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News for the week beginning 5 February 2024 and Question of the Week: "When is a career setback or failure valuable?"
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Transcript
Weekly News Introduction
00:00:08
Speaker
This is the news for we commencing 5th February 2024 by Madel Last.
Matching Service Japan's Australian Market Entry
00:00:14
Speaker
Japanese publicly listed recruitment and staffing company Matching Service Japan has entered the Australian recruitment market, having last Wednesday announced the acquisition of 75% of the shares of 4 quarters recruitment, a Melbourne based recruitment firm. The total price of the transaction is around $36 million including advisory fees.
00:00:34
Speaker
Four quarters recruitment was founded in 2011 by Brendan Shawcross, Anthony Nardone, Jules Stockie and Fraser Macmillan, all former managers at Robert Half Australia. The company provides permanent and temporary services in finance and accounting, technology, banking and financial services, HR and business support through four offices, two in Melbourne and one in each of Sydney and Perth. The firm currently has 54 employees.
Job Market Trends and Challenges
00:01:02
Speaker
Job vacancies decreased by a seasonally adjusted 0.7% in the three months to November 2023. Despite this being the sixth consecutive quarterly decrease, the 388,000 job vacancies were 70.8% higher than the 228,000 vacancies of February 2020, just prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
00:01:27
Speaker
The proportion of Australian businesses reporting at least one vacancy decreased from 21.7% in August to 19.7% in November, but it's still substantially higher than the 11% of businesses reporting at least one vacancy in February 2020. On a state basis, Queensland reported the highest number of employers reporting at least one vacancy at 24.1% and Tasmania had the lowest at 12.7%.
00:01:57
Speaker
The desperation for teachers in New South Wales has forced the Department of Education to implement drastic measures late in 2023 in a bid to attract more teachers, including cold calling ex-teachers, in hopes of luring them back into the classroom. Late last year, the department instituted the Teachers Re-Engage program to increase the number of casual relief teachers in New South Wales public schools.
00:02:21
Speaker
As a result, teachers who have previously worked in public schools are being contacted and asked if they would like to return. Government figures show demand for secondary teachers will exceed the supply of new graduates by 4,100 individuals between 2021 and 2025, and a 2023 Australian Education Union survey found 4 out of 10 early career teachers say they plan to leave the profession within a decade.
Financial Results and Economic Indicators
00:02:48
Speaker
Manpower Group reported fourth quarter revenue in 2023 fell 5.2% in constant currency to US$4.63 billion. After restructuring and goodwill impairment charges, the bottom line returned a loss of US$84.5 million. Manpower Australia revenue was down 45% year on year due to the loss of the Australian Defence Force RPO contract.
00:03:14
Speaker
Robert Half reported that it sees a more positive backdrop heading into this year when it announced fourth quarter earnings on 30 January, though Q4 revenue fell 15.2% year-over-year when adjusted for the effects of currencies and billing days. Overall, firm placement revenue fell 22.6%, while contract staffing revenue fell 17.7%.
00:03:39
Speaker
Quarterly Net Profit declined 41% on a year-on-year basis to US$87.3 million. On a full year basis, Robert Half's revenue declined 10.7% and Net Profit dropped 37.5% to US$411 million. LinkedIn beat revenue expectations in its fiscal second quarter, ended 31 December 2023, according to parent company Microsoft.
00:04:07
Speaker
LinkedIn revenue increased 8% in constant currency ahead of expectations driven by slightly better than expected performance across all businesses. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said LinkedIn revenue was $4.19 billion for the quarter. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said we continue to see strong global membership growth driven by member signups in key markets like Germany and India.
00:04:35
Speaker
The ABC reports outback business operators are worried about recruitment difficulties and resulting staff shortages in the peak tourist season due to upcoming changes in visa requirements for UK citizens.
Visa Changes and Workforce Impact
00:04:48
Speaker
From July 1, backpackers from the United Kingdom can apply for up to three visas under the Working Holiday Maker, WHM scheme, without having to complete the three months of specified work. The change is the result of the Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the UK.
00:05:05
Speaker
The 88 days, as backpackers refer to the rite of passage, is a staple of the Australian experience and involves visitors spending time picking fruit and working in hospitality across rural and regional Australia. But backpackers on a UK passport will no longer be required to complete the 88 days, meaning they can essentially choose Bondi over Birdsville, causing even greater difficulties for those parts of Australia relying on young backpackers to boost seasonal workforces.
