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. Welcome to Recruitment News Australia. This is the news for the 18th of August, 2026. I'm Adele Last.
Speaker: And I'm Ross Clennett. Some late breaking news, Hudson Global Resources Australia Proprietary Limited has been fined $270,000 for failing to meet its financial reporting obligations as a large proprietary company.
Speaker: Hudson was convicted and fined on the 21st of July, 2026 at the Downing Centre local court in Sydney. Hudson was required to lodge audited financial reports with ASIC for the financial years of 2022, 23 and 24, but failed to do so.
Speaker: Value to lodge full year financial reports with ASIC is a breach of the Corporations Act. Hudson remains under the control of administrators from WLP restructuring, while the conditions of high-tech acquisition of the company's assets are fulfilled.
Speaker: Seamus Scanlon, the former head of Davidson's Victorian search practice, has officially joined the national consulting firm Quartermentha. Scanlon left Davidson in late May this year after more than a decade there and started at Quartermentha last month as a partner specialising in executive search.
Speaker: Scanlon is reuniting with former colleague Melanie Peckinack, who started this week as the firm's director of executive search. Scanlon and Pekinac worked together at Davidson for nearly seven years between mid-2016 and early 2023. Pekinac left to go in-house joining so CSIRO as a search consultant.
Speaker: It's an interesting time to join that firm, Ross, as they've had some pretty bad publicity recently, haven't they? ah You bet, Del. As ah RNA has reported Corda Mentha has been in a lot of trouble.
Speaker: However, at the moment, they must be relieved that KPMG are ah dominating the headlines for all the wrong reasons. In June 2026, the New South Wales Commission Against Corruption, ICAC, began public hearings into allegations of corrupt conduct at the University of Wollongong. Those hearings, known as Operation Scandi, involve recruitment, procurement and conflict of interest management issues linked to quarter-menther partner John Dewar.
Speaker: The inquiry is specifically examining claims about the circumstances surrounding Dewar's appointment as interim vice-chancellor and the multi-million dollar consulting project his firm subsequently won through a compromised tender. University of Wollongong Chancellor Michael Still resigned from his post last month, just days before he was scheduled to give evidence to the inquiry. Ouch. Attempting to start a new service line in executive search with that cloud hanging over your employer's ethics must be tough. What has Scanlon said about it?
Speaker: Publicly nothing. I spoke to him to find out more about his reasons for joining. However, he declined to comment, saying he'd be happy to say more after returning from an overseas holiday later this month. Well, it's certainly a watch this space then.
Speaker: A court decision out of Queensland has recruiters, hiring managers and ah HR teams thinking carefully about the use and enforcement of non-compete clauses. The Supreme Court of Queensland has just refused a bid by medical device giant Striker Australia to block a former sales executive from joining a start-up, and the reasoning behind it could reshape how companies draft employment contracts.
Speaker: The employee had worked at Stryker since 2015, most recently as a territory manager, selling surgical camera systems across parts of Queensland and northern New South Wales.
Speaker: She resigned in June to take a job at what Stryker considered a competitor, and the company moved to enforce a non-compete clause to stop her starting her new job. But the court wasn't convinced. The clause in question could have barred her from the industry for up to 12 months across the entire country and even covered indirect involvement with products from up to two years earlier. The judge called that scope broad enough to effectively shut her out of the whole medical equipment field.
Speaker: and that's really the crux of this for employers. Under Australian law, restraints are presumed invalid unless the company can prove they are doing no more than protecting a legitimate business interest. Here, the court found Stryker hadn't identified any specific confidential information at risk and that her role wasn't senior enough to justify a sweeping restriction.
Speaker: The takeaway is the courts are increasingly looking past the wording of a contract to the substance of the role, seniority, real access to sensitive information and genuine overlap between old and new employers.
Speaker: A broadly worded nationwide restraint with vague directly or indirectly language doesn't automatically protect a business. In some cases, such as this one, it can actually work against it.
Speaker: There's also the human element here that shouldn't be overlooked. The court noted that she was her family's main income earner, paid largely on commission, and that blocking her move would have left her household without income for an uncertain stretch. That balance of hardship weighed heavily in the decision. For employers, the message is clear.
