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Episode 101 - Celebrating our milestone
91 Plays16 days ago
Episode 101 has news for 18 March 2025 and a discussion about the behind-the-scenes of RNA as we (a week late) celebrate our 100th episode of RNA.
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Transcript
AI in Recruitment Lifecycle
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AI is the buzzword of this decade. Bullhorn is embedding AI capabilities across the entire recruitment lifecycle to empower all your recruiters to work like your best recruiters.
00:00:21
Speaker
Use AI to quickly automate key activities throughout your recruiting workflow. AI agents take on entire workflows, saving recruiters time, increasing their output, and giving them more time for human interaction.
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Contact Bullhorn today to find out more. This is the news for the 18th of March 2025. I'm Adele Last.
Criticism of Office Return Mandate
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The federal opposition appears to be spooked by the reaction to their recent announcement that all federal public servants will be required to return to the office five days a week if the coalition is returned to government in the upcoming election.
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The Shadow Finance and Public Service Minister, Jane Hume, introduced the policy on the 3rd of March and the next day Liberal leader Peter Dutton publicly promoted the policy on 2GB. Asked what impact the plan would have on women with caregiving duties, Mr Dutton replied, there are plenty of job-sharing arrangements.
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I don't think it's unreasonable that people, like in many other workplaces, are asked to go back to work for that face-to-face contact, he said. That's exactly what will happen if there's a change of government after the election.
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However, a week later, Dutton appeared to walk those comments back, saying last Thursday that the levels of working from home in the public service should return to pre-COVID levels. Some senior coalition figures and candidates who spoke to Guardian Australia on the condition of anonymity said there were no positives to the policy.
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The coalition should be more focused on the cost of living instead, they said. Flexible work arrangements are cherished in many households and it looks like we, the coalition, don't get that, one said. Labor's Katie Gallagher, the Minister for the Public Service and Women, claimed the policy showed the opposition had no idea how working families operate.
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She said workplace arrangements in the public service already set parameters for staff working from home. The EBA is clear employees have a right to request working from home arrangements and employers have the right to approve or not approve that, she told reporters.
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Gallagher also criticised Dutton's apparent backflip, saying that policy ideas copied from the US won't work for Australian families, referencing Donald Trump mandating all federal workers have to return to the office full time.
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Sunshine Coast based East Coast Human Resource Group has been bought by Sydney based labour hire business People Plus. Started 1986, East Coast HR has been operated by Michelle Faulkner since 2010 and provides recruitment, labour hire and ah HR consulting services to businesses across Southeast Queensland.
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According to LinkedIn, East Coast ah HR has eight employees. The acquisition of East Coast HR Group is being regarded as a key milestone in PeoplePlus' as nationwide growth strategy as it expands its portfolio of complementary businesses, including training organisations and waste management companies.
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While stepping away from ownership, Faulkner will continue to support the company in a consultancy capacity. Faulkner's next ventures include the release of her second book, Modern People Matters, and building her public speaking profile.
Inquiry into NT Police Force Appointments
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An independent inquiry into the highest levels of the Northern Territory Police Force has been launched, looking at dozens of appointments made under ousted Police Commissioner Michael Murphy.
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Last Wednesday, Chief Minister Leah Finiciara announced the inquiry would investigate the recruitment of officers to the rank of Superintendent and above during Commissioner Murphy's tenure, which started in August 2023. On Saturday 8 March 2025,
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on saturday the eighth of march twenty twenty five The Chief Minister terminated Commissioner Murphy's contract a week after the Territory's corruption watchdog found he helped to recruit a close friend to a high-ranking police position.
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Former Tasmanian Chief Justice Alan Blow, who was appointed the NT's acting justice in January, will lead the inquiry. The inquiry will examine where the panel processes were consistent with NT police's recruitment standards and where the successful candidates have merit to continue in their roles.
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The NT Police Association has questioned the integrity of all 27 senior appointments overseen by Commissioner Murphy, including that of Deputy Commissioner Martin Dole, who is now the Acting Commissioner.
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Opposition Leader Selina Weibo said she supported the inquiry to restore confidence in police leadership. Hydric and Struggles International reported Q4 2024 net revenue rose 9.1% to US$276.2 The executive search division up 0.5% year over year.
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two hundred and seventy six point two million us s dollars the executive search division was up half a percent year over year Executive search revenue at APAC was up 8% year over year in constant currency.
