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Episode 156 - Is old school recruiting become new school?
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This week features news about the sad passing of an industry legend, a brand refresh for Six Degrees, news of the US job market and BHP's same pay same job ruling that will change the landscape of labour hire forever.
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Transcript
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00:00:07
Speaker
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00:00:26
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Welcome to Recruitment News Australia. This is the news for the 14th of April, 2026. I'm Ross And I'm Adele Last.
BHP's High Court Appeal Dismissed
00:00:35
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The big news this week, Adele, is last Thursday's High Court ruling in BHP's appeal in the same job, same pay case.
00:00:43
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The High Court refused to grant special leave, meaning BHP is at the end of the road in terms of appeals. This ends BHP's legal campaign to overturn the initial orders from the Fair Work Commission and subsequent federal court decisions.
00:00:59
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It's a huge win for the Mining and Energy Union and Labor hire workers. That's right, over 2,000 mine workers at the Guniela Riverside, Peak Downs and Siraji Mines in central Queensland are impacted. The union has been very vocal about this decision being the cause of annual pay rises of $20,000 to $30,000 for the former labour-high
Impact on Mine Workers' Wages
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workers.
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Seems the High Court has reinforced the underlying principle of same-job, same-pay legislation, Adele, that labour-high workers should be paid the same as permanent employees doing equivalent work.
00:01:34
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It appears this decision is the definitive ruling that will end companies using labour-high arrangements to reduce wages. BHP had argued that their operations services arm provided a specialised service, not just labour, which in theory seemed a stretch and the court clearly wasn't convinced.
00:01:52
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The Fair Work Commission determined that the work performed by operations services employees was not for the provision of a service rather than for the supply of labour, leading to the regulated labour hire arrangement orders. This ruling confirms the government's intent of the same job, same pay laws. The next stage of the union's campaign will no doubt be invigorated by this win. The MEU mentioned they'll pursue similar orders at other mine sites.
00:02:18
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I read MEU President Mietz Hughes believes this decision will make it easier for them to get similar applications approved at other mine sites in New South Wales and Queensland. This ruling has set a significant precedent.
Six Degrees Executive Rebranding
00:02:30
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Six Degrees Executive has rebranded Adele, telling us they're reaffirming their commitment to human-led recruitment. What do you think? Is this necessary or window dressing?
00:02:41
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I like it. Their new tagline says, expertly human. It's short and sharp and seems to accurately reinforce their updated values, relationships first, integrity in action, and expertise that delivers. CEO Susie McInerney stated the refresh is aligning the brand with their team's longstanding approach.
00:03:02
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The rebrand also includes an updated website and refined colour palette, quite like the more reserved colours. However, I will always take issue with that terrible stock shot that populates far too many corporate websites of three people standing up, looking serious and pointing at a laptop.
00:03:21
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Does that ever happen in real life? Sorry, Paul, Nick and Susie, the three people in the photo. That's a donk-dong from me. Look, I think it is good that they've used their own real staff in the photos, but they are a little bit awkward, I will agree. There's one in particular on the homepage of two guys walking through the office looking quite lovingly at each other like they're about to hold hands, Ross.
00:03:47
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What else caught your eye? Well, The answer to the question that they ask on the homepage, why us, is our edge comes from empathy, intuition, and experience.
00:03:58
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I found the choice and order of words unusual. Four marks for originality. I would have preferred different words to communicate the same themes. For example, our edge comes from expertise, insight, and understanding.
00:04:16
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Oh, it definitely sounds very professional, Ross. Are you moonlighting as a marketing consultant there? No, absolutely i am not. I have no expertise in that area. Although, as you and some listeners may recall, I have written infrequently a review of the career page of some of the largest recruitment agencies in Australia.
00:04:37
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I last did that in 2024. And hot news, I am about to redo that exercise and there'll be a 2026 update. that I'll post to my blog sometime in the next four weeks or so.
US Job Market Concerns
00:04:50
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Excellent. Look forward to it. The latest US jobs report for March is a bit of a mixed bag, isn't it, Adele? It is, Ross. On one hand, non-farm employers added a strong 178,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate dropped to 4.3%. That's a nice rebound from February's loss of 133,000 jobs and about three times what economists had forecasted.
