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Episode 5
379 Plays1 year ago
Episode 5
Important industry updates in this podcast episode with Ross & Adele. Don't miss out on this podcast.
Question of the Week: How to manage a client's selection criteria for a vacancy that may breach discrimination law?
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to Recruitment News Australia. Let's tell the people how recruitment news Australia came to be.
00:00:17
Speaker
Well it was an idea Ross that we came together with at the RCSA conference in Hobart last year over a coffee in one of the breakout sessions we came up with the idea of providing a central news source of information for the industry. So what we'll be doing each week is curating sources of different news from across our industry in Australia and overseas and providing all that information in one location for you on this podcast.
Industry Experience Insights
00:00:44
Speaker
We'll also be addressing common issues and relevant content to the industry and in our hopes creating a bit of a community and a learning platform for our listeners. In case you don't know who we are, firstly, my name is Ross Clennet. I started my recruitment career in 1989 as a permanent accounting recruiter in London. I worked for four different agencies across a 14-year period. I started my training and coaching business in 2004.
00:01:14
Speaker
I've been publishing a weekly newsletter and blog since 2007. And my name's Adele Lust. I've been working 26 years in the recruitment sector for a range of small private and larger publicly listed recruitment agencies.
Australian Labor Market Overview
00:01:28
Speaker
I've worked as a GM and managed recruitment businesses before starting my own company three years ago involved in creating a pathways program, including training for new recruiters coming into our industry.
00:01:46
Speaker
The strength of the Australian labour market continues with yesterday's announcement of February's unemployment rate declining 0.2 percentage points from the previous month's 3.7% to return to December's 3.5% in seasonally adjusted terms.
00:02:03
Speaker
Employment increased just over 64,000 jobs to reach a new record high of 13.826 million people, while the number of unemployed people dropped by just over 16,000 to 507,500 people. Victoria added the most new jobs up 0.3%, but New South Wales unemployment remained the lowest in the country at 3.1%.
00:02:27
Speaker
The participation rate ticked up 0.1 percentage points to 66.6%.
Global Employment Data
00:02:34
Speaker
In the United States, February's employment data showed a monthly increase of 311,000 jobs from January, a slight decline in the rolling prior six-month average of 343,000 job gains. The national unemployment rose from 3.4% in January to 3.6% in February.
00:02:57
Speaker
The unemployment rate across the OECD countries remained at 4.9% in January 2023, the seventh consecutive month at this record low since the start of the series in 2001. The unemployment rate was stable in 12 of the 13 OECD countries, but close to its record low in seven countries, including Canada, France, Germany, and the US.
Trends in Job Advertisements
00:03:22
Speaker
SEEK reported that job ads fell by 1.6% from January to February and a 12.2% down year on year. Volumes remained 1.3% higher than what they were in December and 24.1% higher than February 2019. While job ads declined overall, two states in the Northern Territory recorded an increase in job ad volumes.
00:03:49
Speaker
Northern Territory was up 5%, Western Australia was up 1.4% and Tasmania reported a 0.1% increase in job ad volumes. Applications per job ad fill for the first time in eight months dropping 1.8% although they remain among the highest they've been in the past two years.
00:04:10
Speaker
On a sector by sector basis, the largest declines in job ad volumes were in design and architecture down 7.1% and sport and recreation down 6.2%. By volume, the most popular job categories advertised in February were first, administrative assistance, second, aged and disability support roles, and warehousing, storage and distribution jobs came in third.
Debate: In-Person vs Video Interviews
00:04:44
Speaker
And we're on to question of the week now, Ross. And our question is, should we return to conducting all our candidate interviews in person? What are your thoughts on this one? The risk of sounding like a dinosaur, Adele? I'm going to say yes, for three primary reasons. Firstly, when a candidate comes to our office,
00:05:06
Speaker
They are demonstrating their commitment to their job search because clearly there's going to be some degree of inconvenience. They're allocating an hour or two of their day to commute to our office, to be interviewed by us, to do testing.
