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Episode 40
333 Plays11 months ago
News for the week beginning 4 December 2023 and Question of the Week: 'What is acceptable attire in a recruitment office these days?'
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Transcript
Weekly News Summary
00:00:08
Speaker
I'm Adele Last and this is the news for we commencing 4th December 2023.
Australia's Gender Pay Gap Update
00:00:13
Speaker
The Workplace Gender Equality Agency, WEGO, last week released its annual analysis of data based on the results of their employer's Census of Businesses with 100 or more employees covering nearly half of Australia's workforce. This year's Gender Equality Scorecard, GES,
00:00:30
Speaker
shows that an average annual pay difference of $26,393 remains between men and women in Australia, down by $1,322 on the previous GES. This decline means Australia's gender pay gap has hit a new low of 21.7%, meaning on average for every $1 men earn in Australia, women earn 78 cents.
Women CEOs in Australia: A Slight Decline
00:00:53
Speaker
Meanwhile, the representation of women on boards has stayed the same at 34%, while one in four boards has no women.
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the proportion of women CEOs dropped from 22.3% to 22%. On a date yet to be specified in early 2024, the individual median gender pay gaps of more than 5,000 employers across Australia will be made publicly accessible.
Positive Financial Outlook for IT Sector
00:01:17
Speaker
IT Recruiter High Tech Group announced its outlook for the current financial year remains positive. Based on unaudited internal management accounts for the period up to the end of October 2023,
00:01:28
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The group's expected profit for the first half of the current financial year is expected to be greater than the prior year period. Hitec said it remains a strong profitable and resilient business with growing revenue and record profit, a strong balance sheet, solid cash reserves and no debt. For its fiscal year ended the 30th of June 2023, the group reported operating revenue rose 17.8% to $74.4 million and its EBITDA rose 13%.
00:01:56
Speaker
to reach $7.63 million.
Challenges for Skilled Migrants in Employment
00:02:00
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Skilled migrants in Australia face recruitment barriers that lead to a surplus of overqualified delivery and taxi drivers while necessary jobs remain unfilled, a new report has revealed.
00:02:11
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Our research shows that skilled migrants who move to Australia and students who move to Australia and students who stay in Australia after study end up in jobs lower than their skill level due to barriers in the application process, said June Tran, a lecturer with the RMIT University in Melbourne.
00:02:28
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The four most significant barriers were identified as recruiters setting unfair requirements for local work experience, recruiters only recognizing local certificates or qualifications, applicants not understanding the application requirements in Australia, such as cover letters and addressing key selection criteria, and bias towards applicants from Western countries with less experience over people from Asian non-English speaking countries.
00:02:53
Speaker
Dr. Tran's report, Diversity Climate Discrimination Against Skilled Migrants in Recruitment, was published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources in October, 2023. At the time of publication, Dr. Tran said, government, industry and HR need to communicate about fairer recruitment processes for skilled migrants. These barriers to employment impact everyone as the jobs we so desperately need to fill aren't being filled, and instead we have an army of overqualified delivery and taxi drivers.
Changes in Employer-Nominated Visas
00:03:23
Speaker
Australia's Department of Home Affairs last week introduced changes to employer-nominated visas. From the 25th of November, there will no longer be a limit to the number of onshore temporary skill shortage visas that can be lodged in relation to short-term skills occupation list occupations. Currently, these applicants would need to travel offshore to facilitate lodgement of their third application and also would need to demonstrate the intention to remain in Australia as a genuine temporary entrant.
00:03:51
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this requirement will also be relaxed for this cohort. The subclass 186 temporary residence transition TRT stream visa lets skilled workers who are nominated by their employer live and work in Australia permanently. Employers will be able to nominate all TSS visa holders for the TRT regardless of which occupation list their approved position falls under.
00:04:14
Speaker
TSS visa holders will be required to demonstrate that they have worked in their position with their sponsoring employer for two years full time, a reduction from the current requirement of three years full time. These changes are expected to provide both employers and visa holders with greater certainty.
Reforms in Employment Services System
00:04:32
Speaker
Australia's employment services system needs large-scale reform to fundamentally rebuild, according to a parliamentary review by the government released last week.
00:04:41
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It should not be controversial to state that full privatisation has failed. Select Committee on Workforce Australia Employment Services Chair and Member of Parliament Julian Hill said that the previous government implicitly admitted this when it returned a large caseload to the public sector with Workforce Australia Online. It's harsh but true to say that Australia no longer has an effective, coherent national employment services scheme. We have an inefficient, outsourced, fragmented social security compliance management system
00:05:10
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that sometimes gets someone a job against all odds," Hill added. The Howard government privatised employment services nearly 25 years ago. The committee's report includes 75 recommendations in its ambitious blueprint to rebuild the Commonwealth Employment Services System.