00:05:32
Speaker
UK citizens were the number one recipients of the WHM visa in the most recent financial year, with 38,000 visas issued.
Recruitment Strategies in Defence Forces
00:05:42
Speaker
Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh said the federal government was considering ways to grow Australia's armed forces amid recruitment issues.
00:05:50
Speaker
including allowing people from foreign countries to serve. It comes as large numbers of ADF personnel have signed on to receive a one-off retention bonus payment of $50,000. About 85% of eligible personnel have received the payment for the commitment to stay another three years with the Defence Force following their initial period of service.
00:06:11
Speaker
The payments were set aside in the last federal budget with $400 million earmarked as one measure designed to address the ADF separation rate of 11.2% recorded in the 2022-23 financial year, with the military also failing to meet its retention goals.
00:06:29
Speaker
The move comes as the US Navy has opened the door to individuals who didn't graduate from high school or get a GED, marking the second time in about a year that the service has lowered entrance benchmarks as it struggles to attract the dwindling number of young people who can meet the military's physical, mental and moral standards. Vice Admiral Rick Cheeseman, the Navy's chief of personnel, said that of the 2,442 applicants who were turned away last year,
00:06:57
Speaker
as many as 500 of them could score high enough to get in. He said he'd already sent an order to his recruiters to start calling the previously rejected applicants in the hope they are still interested in a Navy career. The NSW governments make the MOVE campaign launched last week aims to lure essential workers currently residing in Sydney and Adelaide to transfer to regional NSW.
00:07:23
Speaker
The campaign will shed light on the stories of first responders, health care workers and educators about how moving to regional New South Wales has granted them a better work-life balance, more time for personal pursuits and an overall improved quality of life. The Make the Move campaign is part of the government's bigger Essential Worker Attraction Program, which the government launched to address the fast growth of job vacancies in regional New South Wales.
00:07:48
Speaker
The New South Wales government recently doubled the available support under the Rural Health Workforce Incentives Scheme from $10,000 to $20,000.
Australia's Economic Performance
00:07:57
Speaker
South Australia has for the first time been named as Australia's top performing economy with the CommSec State of the States report praising its strong jobs market and construction sector. In a report released last Monday,
00:08:11
Speaker
CommSec chief economist Craig James said South Australia has emerged as the strongest performer against that bat prop, while Victoria and New South Wales are now tied for second place. It's the first time South Australia has ranked number one in the 15-year history of CommSec's State of the States report. Population growth in South Australia has tripled over the past two years, which is showing up in a strong housing market and overall economic activity, James said, of South Australia's strength.
00:08:39
Speaker
Its nation-leading real economic growth measured 9% higher than the four-year averages in the September quarter of 2023, beating New South Wales at 8.3%. That growth has been underpinned by South Australia's unemployment rate, which had the greatest relative improvement compared to all other states and territories over the past decade.
Office Mandates vs. Job Satisfaction
00:09:01
Speaker
The Washington Post last week reported new research from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh
00:09:09
Speaker
suggesting that return to office mandates may not help companies' financial performances, but they can make workers less satisfied with their jobs and work-life balance. The study analyzed a sample of standard and pause 500 firms to explore the effects of office mandates, including average change in quarterly results and company stock price. Those results were compared with changes at companies without return to work office mandates. The outcome showed the mandates made no difference.
00:09:38
Speaker
Firms with mandates did not experience financial boosts compared to those without. The sample covered 457 firms and 4,455 quarterly observations between June 2019 and January 2023. Return to the office is dead, said Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University and expert on remote work. The proportion of paid work from home days has stabilized at 28%
00:10:05
Speaker
that's four times greater than the 7% pre-pandemic level. Bloom added that long-term trends suggest the share of employees who work from home is only likely to grow from here due to newer firms and younger CEOs being generally more enthusiastic about hybrid work arrangements, meaning they'll get more popular over time as existing business heads retire.
Career Setbacks: Value and Stories
00:10:27
Speaker
And that's the news for the week beginning the 5th of February, 2024. I'm Ross Clannett.
00:10:40
Speaker
Question of the week this week is an interesting one that we've been pondering around your own career. When is a career setback or a failure valuable? And I know Ross you have been doing some reading through the Harvard Business Review and you found an interesting article to talk about today. Tell us about this information, this research. Yes I love the Harvard Business Review. Adele as you know and I was
00:11:08
Speaker
Taken by the title of the article, setbacks can actually boost your career. Let me just read a little of it. Many of us will face a setback at some point in our careers. Perhaps we'll be passed over for a promotion, fail to get the job we want or even be asked to resign.