Speaker: Overly broad restraint clauses drafted just in case may not hold up when it matters, contracts should be tailored to the seniority and risk profile of each role rather than applying blanket one-size-fits-all restrictions.
Speaker: It's worth noting this was only an interim ruling on the injunction. The broader case is still ongoing. However, for job seekers and recruiters alike, it's a reminder to scrutinise these clauses carefully during hiring, both to understand what you're agreeing to and what's genuinely enforceable if a dispute arises.
Speaker: And if in doubt, consult a lawyer or the Fair Work hotline may be able to help. Robert, Walter's PLC has just released its results for the first half of 2026, and it's a bit of a mixed bag. Revenue for the six months to June 30 climbed 7.7% year-on-year £434 million, pounds but net fee income or gross profit fell to million. pounds So more revenue coming through the door, but lower margins. However, there was some good news on the bottom line. The operating loss narrowed to £4.5 million, pounds down from £7.8 million a year earlier, with cost cutting largely an 11% year-on-year global headcount reduction being the main driver.
Speaker: Regionally, it was a mixed picture. The UK saw revenue climb nearly 30%, while Europe went the other way, down 17%. Robert Walters Australia's net fee income dipped 6%, although the company reported that temp volumes hit their highest level since the first half of 2024. An ongoing decline in perm income was the drag on results. Robert Walters New Zealand fared better with net fee income up 14%, again driven by temp and contracting.
Speaker: CEO Toby Foulston described the results as in line with expectations, pointing to ongoing cost savings and momentum heading into the second half of 2026. Ross, there's a recent story out of Canberra that's a real warning shot for anyone using AI in their hiring process. The Australian reported that the Australian Tax Office had to scrap an entire recruitment round after discovering artificial intelligence had been improperly used to screen candidates.
Speaker: The recruitment process for audit and compliance officer roles, paying between $84,000 and $100,000 per annum, had the required human oversight go missing at some point.
Speaker: The ATO's recruitment policies are clear. The human decision maker must sign off on any shortlist. Somewhere along the way, an AI tool ended up reviewing or filtering applications instead.
Speaker: And once that came to light, the whole hiring round was pulled. What's still murky is exactly where the process failed. Was it an internal ATO process error or something that occurred elsewhere, potentially even a recruitment agency that was sourcing for the role?
Speaker: It hasn't been revealed how many roles or applicants were caught up in the fallout. it Makes you wonder how many other times this sort of thing has happened and it hasn't been discovered. Now to a story that I think we'll file under only in America or more specifically only in California's tech startup sector.
Speaker: It's a wild one, Ross. The company's called Lemon Lime and their co-founder, 24-year-old Stanford graduate Jordan Zietz, through what he called the most unhinged after-party during Y Combinator's start-up school in late July. The hook was that attendees could score an instant job interview, but only if they were willing to get a tattoo on the spot, with the company logo one of the very few options available.
Speaker: Unbelievable as it sounds. Seven people said yes and got themselves inked by a professional tattooist the company had hired for the event. The tweets originally spun it on LinkedIn as some kind of loyalty test, a way to sniff out bold, committed talent. But of course, the backlash was swift.
Speaker: The core issue people raised was consent. When there's a job on the line and the employer holds all the power, how voluntary is that decision in this case to get a tattoo? I mean, really? One participant who took up the offer said she felt she lost control of her own story once it went viral.
Speaker: Zeitz ended up deleting the LinkedIn post, calling the stunt reckless and apologising for the pressure it put people under. The company has since offered to fund tattoo removals for anyone who wants one.
Speaker: A pretty costly lesson on how not to test for culture fit. Did you see LinkedIn dropped its first ever cities on the rise list? I did. I wasn't expecting my hometown Hobart to take out the top spot. Greater Darwin, which came in second, and then Rockhampton up in far north Queensland rounded out the top three.
Speaker: On what basis did Hobart come out on top? Healthcare, care education and tourism are the big three, apparently. There's also a growing tech sector and a solid pipeline of skilled workers feeding into it. So the city's broadening beyond its traditional strengths, according to LinkedIn.
Speaker: So it's not just riding on lifestyle appeal, there's real diversification happening in the local economy. Apparently. Unsurprisingly, Darwin's story is altogether different. Defence, infrastructure and logistics investment are doing the heavy lifting there, which makes sense given its position as the gateway to Northern Australia. I'd imagine that's pulling in a lot of construction and transport demand.