00:05:21
Speaker
That's a significant sign of their commitment. Secondly, clearly in person, it's much easier to read body language. It's easier to build rapport. The depth and strength of that relationship is going to be increased if we're in the same room with the person. And finally,
00:05:39
Speaker
how they present to us in an interview in person is a pretty strong clue as to how they're going to present to our clients. If we're interviewing someone on video, then they could be in the middle of anything and they're not typically going to get dressed up as if they're coming for an interview face to face. So there is a risk that when we interview on video that we don't really know how that candidate is going to appear
00:06:09
Speaker
when they front up to a client in person interview. Whereas if they've come to see us in the office, then very clearly they're coming for an interview and we're going to have some degree of confidence about how they're going to appear in front of our clients. What about you? What do you think Adele?
00:06:28
Speaker
Well, I think on the flip side of that, I mean, you could prepare your candidate well for a video interview, let them know what is expected as far as presentation and that it is normal interview conditions. I think I agree that perhaps the candidate has taken the view that it's a more casual format and they can take a more casual approach to it. But I think you can definitely ensure that it, you know, emulates a normal interview situation, albeit just not in the same room. So,
00:06:58
Speaker
you can definitely try and set it up as close to an interview as possible and then that's going to just make it easier for candidates. More candidates are more likely to respond to you, accept invitations for interviews and engage with us more readily if we make it easier. I don't want to make it harder, I want to make things easier for candidates and I think accessibility as well. There are many candidates that can't get into our offices for a variety of reasons
00:07:25
Speaker
And so that could be around disability or other responsibilities, or they could just be at work and need to do it in their lunch break. So I think it means that we're more likely to get access to more candidates by being more flexible about the circumstances in which we interview. And that allows us to be quicker, allows us to have speed to market, it allows us to see more candidates, assess more candidates, find better candidates and refer better ones to our clients.
00:07:53
Speaker
All of those factors to me are critical around making sure we're using this kind of technology as much as we can, especially since we've gotten much better at it in COVID, post COVID, that the new breed of recruiter is much better, I believe, now at assessing candidates on a video format than perhaps even we are because we learned old school, as you said, in person. So I think
00:08:19
Speaker
It's not as much of an issue nowadays, I think, as it might've been. I think it's definitely something that should be here to stay. Okay, that's a fair call.
Improving Interview Processes with Data
00:08:32
Speaker
So in summary, I think the point I would make is make data your friend as an owner or a leader. In other words, be very vigilant about the statistics,
00:08:47
Speaker
that will show what candidate started a recruitment process then withdrew. At what point did they withdraw? Did they decline an offer? Did they accept a counter offer? Because if you're getting a negative trend in that data, then I'd suggest as an owner or leader, you'd want to be very interested in the quality of the person's, the recruiter's interview. Is there something that they're missing on video?
00:09:17
Speaker
Are they more casual? Are they not taking the extra steps that I think are necessary when it is a video interview to ensure that sufficient rapport is built? So those are the things that I'd want to be interested in in terms of data tracking. And I think if an owner or leader does that, then they're going to make a decision on this topic based on the evidence rather than what they think is the right thing to do.
00:09:46
Speaker
What about you Adele, any concluding comments? There's one final caution I probably would make which is that it's probably creating for the first time a situation where our client perhaps knows our candidate better than we do. If we're only video interviewing them and we're sending them in person to the client, they're having several meetings with the client, it is possible and likely the client starts to build greater rapport and knows your candidate better than you do.
00:10:13
Speaker
If that is the situation, you're leaving yourself open to issues around being able to influence the outcome and that's really the art of what we do. So we know that that one part of it is obviously finding and referring candidates, but the real art in what we do is that influencing the outcome situation.
00:10:31
Speaker
If you don't know your candidate well enough and you haven't put in that time and understanding, you find yourself in a situation of lack of influence and that's going to make you really dead in the water as a recruiter. So be very cautious about the process of completely video interviewing, I guess is the final caution I would make.
00:10:54
Speaker
That's a wrap and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcast from, Google, Apple or Spotify or on our website.