00:05:15
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It's good to see some resilience in the US labour market. However, the less welcome news is the sharp drop in labour market participation. Definitely a very concerning 400,000 workers left the labour market in March, causing the participation rate to fall to 61.9%. That's the lowest it's been since November 2021 and suggests more workers are taking early retirement and discouraged workers are dropping out of the labour market fact, discouraged workers were up by 144,000 and those who want work but haven't looked recently increased by 325,000 in March. It's quite concerning, especially since the quit rate is also incredibly low, meaning workers are staying in their jobs because opportunities for better positions have dried up.
00:06:00
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Seems so, even with the job growth, share of people unemployed for 27 weeks or more increased slightly to 25.4%.
00:06:10
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indicating difficulty getting back into work for those without a job. In the Good News column was the healthcare sector adding a significant 76,000 jobs. Construction, transport and warehousing also saw gains.
00:06:25
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And as we've been saying with almost all the surveys we've reported on recently, this report... was completed before the full impact of the war with Iran and high energy prices had hit the US economy. No doubt all eyes will be on the April jobs results released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the 8th of May.
00:06:48
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I've been looking over that 2026 motivation at work report, Ross, and it's damning about managerial failings. It seems clear that poor management practices are a huge problem in today's workplaces.
00:07:01
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The report highlights what I suspect everybody listening to us would identify with, unclear priorities and unproductive meetings as major issues. For sure. survey indicates that 78% of employees start their roles feeling motivated, but most don't maintain that motivation, which is directly caused by the environment created by leadership. The data points to a breakdown in three core areas for employees.
00:07:28
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cognitive overload, process friction and work that doesn't quite fit the person doing it. These factors contribute to a lack of clarity, which is the number one cause of declining employee motivation.
00:07:40
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Specifically, the lack of clarity about priorities. Clear priorities are the single biggest factor employees identified as important to their motivation, yet only one in three employees feel their priorities are clear on a typical workday.
00:07:57
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This suggests that busyness often fills the void where clear direction should be. The report says the problem is disproportionately affecting younger generations with the need for clarity extending beyond priorities. Gen Z emphasised manager support as a motivation driver.
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In summary, as per many previous similar surveys, managers are the primary driver of day-to-day employee experience and they generally aren't doing it very well.
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The survey reinforces that when managers understand what drives each person on their team, they are better equipped to set expectations, conduct meaningful one-on-one meetings and connect individual work to significant company outcomes.
00:08:42
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A new Indigenous-owned company has entered the local recruitment market. Former Drake and Adeco recruiter Megan Vanderkamp announced on LinkedIn last week the launch of Talented Tribe, a 100% Indigenous-owned national permanent recruitment business created alongside her husband and co-founder Jason Vanderkamp. an Aboriginal man from Malukadu country in Tasmania.
00:09:07
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Megan Vanderkamp was most
Indigenous Recruitment Initiatives
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recently state manager for Drake in Queensland, having also worked for WorkPAC for two and a half years and before that at Deco for eight years. Jason Vanderkamp's LinkedIn profile shows he's been employed for 26 years in the Australian Federal Police Department and is currently on assignment in Papua New Guinea's capital, Port Moresby. Talented Tribe's mission is to connect great people with great organisations while supporting meaningful employment pathways for First Nations communities with organisations genuinely committed to reconciliation action plans, diversity and Indigenous engagement.
00:09:44
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Australia's recruitment industry is mourning the loss of a true
Legacy of John MacArthur
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pioneer. John MacArthur has passed away at the age of 98. Known as John Mack, he founded MacArthur Management Services in 1969 and spent nearly six decades helping shape one of Australia's most respected recruitment for consulting firms.
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He was a trailblazer of the 1960s and he played a key role in building the industry, including helping establish what is now the Recruitment Consulting and Staffing Association, the RCSA. He was also instrumental in ending the practice of charging temporary worker fees, driven by his belief that no one should have to pay for the right to work.
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John leaves behind a lasting legacy, not just in his business, but in the values, standards and professionalism that continue to help shape the recruitment industry today. He's survived by his wife, Annie, four children, 14 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren, leaving behind not only in an extraordinary professional legacy, but a deeply cherished personal one.
Traditional vs. Digital Recruiting Methods
00:10:49
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Question of the week. Has old school recruiting become new school? Okay. So what's this and where's it coming from, Adele? This is from a post that I saw on LinkedIn this week from Peter Knoblet from Sentinel Collective, who talked about a question that he asks recruiters, what would they do if they walked in tomorrow and they had none of the tools that they currently have that help them do their job? So there's no LinkedIn information. no seek, no lusher, no sales nav, your CRM's gone, you walk in tomorrow and there is nothing and you need to do your job. And it's a question that he poses to people to get them to ponder what they would do and what the real skills are.