Speaker: The Darwin Shiplift gets a specific mention, plus growing investment in critical minerals. Both are reinforcing Darwin's role in the north's economy going forward. And Rockhampton at three. That's a great sign for regional Queensland.
Speaker: Greater Newcastle and Greater Adelaide rounded out the top five. And then Albury-Wodonga, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Canberra and Wollongong filled out the rest of the top ten.
Speaker: LinkedIn based the rankings on their data, looking at where hiring's accelerating, job demands climbing, and where new talent is heading to. And they've capped it at regions under 3 million profiles on LinkedIn, so Melbourne and Sydney are excluded. It's really a rising star, Liz Tadell, more than anything. There's a broader theme sitting underneath all this too. LinkedIn survey data found two-thirds of professionals now say they work to live, not live to work.
Speaker: Only two-thirds. I thought it might have been higher than that these days. People aren't just chasing a great job or promising career path. They're chasing the whole package. Job plus lifestyle plus affordability, which probably explains why places like Hobart and Rockhampton are climbing the list. They're offering that balance in a way the bigger cities increasingly struggle to do Definitely one to watch for recruiters and employers. If talent's voting with its feet, these are the cities to be paying attention to this year.
Speaker: Stay tuned now for question of the week. Question of the week. Does being tall pay more? Have you ever spent time with Michael Page consultants at any stage of your career, Adele? I can't say that I have, Ross. Where's this going?
Speaker: They always seem to be attractive, above average, good looking, and tall, taller than average. Okay, I'm assuming that you've read that recent HRD article about the height wage premium. Guessed it in one. Okay, let's unpack it.
Speaker: Okay, I love this. Okay, for starters, the 2023 meta-study of 42 research papers on height and wages found the effect... was smallest in the US and Australia and considerably larger in parts of Asia and Latin America. One of the studies from Indonesia found the 10 centimeter increase in height was worth about 7.5% as a wage bump for men, but nearly double that, 13% for women, even after controlling for a long list of productivity measures.
Speaker: So the typical assumption that this is all about tall men getting ahead is just too simplistic. In some countries, the effect is stronger for women, not weaker.
Speaker: For me, it was the size of the height wage effect. Research out of Florida and North Carolina, pulling several long-running US and UK studies, calculated that once you strip out the gender, age and weight Every extra inch of height is worth the equivalent of about $1,140 Australian dollars a year.
Speaker: Per year? Wow. I know math's genius, but I know that compounds over a career, making a huge difference, easily six figures in many cases.
Speaker: Exactly. the comparison the researchers made, six-footer versus someone five-foot-five over just one year, was already a few thousand dollars apart. Multiply that by 30 years of raises, building on raises, and you're heading into potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of difference.
Speaker: Especially fascinating was that it holds up even after they control for gender. So it's not simply men are taller and men get paid more. And that's exactly where the article kind of gets interesting, more than just a simple bias story. There's a competing camp of economists who argue that it's not about boardroom charisma or bias at all.
Speaker: They found that taller kids score higher in cognitive tests and think that ability gap is what's driving adult earnings difference and not the perception. So one camp says it's discrimination dressed up as merit. The other one says it's a real capability signal that happens to correlate with height?
Speaker: Well, the honest answer is it's not a settled argument. Both mechanisms could be operating simultaneously. But either way, the correlation isn't in dispute. which is exactly the part recruiters can't shrug off. I mean, if you don't know the why the wage premium exists, you can't assume your evaluation process is immune to it.
Speaker: That's what got me about the geography angle too. The high wage effect isn't uniform globally. As mentioned earlier, it's smallest in the US and Australia and considerably larger across parts of Asia and Latin America.
Speaker: For any organisations with offices in multiple countries, That's not just an academic footnote. It means the same evaluation habits could be quietly rewarding different groups depending on which office you're sitting in.
Speaker: Which brings us to the part that made me wince a bit, to be frank, the gender pay gap angle. The ABS has the average height gap between men and women in this country at around 14 centimetres, which is just under six inches. If you just ran the per inch wage premium across that gap as a rough illustration, you land somewhere around $6,000 a year. It's illustrative, not casual, but even as illustration, it makes the point. If a promotion process is unintentionally rewarding height, it's going to tilt towards men as a group on average, purely on the basis of typical height differences, regardless of which theory of why turns out to be correct.