00:05:26
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The committee also calls for the Commonwealth Government to take a more active role by establishing Employment Services Australia to, among other things, lead each region via physical hubs. The committee also wants a new regulatory culture with a more relational contracting model in which service partners are contracted to work with government and employers in local communities. In its report, the committee also calls for greater professionalism across the sector's workforce to reduce the 40% staff turnover rate
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and improve the pay, skills and conditions of critical frontline staff. It also calls for establishing the Employment Services Quality Commission as an independent regulator.
Consultant Spending in Victoria
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Despite targets to cut spending on consultants and contractors,
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The amount spent by the Victorian Government and its various departments between 2018 and 2022 increased by 47%. Based on what departments published in their annual reports and other data they provided, the public service spend on contractors and consultants was $2.8 billion in 2018-19 and $4.2 billion in 2021-22. Victoria's Auditor General Andrew Greaves said in a report released last Wednesday.
00:06:38
Speaker
Across the four years, Victorian Government Departments spent $561 million on consultants and $11.1 billion on contractors, with 57% of the total spend going to the top five vendors – KPMG, EY, PWC, Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group. The report is critical of the fact that Victorian Government Departments aren't required to consistently record, monitor or report on what they are spending on contractors and consultants.
00:07:06
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This results in a lack of transparency, Mr Greaves said. From 2018 to 2022, the Victorian Government set targets to reduce government spending on contractors and consultants, but the Government did not publicly report progress against these targets.
Benefits of Gender-Balanced Firms
00:07:20
Speaker
Companies with more gender-balanced workforces outperformed their least-balanced peers by as much as 2 percentage points annually between 2013 and 2022, a BlackRock study of the MSCI World Index has found. The higher return on assets held true within countries and within sectors, and was especially marked for companies where gender parity was greatest in revenue producing, engineering, and top-paying jobs.
00:07:46
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While other researchers have also sought to document links between gender equality and performance, this global study of roughly 1,250 big companies that report at least some gender data is one of the largest ever done. Companies in the middle quintile for gender balance reported an average annual return on assets of 7.7% compared to 5.6% for those with the highest share of men in their workforce and 6.1% for those with the highest share of women the study found.
00:08:16
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They also found that companies where the gender diversity in mid and top level management reflected the overall workforce tended to have lower employee turnover and provided higher returns. The researchers also looked for links between personnel policies and financial performance and found that US companies, where women took longer maternity leave, outperformed others.
Evolution of Casual Work Attire
00:08:39
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Dressing more casually for work has increasingly become commonplace across a range of industries, but some of the outfits staff are donning now as they return to the office might be taking it too far. About half of UK employers say that their employees aren't presenting themselves acceptably on the job, and wearing pyjamas, leggings and hoodies, and showing up with messy or unwashed hair, according to a survey from Hiring Platform Indeed.
00:09:01
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included responses from over 1,000 workers and 500 employers. Some 30% of those employers said they've started enforcing stricter dress codes or would if they could. It comes as the share of workers dressing in business professional attire had 3% this year, the lowest level since Gallup began collecting data on it in 2002. In 2019, about 7% of workers said they wear a suit or formal business wear to work.
00:09:28
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Employers said when attending face-to-face meetings with clients and stakeholders staff are actually dressing more formally than before the pandemic. The indeed survey found but they're dressing down significantly when they are in the office with colleagues. There are also some big generational differences in who dresses up for work today. Somewhat surprisingly Gen Z workers are the most keen on dressing up for all workplace situations. Over 40% dress in business attire in front of clients compared to 15% of those age 35 or older.
00:09:57
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In the office in general, more than 20% of Gen Z workers wear professional attire, compared to just 9% of workers 35 years old and over. And that's your recruitment news for the week beginning the 4th of December, 2023.
Impact of Attire on Professional Perception
00:10:13
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I'm Ross Clennett.
00:10:23
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Question of the week this week has been prompted by that last news story where we were talking about how dressing down at work may have gone too far. So curious to ask, what's acceptable attire in a recruitment office these days? Ross, what do you think? Well, let's start with my experience. I was someone that turned up every day for work
00:10:51
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every day of my recruitment career in a suit. And for almost every one of those days, I wore a tie. Towards the end, I might have had my tie off on some days, but I wore a suit. Now, the caveat here is I was recruiting in the Sydney CBD and then the Melbourne CBD, and I was recruiting accountants.
00:11:16
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My clients were CFOs, finance managers, finance directors, and almost all of them, all the males wore ties. So I was replicating what my clients were wearing. And that was important for me. I felt ready for work. I felt in work mode. And when I lived in Sydney,
00:11:43
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I caught the ferry home. So when I left the office, part of the ritual of leaving the office was taking off my tie as I was walking to the ferry. So for me, in my era, in the recruitment that I did, dressing right up
00:12:01
Speaker
a suit and tie it was helpful for me. Now that's not what I see these days and I would question some of the choices people make but before I go there Adele I'd be interested in your experience when you were recruiting and how you dressed and I suppose what you saw around you in the recruitment companies that you worked in.
