they have ah in the past, but I certainly can't remember. Sharpen Carter, very prominent agency, never seen them submit, I don't know, stellar recruitment. I don't recall them. What about the big blue collar agencies, work pack and so on. I don't recall that they've submitted or not for a very long time. So it's that balance between respecting, of course, that everyone can choose to enter or not enter, but then also, you know, it slightly diminishes the awards because those prominent, well-known, and I'd like to think agencies doing a lot of good stuff just aren't involved.
00:18:09
Speaker
And in discussing this question today, you and I were talking about the number, we're talking about quality as well here, of course, of the awards, but you know are are there too many? The number of awards I think helped, that kind of contributes to the diminishing of their importance as well, because there's lots of opportunity to keep trying for that category across lots of different award programs there. And you know again, ah is that the best of the best or is it just the best of you know, that category within that that particular structure um in that particular year. Again, I'm trying, I don't want to diminish anyone's award win. um It's a great thing and it's good to promote your business. And as I said, and there is some great work going on, no doubt about it. But, i you know, I do think there are too many. I think they're too similar. And I think there's some question marks around um credibility of, you know, how things are assessed and, and you know, the way things are
00:19:04
Speaker
are managed in the processes because you just can't you know it's it's not truly across the whole sector. Well, I mean, that's absolutely right. If you said that, well, depending on what figures do you believe, there's sort of 8,000 to 10,000 different agencies, but probably half of those are no more than three people.
00:19:25
Speaker
So if you said agencies of let's pick a figure at least six people, then I mean, I'm just guessing here, but it's probably not more than about 3000 agencies. But even then, if you say there's 3000 agencies that. potentially could submit for at least one of these awards. And I look at the number of different agencies that submit to awards. And of course, I can only look at the ones that I've participated in. Then the number of different agencies, gee, if it's more than 50, I'd be surprised across all those categories, you go 50 out of 3000. Like it's a tiny slither. But again, getting back to my point, you got to respect the decision of the various people involved to other participate or not.
00:20:13
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess we are saying that we think there are too many. ah The question is, are there too many ah recruitment industry awards? And I think we're both saying yes. Yes.
00:20:24
Speaker
and If we were saying, well, what could we do to improve it? I think any significant improvements would take a lot of time and money where you really had a resource across the whole industry that full-time went around doing assessments to do a much wider ah coverage of the industry. But I mean, I just I mean, that's I think fantasy land like that's never going to happen. The resources are not available. And as much as that might be utopia, I can't ever see it happening. Hey, are you liking listening to our podcast Recruitment News Australia? If you are, it would really help if you could give Ross Clannan and I a five star review on whatever podcast app you listen to it on. Please
00:21:12
Speaker
hop onto the review section and give us a review next time you're listening on your favourite episode. And thanks for listening.