Speaker: And it's not only height, going back to the other alleged common aspect of Michael Page Consultants' attractiveness, or in research terms, the beauty premium, over 43,000 MBA graduates were tracked across 15 More conventionally attractive graduates earned a meaningful premium over equally qualified peers, and the effect was much larger for the most attractive decile. They were also substantially more likely to land a prestigious role over that same period.
Speaker: Why am I not surprised, Adele? How many tall and attractive people do you see stuck in dead-end jobs or hear a complain about going for heaps of interviews and never getting an offer for a job they want? It just doesn't happen.
Speaker: Basically, there are two things going on under the surface here, how tall you are and how you look. And they're both quietly messing with how much you get paid and whether you get promoted. And the thing is, you won't find either of them written down on a job description anywhere.
Speaker: Well, that is true. All right, let's talk implications because this is where it stops being a curiosity and intellectual conversation and starts being a potential risk for recruiters and hiring managers.
Speaker: And this isn't just some kind of what if, you know, it's it's real. Regulatory bodies use this kind of data and scenario as the go-to example for indirect discrimination in their education material.
Speaker: A minimum height rule that sounds fair enough on paper No real reason for it job-wise, but it ends up excluding many more women than men. New Zealand's Human Rights Act runs on the same logic too. A rule that's applied evenly to everyone can still be unlawful if it ends up disadvantaging people on a protected ground, even without any intent to discriminate.
Speaker: So the exposure isn't just we might have some unconscious bias floating around. It's that an unexamined physical criterion... even an informal one nobody wrote down, can create actual legal risk the moment it maps onto sex or another protected characteristic.
Speaker: And the tricky bit is that appearance itself isn't a protected attribute in hiring, so nothing stops a hiring manager from rating the taller candidate as having more executive presence, say. That impression itself isn't illegal.
Speaker: It's only a problem if it's operating as an unintentional proxy that disadvantages a protected group. which is exactly why executive presence, as you put it, as a criterion, should make any hiring manager pause. It sounds objective, but really isn't it often just a proxy for looking the part.
Speaker: Okay, so what should recruiters do about all this? I know this seems like hiring 101 to some of our listeners, and we have covered this before with other editions of Question of the Week. However, we probably can't say this often enough.
Speaker: First things first, have an honest look at where your hiring is still running on gut feel. Unstructured interviews, no proper scoring against key criteria, that kind of thing. It's more common than probably people would like to admit or that we'd think. So the goal is to build in real objectivity and structure and make sure it's all defensible.
Speaker: And Ross, by defensible, I mean actually written down, documented. So if anyone ever asks, you can show you're working out, so to speak, and not just be saying, you know, trust me, it was fair. Honestly, that's not really good enough anymore in in today's market. And then if you push, you know, push comes to shove on that, it wouldn't stand up legally either.
Speaker: I would add, if a role genuinely has a physical requirement, height, reach, strength, whatever, write down the operational justification. Not something inherited from a JD nobody's revised in 15 years.
Speaker: Also, educate yourself and hiring managers on the halo effect specifically, Rather than talking about unconscious bias in the abstract, people correct for bias much more effectively once they've seen the data behind it rather than just being told it exists in theory.
Speaker: Remember, your impression of a candidate in a video interview may be impacted by whether the camera angle makes them look taller or shorter than they are. I think the article's closing point is the one that hiring managers should really pay attention to. This isn't about penalising tall people. Nobody chose their own height, of course. The point is narrower than that. It's that if your evaluation system is quietly rewarding height or attractiveness, it's happening without anyone approving it and probably without anyone noticing.
Speaker: Which means there's potentially a height or appearance premium sitting inside your REM data right now that no one's aware of. So from a recruiter standpoint, the action items are pretty concrete. Standardise interview structure, use scored rubrics tied to job-relevant competencies, scrutinise any physical requirement for genuine necessity, and train hiring managers on bias using real numbers rather than vague awareness training.
Speaker: And build in some kind of periodic pay equity check that goes beyond gender to see whether other physical proxies are correlating with outcomes. It's good note to end on. It's less hide is bad and more not assuming that well-intentioned hiring is automatically fair and non-discriminatory.