00:11:25
Speaker
Because such experiences can shake our confidence and make us doubt our worth, trying to shield ourselves from them is instinctive. But what if by focusing on the obvious negative aspects of setbacks, we miss their silver lining? Then these two academics go on to talk about their research and let me pick up the article a little bit further on. When we talk to our interviewees about their career choices and the opportunities they thought were available to them,
00:11:54
Speaker
We found that people who had experienced setbacks, despite initially feeling they'd fallen off track, had had a positive shift in perspective. The jolt of a setback had pushed them to reconsider and reframe their careers in ways that were more authentic to their inner selves, and that helped them be more successful. In contrast, individuals without career setbacks had predominantly pursued conventional paths driven by safe choices.
00:12:21
Speaker
wider career opportunities seemed unattractive or invisible to them. So Ross I'm interested to know, do you agree with that? Tell us about your own story. Have you had a career setback or a failure that you think in hindsight maybe was something more valuable than what it looked like at the time? Without doubt I mean I've certainly had a number of setbacks and failures but the most significant one
00:12:50
Speaker
without doubt was my exit from Recruitment Solutions. Greg Savage had been my boss, incredibly supportive of me, had helped me develop my career from being a unsuccessful recruiter to being a very successful recruiter, to being an unsuccessful leader, to being a very successful leader. He left the business and I had a new boss and he and I did not get on.
00:13:16
Speaker
And ultimately that led to a conversation where he said he was going to re-advertise for my role. And I was welcome to apply for that role if I so chose to. And of course, that's basically saying, I don't have any confidence in you. So I said, no, that's not going to happen. Cut a long story short.
00:13:43
Speaker
I negotiated an exit, so technically I wasn't fired, but basically I was. And that was pretty devastating for me because I'd been at the company at Recruitment Solutions for 10 and a half years. And I had always viewed my career there long-term and suddenly, or suddenly, certainly within a matter of months, that completely changed.
00:14:13
Speaker
And as a result of me exiting the business, my first wife and I then moved to Melbourne and I joined SACS Consulting, didn't really work out. I joined Jeff Slade's business, didn't really work out, both of them for different reasons. But I think at my core, I was still shell shocked.
00:14:42
Speaker
It's kind of a thing about when you break up in a long-term relationship, jumping back into a new one is often not the thing to do and it's kind of the same with jobs. And ultimately, after I left Jeff's business, I went out of recruitment. Not many people know this and I bought a coaching franchise, which was a complete disaster and I lost all my money. So I'd not only had my recruitment career
00:15:12
Speaker
uh derailed I then made a very poor choice with respect to a business and pretty much lost all my money and then of course my first marriage uh finished so that was a trifecta of events within a 12-month period that oh wow that's really caused significant setback and I was devastated I was absolutely devastated I
00:15:43
Speaker
I really reached rock bottom. I felt at the age of 33. No, I must've been a little bit older than that. Maybe 34 or 35. Here I was. I'd worked really hard. I'd done very well by the traditional benchmarks of success. And suddenly or within 12 months, I had none of those things anymore. And ultimately that led me to
00:16:12
Speaker
becoming a recruitment trainer, and then that progressed through to me becoming a trainer, a coach, a speaker, and having the business that I have today, which I really enjoy. I really enjoy it. I never saw myself as someone who
00:16:35
Speaker
was going to be self-employed. That was never part of my journey that I saw it because I didn't come from a family of entrepreneurs or self-employed people. My mother and father were both employees and that's sort of what I was surrounded by. So that piece of research really did
00:16:59
Speaker
resonate with me because I've got no doubt if I'd not had that setback then I would have pursued a conventional career path and I probably would still be employed today.
Career Changes and New Opportunities
00:17:12
Speaker
Well I have a similar view of it I believe, different story of course but a similar view about the article as well and I agree that these seemingly you know
00:17:26
Speaker
failures in your career or diversions, in fact, can end up being the silver lining, as the article says. My story is one around, and it'll be familiar to people listening out there, around restraint clauses. I left a business in the early parts of my career and didn't really respect the restraint clause in the way that you should respect it as an employee.