Past Dress Codes for Women
00:12:27
Speaker
Yes, similarly, I had worked with organizations that had policies on this. In fact, they had dress code policies that were part of your letter of offer and contract and part of the policy documents you read when you first started around what you could and couldn't wear. And it was quite explicit right down to things like women wearing a skirt and stockings and heels and having hair done and appropriate makeup and those sorts of things. So
00:12:53
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It was quite prescriptive and detailed as to, you know, what was allowed. But it's just really different nowadays, obviously, the world post-COVID and even just, I saw it starting to change even pre-COVID where we saw the disappearance of the Thai with men and it just disappeared. It literally kind of disappeared and we never saw it again and no one ever asked about it or asked why. So it's a really interesting thing to see this slow, steady decline
00:13:22
Speaker
in terms of the standard, you know, dressing down essentially. And it certainly was very, in fact, stricter for women in the company that I joined in Australia. Women were not allowed to wear pantsuits. Well, certainly not originally. I think it was loosened a little bit later. It had to be skirt and had to be stockings and it was explicitly communicated. It was in the letter of offer and it was enforced.
00:13:52
Speaker
and it was part of our image. And I would have said that for many recruitment agencies that we competed against, particularly the UK headquartered agencies like Robert Walters and Michael Page, they had a similar standard, if not maybe even more strict than ours. But what about young people nowadays would be saying, listening to this and sort of thinking, well, what difference does it make really in the scheme of it? You know, if I'm good at my job and I perform well,
00:14:22
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and I'm able to deliver for my clients, what does it matter if I'm wearing jeans and runners and I'm comfortable?
Dressing for Authority and First Impressions
00:14:32
Speaker
I'm not going to argue that it does or doesn't matter. I certainly think you can do a good job wearing casual clothes. I suppose my point is what advantage could it give you?
00:14:48
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My view was if I turned up looking sharp in a suit and maybe a tie, it gave me an air of authority. It helped me with candidates and clients. It's like a picture speaks a thousand words. It's like, of course, when I open my mouth, I also have to know what I'm talking about. Like it doesn't make up for that, but it's that whole thing of first impressions.
00:15:16
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What's the first impression that you have when you meet someone, a business professional, for the first time? Is what you're looking at something that impresses you and sends a clear signal to you about their intention?
00:15:34
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or does it signal nothing? And it's just, oh, well, there's someone in jeans and t-shirt or there's a recruiter in jeans and t-shirt. Let's see what happens. I don't know. Maybe I'm overthinking it Adele. No, I really think that, you know, as a society, this isn't just recruitment. You know, as a society, there is that idea that the way somebody presents does give you an impression of their level of expertise, as you said, or confidence, in fact. So
00:16:02
Speaker
We form impressions really quickly. That's what people need to understand. An impression on someone is formed, as we know, in those first few seconds when we meet. So you want that to be a positive impression. You want the person to build trust with you straight away. That's what this comes down to. If a client straight away looks at you and sees somebody they feel is trustworthy, then what comes out of your mouth and then how you deliver is obviously a slightly easier path. If they look at you and they have doubt to start with because they're not sure whether you're really
00:16:32
Speaker
serious about the job, whether you are able to identify the right candidates, whether you're in work mode, like you said, are you in the game for them? I think that's really important and could definitely be the difference that sets you apart, maybe even from your competitors. Well, actually, as you're talking, it sort of makes me think, well, yes, dressing is important, but more important is direct eye contact.
00:16:57
Speaker
a firm handshake, if that's what you're doing, you've got good verbal communication skills. So all of those things, is your hair appropriately groomed? Like, do you demonstrate a sense of care and authority? Because a suit, using a suit as an example, in and of itself, doesn't do that.
Grooming and Professional Impressions
00:17:26
Speaker
those other things need to be there because if I turn up in a suit and I have a limp handshake and I've got untidy hair well untidy hair I don't have any hair but you know back in the day if I had untidy hair or I just looked kind of disinterested then the suit's not going to help me in any way all of those other things need to be lined up with my um
00:17:54
Speaker
presentation to ensure that I'm taken seriously. So I think it's a combination of those things because clearly if someone is dressed casually, but clearly they're well groomed and they're confident and they've got a firm handshake, then that will do a lot of heavy lifting very quickly in that initial introduction.
Setting Dress Code Standards in Recruitment
00:18:17
Speaker
But I guess, like you said, if it's going to aid, it's not going to make it more difficult to make a good impression being well-dressed. So if it's going to aid, why would you not do that? Why would you not put your best foot forward, present in the best possible light, and that way you're not having to rely so much on all of the other elements, I suppose, in order to make a good impression? Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that's something that
00:18:43
Speaker
perhaps gets lost when it becomes just about the dress code. To me, it's the dress code and the other things that go into making a first impression. And are all those other things firstly acknowledged that they are important in terms of a first impression and what standards as a recruitment agency team or whole of company do we agree to?
00:19:09
Speaker
and then stick to. I think that's probably where agency owners or leaders may need to have or should have or could have a productive discussion with their team.
Call for Podcast Reviews
00:19:23
Speaker
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00:19:38
Speaker
on your favorite episode and thanks for listening.