00:11:33
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I find this really interesting. It's kind of a bit of ah a time travel situation or time travel question of going back into history and thinking about what it might be like, but we don't have to imagine it, do we, Ross? Because... That was your early days in recruitment, right? Correct. Correct, Adele. That's right. I've been around so long that when I started, there was no computer on my desk. In fact, there wasn't even a computer in the consulting space.
00:11:59
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The receptionist had one to word process resumes. And in fact, people could still smoke in the office mean i when I joined the recruitment industry. You're going tell me you had pens and paper though, right? you're not on a tablet with a chisel or something, right?
00:12:17
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We definitely had pens and paper. But going to say four years, I did not have a computer on my desk. relied on those 4x6 index cards. And then after getting a computer on my desk, I could only access the data database. There was no commercially available internet for, I'm going to say, another three or four years. So it was probably only year seven in my recruitment career that emails turned up.
00:12:50
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Well, see, this might surprise people to think about this, right? Because you think in today's current age of all of the tech we've got available to us and all of it moving so fast, you know, this is not that long ago. But tell us then what you did. What did you do when you walked in? You've got no computer. So so imagine this, listeners, you've got no computer on your desk. You've got a phone and a pen and paper. What did you actually do? How did you recruit with that? Well, I mean, that is exactly what it was like for me. We had manila folders full of ah resumes. And then we had another manila folder that was full of jobs. You needed to pick up the phone and call, call candidates or call clients.
00:13:30
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If you were not on the phone, then what were you doing? Like there literally wasn't anything else to do. Oh, of course, unless you were interviewing a candidate or seeing a client, certainly interviewing a candidate was common.
00:13:44
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Seeing a client face-to-face in London in 1989 when I started was very uncommon. And my boss rightfully looked at you and if you were not on the phone, it's like, well, what are you doing, Ross? Like that's how you indicated you were working by talking on the phone. No wonder they were smoking as well. I can just imagine. Yes. Okay. so So you're on the phone. yeah You're calling companies to try and solicit work from them. How are you – like that's a tough gig, obviously, but how are you doing that? How are you finding these companies? How do you know who to call?
00:14:22
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Okay, so to be clear, when I started the beginning of 89 in London, we didn't need to know or need to do business development. The jobs just poured in and the client either phoned the office directly and then a consultant took the job.
00:14:40
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And the major technique that you were taught as when you were talking to the client, sorry, this is permanent accounting recruitment I'm talking here. So as you're talking to the client, and asking them details about the job.
00:14:53
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you are then thinking about who of your candidates you can propose in the same conversation. Because the goal, and certainly what we were trained to do, was not only to take the job, but to also book in confirmed interviews. So that was the segue. And the goal then of the consultant who took the job was to book in however many candidates that they had that were suitable And then another consultant would overhear and then this is what would happen. They'd click their fingers and mouth to everyone pointing, say, I'm the consultant, the client's taking, the client's taking. And when the the phrase the client's taking meant that the client was accepting candidates and
00:15:43
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through a verbal referral and booking in interviews. Now, of course- Okay, before you go on from this, I just want to i just want to um visualize this because I'm imagining this on the phone, this sitting, standing, this clicking of fingers, the pointing. This has got full wolf you know Wall Street wolf vibes going on for me. Is that the right picture? Seriously, this is this is exactly this is exactly what it was because this this is how internally competitive it was at accountancy personnel now, Hayes, was that you wanted to completely book up the client's allocated time for interviews because when the job was registered, so what that meant was the other officers got access to the job, um you didn't want them to book in their candidates because you didn't want another office to potentially get the fee. You wanted your office to get the fee. So that was the whole point of cramming the client's interview schedule with the candidates from your office to prevent not not the competitors, not the office that might have been one street away yeah the AP network from getting a chance to fill the job.
00:16:54
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Wow, so competitive. And what I also heard in there was you talk about As the client is telling you the job brief, you're thinking about candidates that you know in your network, in your database, which is actually your head.