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Consultant productivity as measured by annualized executive search net revenue per consultant rose to $2 million dollars in the fourth quarter 2024, $1.8 million dollars in the equivalent twenty twenty three quarter H&S posted a net loss of $15 million dollars in the fourth quarter amid a non-cash goodwill impairment charge of $43.3 million dollars related to the company's on-demand talent segment.
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Corn Ferry reported fee revenue rose 2% in constant currency to $668 million u s dollars in the fiscal third quarter ending thirty one january twenty twenty five By segment, RPO revenue climbed 6%, executive search was up 4%, digital was up 3%, while professional search and interim was flat and consulting declined 3%.
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three percent By region, Korn Ferry APAC revenue rose 4%.
AI in Customer Communication
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Group operating profit was flat at $59 million. dollars Teleperformance SE, the largest call centre operator in the world, is rolling out an artificial intelligence system that softens English-speaking Indian workers' accents in real time in a move the company claims will make them more understandable.
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The technology called Accent Translation coupled with background noise cancellation is being deployed in call centres in India where workers provide customer support to some of Teleperformance's international clients.
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Teleperformance provides outsourced customer support and content moderation to global companies including Apple, TikTok and Samsung Electronics. When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it's hard to hear, to understand, Deputy CEO Thomas McEnbrock said in an interview with Bloomberg. berg The technology can neutralise the accent of the Indian speaker with zero latency, he said.
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This creates more intimacy, increases the customer satisfaction and reduces the average handling time. It's a win-win for both parties. The company declined to disclose the clients which are using the technology.
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The rise of AI chatbots has led to investor jitters about the sustainability of the human call centre model. Teleperformance has sought to allay shareholder concerns by using AI to enhance rather than replace their half a million employees.
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tech account of The Tech Council of Australia has launched a program to increase women's participation in tech jobs after receiving a grant to deliver the program from the Australian government's Building Women's Careers program.
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Women still represent only one in four tech workers in Australia, a statistic that does not reflect the broader demographics of our society. Damien Kassabji, CEO of the Council, said in a press release.
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To ensure Australia remains a global technology leader, we must do more to increase the opportunities for women to reskill and upskill into tech jobs. The next wave, Women's Tech Transitions Program, will include a career switching action plan, workshops, and other initiatives that promote gender equity and inclusion in the tech sector.
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Women are nearly twice as likely to transition into tech roles mid-career than when they first joined the job market, according to the Council. The TCA's partners include Seek, Eubank, Tech Recruiter, Underscore Knowledge and Project F, a group aimed at gender equity in tech.
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Inflation and increasing responsibilities are prompting employee demands for higher wages, but in employees are finding it more challenging to negotiate a pay rise, according to the Robert Half 2025 salary guide.
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In its survey of 1,000 full-time office workers and 500 employers in Australia, the global staffing firm found that 72% of workers say it is now more difficult to negotiate a salary increase compared to the previous year, whereas 23% group believe it is less difficult.
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Robert Half's report also found that 49% of employers state that employees are more demanding regarding salaries compared to last year. The top reason employees cite for a pay increase is consistently exceeding my performance goals nominated by 36% of respondents.
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This aligned with the employer's nominated top reason to award a pay rise on merit when employees meet and exceed performance goals. The number of multiple job holders in Australia rose to 1 million in December 2024, up from 957,800 in December 2023, according to data released last week by the ABS.
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Multiple job holders accounted for 6.7% of employed people in December 2024, and their numbers have been growing. Between 1995 and 2019, the multiple job holding rate remained between 5% and 6%, according to the Bureau.
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However, following out a a large decline at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in June 2020, the multiple job holding rate rose and has remained at an all-time high of between 6.5% and 6.7%.
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since December 2022. Multiple job holders usually worked 30.6 hours on average in their main job and nine hours in their secondary job or jobs for a total of 39.6 hours per week on average.
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Those who held only one job usually worked 34.9 hours per week on average. Workers whose main occupation was community personal service worker were most likely to be a multiple job holder 9.9% of CBS workers hold a second job.
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Global hiring intentions are holding stable, according to Manpower Group's Employment Outlook survey for the second quarter. The report's January survey of 40,000 employers across 41 countries found that 40% anticipate an increase in hiring in the second quarter, while 15% cited a decrease for a net employment outlook of 25%,
Behind-the-Scenes of Recruitment News Australia
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unchanged from the previous two quarters.