00:17:51
Speaker
and got my fingers and toes burnt in a legal capacity and really learnt my lesson. I was very gun shy after that and I always have great respect for the clauses and the contracts that I'm signing and encourage anybody that ever works for me or has worked with me to honour your commitment that you've made to a previous employer. It made me so nervous that when I did leave Horner after a long time, that was 13 years, I was very
00:18:21
Speaker
concerned about joining another recruitment agency and I wanted to honor the restraint. I'd worked at a very senior level obviously being privy to a lot of confidential information and decided to sort of take a diversion out of my career and look at what else could I do that wasn't directly jumping into another recruitment business and I made the approach actually to the RCSA to Charles Cameron around if you know casual work contract work if he knew of any recruitment agencies that might consider me
00:18:50
Speaker
on a casual basis or a contract basis, pretty rare to do that sort of thing at that level. But I thought I'd just sort of throw my name out there. And Charles very generously offered me a position within the RCSA to work with them in helping build up membership and start to streamline some of the sponsorship stuff that was going on in there at the time, because a few years ago. And it was a bit of a different role. It wasn't recruitment anymore. It was in the recruitment industry, but it took me in a different career path in the sense that I was now managing
00:19:20
Speaker
membership and partnership arrangements. It had me speaking to literally hundreds of recruitment agency owners about their businesses and the pain and challenges that they were having over and over again in that period of time was about six months I worked there and I started to hear a theme. I started to hear this theme around the issues of finding good people for our industry and
00:19:45
Speaker
and rookie training, you know, how to find good people to bring them in and how do we train them appropriately. So the seed was formed in what looked like a career setback, looked like I was out of the industry, looked like I might've been done for. That was the end of my career, maybe as a recruiter. But what was forming was the seeds of the idea that became career lasso, became my own business. And like you, I never envisaged that I would own my own business and be
00:20:11
Speaker
self-employed either. I also come from a family of migrants who, you know, you were just very lucky and happy to have a job, any job, never mind starting your own business. So I have a different career path to what I intended as well. And I now look back, very easy to look back. They do say, you know, hindsight's 20-20. And what that means is you can look back and see those positives in your career as ways to
00:20:39
Speaker
take your journey in a different direction, not necessarily what you plan, but not bad either, not in a negative way. So I really think this article might resonate with a lot of people listening as well. And we'd love to hear about those stories. Very happy to share information with people if you want to reach out to Ross and I. But yeah, it's about a mindset view. Do you think that's the case for us? Well, I perhaps want to point to the
00:21:09
Speaker
authentic self because I think for me my mindset shifted significantly about what that actually was and what I can see now was that I was running my career through the prism of other people. I was doing what I thought other people expected of me or wanted me to do. I hadn't really
00:21:36
Speaker
genuinely considered, well, what do I want? What's an authentic expression of myself? And I really see now with the business I've had for 22 years that it is an expression of myself. And I think a classic example of that would be reading my blogs. If anyone's read my blogs and then met me in person, I suspect they'd be pretty clear that
00:22:01
Speaker
I wrote each of those blogs. It wasn't something generated by AI or a ghostwriter. And that to me is the most satisfying thing about the change that I've made. I truly feel that I'm the best version of myself and I'm not quite sure whether I would have experienced that had I remained an employee.
Mindset and Self-Reflection in Careers
00:22:22
Speaker
So both of us are, you know, mid to later in our careers and it's easy to look back in the way that we're reflecting today. But I suppose,
00:22:31
Speaker
If you're listening to this and you may be earlier in your career, early stages of your career or right in the middle of it and you've maybe faced a setback or you're looking at one now, I suppose what we're trying to say is think about shifting your mindset on looking at it differently. Look at those situations as an opportunity to say, what can I learn and where is it going to take me in a different direction? And don't be afraid of that. Maybe just kind of let it,
00:22:58
Speaker
roll out and let it play out how it's going to play out and you might be pleasantly surprised yeah particularly through the prism of what's the best expression of myself and it may not have been that job even though you were very attached to it from a title point of view or remuneration point of view prestige status point of view as i found being a
00:23:25
Speaker
executive general manager in a publicly listed recruitment company was not all that it was cracked up to be and I found much more career satisfaction being a self-employed recruitment leadership coach and trainer. So Ross bringing it back to our original question, when is a career setback valuable?
00:23:50
Speaker
In my experience, when you take the opportunity to stop and think, I can see my mistakes were compounded because I quickly wanted to get back into work and I didn't really think through the alternatives. And that's the thing that I wish I had done sooner. I considered what my options were, perhaps sought alternative points of view.
00:24:19
Speaker
and really thought long-term because I can see at the time I was just reacting out of short-term pain rather than thinking about the next 30 years of my career. 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 hop onto the review section and give us a review next time you're listening.
00:24:47
Speaker
on your favorite episode and thanks for listening.