The Role of Human Intelligence in Recruitment
00:17:09
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so this is the ultimate. This is this is hi never mind AI. This is human intelligence. This is you using your brain and memory and recalling people and referring them on the spot. so completely there is a really different skill set there. But this is what I'm asking the question about, has all of that become new again? Should we be looking at honing those skills? Well, there's no doubt to me with the advances that I'm seeing in large language models, and no doubt you're seeing it even more so because you've been a little bit closer to it than me recently, that all of the, let's call it um behind the scenes work, largely um those large language models will be able to do or do a substantial amount of it. So it's freeing up your time. What are you freeing up that time for? Well, ultimately, it should be for what I spent as much as time as possible ah when I started, which is having a conversation with a client or a candidate, whether it's in person or over the phone. Yeah. I think it also emphasises that human interaction around being able to build confidence in people,
00:18:22
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ah create influential conversations with both clients and candidates. And I actually recall this early in my career and I started a little bit after you, but i did I didn't have card files. I did actually have a computer, but I do recall starting in one role and I worked for Sue Healy. It was actually one of her earlier businesses in office support. And I walked into the office and there was literally nothing in that system, in the CRM. There was no candidates. There were no clients. We had to literally start from scratch.
00:18:52
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And I had to sit there and think about, well, how am I going to do that? I did have access to the internet, but there was no Google. So you didn't know, you couldn't search for things. You had to know the the website you were looking at. But I had to try and find where people were. And I had to do that physically. So it was quite literally getting out of my chair and going to events, going to breakfast, going to things where I could bump into people, being out in the street, going out at lunch in Melbourne on Collins Street, you know, back in the 90s was a means of business development. Because you bumped into people and you met people or you, you know, spoke to someone in the coffee shop and and asked about what they did and and picked up a candidate. So there was this idea of being openly connected to the community and to your network around you. It made it perhaps a little less global, I suppose, but it allowed you to, you know, have a real tangible perspective.
00:19:42
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asset that you were building. and I'm not sure I got that personally early in my career. I remember going to some of those things thinking, what am I doing? Or what a big waste of time. I went there for three or four hours and i picked up two names. Who cares? And this was pre-LinkedIn. So I picked up names, meaning I picked up cards, actually, people's business cards and had to follow them up. It wasn't until about 10 years into my recruitment career that I started to learn the value of the network. The network that I had started to build and the reputation and the name had started to pay me back. So I had calls from candidates I had previously placed that were coming back to me. I had clients who remembered me and and took me to another company when they moved.
00:20:21
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So that was really powerful. But I realised that probably really late in my career. As I said, I was a good 10 years in. Had I known that, if I could talk to my younger self, that's what I would would do as a newer recruiter now. I would be networking so that I could build that reputation earlier and more definitively earlier in the career, so it would pay back earlier as well.
00:20:43
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And certainly what you've just said has prompted me to think clearly that was very apparent to me when I started, was scarcity. You had a scarcity of candidates. Of course, you couldn't post an ad on the internet because it didn't exist.
00:20:58
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The only way could get candidates was to run an ad, and there was only one day of the week that would reliably generate candidates from ad response. So that meant you had to really work your existing candidates. You couldn't just easily get others or go into your database. It was just the manual files.
00:21:16
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And for anyone who wants a fantastic cinematic example of the value of scarcity, Go and watch Glengarry Glen Ross. ah That is a fantastic movie about old school sales. It's about land sales in the US and it features Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin.
00:21:40
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and But it's just a wonderful example of old school sales on the phone. So people listening to this might say, well, that's crazy. Why would we do all these things the hard way when there's tools now that make life easier? We're not going back in time. We're moving forward.
00:21:56
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i think there is blandness now that's come out of that, though. We've started to see, obviously, things, particularly email and outreaches, that have started to become very vanilla in their style and they're not having the impact. they're not having the influence. So i guess what we're saying in this question of has you know old school become new school, you've got to go back to the raw basics of this job and influence is always going to be the number one difference between a good recruiter and a great recruiter. Without any doubt, if you had to encapsulate what do the very best recruiters do at a much higher level than the average is that they're masterful at influencing. And that remains, and I think will remain for a long time to come, a skill that AI won't be able to supersede. So it's only taken 30 years, Ross, but you're back in fashion.
00:22:53
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ah Certainly what I learnt ah back in 1989 is, i look, i think it's always been important, but the elevated importance now, I think, is very clear. And it will be, to me, very obvious who has got those skills because in five years' time, if you don't have those skills, there will not be a job for you in agency recruitment because all of those other, let's call it back office type roles will be done by ai