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Looking at the report by Regions, Asia-Pacific posted the strongest net employment outlook at 30%, up three percentage points from the first quarter. And that's the news for the 18th of March 2025.
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I'm Ross Clennett. Stay tuned for Question of the Week.
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the
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So this is Recruitment News Australia podcast 101. So we're going to take a little detour from our standard question of the week this week. And we thought we might explore a little bit more about our podcast and talk about, I guess, the things that we've learned, you know, the surprising things we found out through the journey, give you a little bit of a behind the scenes look at how Recruitment News Australia is put together ah what Ross and I do in the background. We can't give you a behind the scenes view, but we can certainly take you through ah bit of a journey about how we put this together.
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I want to ask you a question, Ross, to start with about the news side of it. You're the producer of our news segment. Tell us about the work that goes into putting the news together for us to read out.
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It's about 90, well, actually, before i actually start compiling the news, I'm looking at articles every day of the week, including the weekend, scouring for suitable articles to include in the news.
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And so by the time I get to compiling the news, it's probably about then 90 minutes working out what stories and in what order. And then, of course, when we then record RNA, which is typically on Monday, then we spend about an hour and a half practicing and then recording the 10 minutes of news and then about another half hour recording question of the week and you're the person responsible question of the week.
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Yes, yes, absolutely. um it It has taken longer and we've had some tech challenges, which has meant it has taken a lot longer. And then, of course, there's the technical side doing all the back end of the podcast, which, again, depending, can take between sort of an hour and three hours, depending on how smoothly it's going.
00:13:10
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Do you think that would surprise people that it takes us that long? I mean, if people have had no experience of doing something like that, probably would. But it's probably also an insight into a question that people have asked us recently about filling the void left by the departure of shortlist.
00:13:30
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And, well, it's pretty clear to me that you and I are not the people to fill that void. Do you agree, Adele? Yeah, we've got a very different model. ah There's, you know, is a completely...
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um you know, journalistic newsletter style format, you know, with reporters who researched and and wrote articles on a daily basis, very different to what we're doing.
00:13:57
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Completely different. um Neither you nor I are journalists. Neither of us have any experience in commercial publishing. And although I've written my blog for, um this is year number 18, I don't make any money from it. Well, certainly not directly. So I'm not interested in learning how to be a commercially successful publisher.
00:14:21
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You and I ah better focused on the areas that we have skills in, coaching, training, ah consulting and so on. So it's a pretty clear no from both of us in terms of filling in the void terms of shortlist. Hopefully there will be some other person that will find a better model um that will make it commercially work for them compared to specialist news where clearly it didn't work commercially well enough for for them.
00:14:50
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ah But in the meantime, we'll continue to produce RNA exactly the way we've done it for the first 101 episodes. Yeah, and I think that is ah worth acknowledging, as you said, ross ah for those that have been asking us about the shortlist replacement,
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We hope that people have been enjoying the variation in our format, which is about delivering the news, about communicating what's going on in the market and educating and increasing the professionalism in our industry. That was our driving force. But the news content is is hard to find sometimes. um As you said, you're spending hours um reading and sourcing and collating, but it is hard to find it in the media and um and to find, you know, the right kind of context for our industry. So we spend a lot of time in the background that I think people would be surprised about.
00:15:44
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We also have a unique format, right, Russ? We chose these guidelines early on in the piece. so We did. i mean I mean, probably just to go right back to the beginning, you approached me at the RCSA conference in Hobart in 2023, wasn't it? Or was it 2022? 2022, it was idea to begin with. I was, I've got to a little lukewarm, nothing to do with you. It was just the and so it was your idea to begin with and i was got to say a little lukewarm nothing to do with you it was just the
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commitment to weekly content production because I was already producing weekly content by way of my blog. And I'm like, hmm, do I really want another commitment to producing content that's not going to be generating a commercial return? But anyway, you are very persuasive.
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And one of the things, well, a couple of things that we agreed on up front It needed to be short. Like we weren't interested in doing an interview style podcast. We wanted to keep it short.
00:16:45
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Our thought process was ah commute to work or going outside, ordering a coffee and standing in line or taking a dog for a walk, you know, 20 minutes. and or 20 to 22 minutes was our goal for every episode which I think broadly we've kept to we agreed we'd read the news formally we agreed it was 50 50 between the news and question of the week we agreed that it would be clean that wouldn't be bad language and we agreed to keep it focused on topics in terms of questions of the week that were relevant for our customers know people who are
00:17:22
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recruitment agency owners and leaders and consultants in the recruitment industry. And I'd like to think that we've stayed true to that across the 101 episodes. What do you think, Adele?
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Yeah, I think it's important to point out that our model and the guidelines we created with each other at the start have have lasted and have been important to us.
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And for anyone that was listening, thinking about starting a podcast or for those that have started, there seems to be a lot of podcasts coming up in our recruitment space. yeah know Every week, I seem to see a new podcast pop up in my feed.
00:17:57
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So i know people are thinking about this format or trying the format out in terms of delivery, in terms of the channel. But you know it is important to work out what is, like anything in business, it's important to work out what is your point of difference? How are you differentiating?
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Or are you just another podcast like all the others? And is it doing something similar? so you know, what is your hook? What is something different about your podcast? And that's, yes, I did have the idea.
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i approached you, Ross, because I knew you were already producing some content weekly. i know that you have huge respect in the industry and your ah presentation skills are second to none, in my opinion. So I wanted all of that for our podcast. And I wanted ah listeners to, as I said, have this next level of ah professionalism in the way things were being delivered to them. And I know for many of our listeners who tell us this, that they use it regularly and weekly across their teams, they encourage everybody to be listening to it to increase their knowledge, as I said, increase their professionalism.
00:19:01
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The question of the week is often a little educational piece, which I love. ah You know, you're getting both of us who, you know, essentially are often competitors in the market, but you're getting both of us together once a week to answer these sorts of questions. I think that's really highly valuable in our space.
00:19:19
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Well, there isn't anyone else doing exactly what we're doing. Clearly, there are other recruitment podcasts in this industry, and I've enjoyed listening to all of them. I think they all have a place. It's just that ours is quite distinctly ah news and then a discussion between the two of us and I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future.
00:19:46
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it it seems to be working to date. And interestingly, our second largest audience, do you know our second largest audience after Australia, Adele? Yeah, this one surprises me. Tell us, Ross.
00:20:00
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It's the United States, easily. e Yeah. So hello to all our US listeners. Yeah.
00:20:09
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Yes, exactly. We've got um around 75% of our total listens are from Australia. And then the United States clocks in at about 11%.
00:20:21
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And then it's a whole range of countries that are 1%, 2%, 3%. But yes, the United States, which is quite surprising, I don't know whether it's the topics we discuss or that we do in many ah episodes have some US news items. But, um yeah, we're finding some sort of traction in the US.
00:20:43
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Oh, they just like that Aussie accent, perhaps. um The other thing that sort of might so surprises me that that I wasn't expecting was – um the idea that people sort of feel like they know us, you know, we're talking to them every week. They're hearing our voices every week. And so when I'm out at events, I now find i will have people come up to me and ah say hello or smile at me and talk to me as if they know me.
00:21:09
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And I may not have met them before. And when I ask them that question, have we met before? They say, no, no, but I feel like I know you. I listen you every week. I love the podcast and they provide some feedback. So That's a little side effect of it that I kind of wasn't expecting. I guess, you know, we are in the media and we, we you know, our profile is going to increase by being out there every week doing this. But it does surprise me how many people are, you know, listening. i'm I'm so grateful for anybody that's listening and i I love that they come up and introduce themselves and give the feedback.
00:21:42
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Well, that's... has been less so for me. i think because over the years that I've been blogging, people have been coming up to me and um introducing themselves and making comment about a blog or a couple of blogs that I've written. So I'm probably, given I'm quite a bit older than you, Adele, and probably been a bit more in the self-promotion category of recruitment trainers and coaches. I've probably had more of that over the years.
00:22:13
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And I i mean, of course, you always want to hear from people. People aren't normally going to come up to you and say, I dislike your stuff. But it's good to get positive reinforcement because, of course,
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you don't get direct interaction like in a workshop. So it is that feedback that gives you a sense of, okay, we are doing something valuable. Yeah, and a lot of people do come up to us and give us their question of the week or pose topics for us to discuss. So I want to keep encouraging that. If you meet with Ross or I out in the field, please come and say hello to us and give us a question of the week.
00:22:50
Speaker
If you've got a question you want to pose, you can also do that through our website. So just want to say thank you very much for getting us to 101 episodes. We look forward to the next 101. We intend to keep going ahead our format. And, you know, we really thank you for listening.
00:23:07
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And if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe. Even better, leave us a lovely five-star review. That definitely helps.
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um