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Episode 26
420 Plays1 year ago
No news just a full review of the just-concluded 2023 RCSA SHAPE Conference on Hamilton Island.
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Transcript
Day Two at RCSA Conference
00:00:08
Speaker
And welcome back to Recruitment News Australia. This is Ross with Adele and we're here just recuperating after day two of the RCSA shaped conference on Hamilton Island, 31st of August, 2023.
00:00:30
Speaker
So how are you feeling Adele? It's been a big couple of days, you know, lots of lots of content shared and lots of really interesting speakers and stories. And so we did that summary yesterday. We wanted to just bring you a quick summary of day two.
Leadership Resilience and Health
00:00:46
Speaker
Yeah. So let's start with the opening speaker today, Dr. Gemma King and Dr. King was speaking on resilient leadership. Dr. King has a PhD in human behavior and
00:00:59
Speaker
Her topic was helping us understand the way in which what we eat and the way we move and how we sleep impacts the decisions that we make, the stress that we're under, and helping us understand how we go dumb under stress and how others go dumb under stress and what we can do about it. Adele, what did you take from Dr. King's presentation?
00:01:28
Speaker
Well, this one's really highly relevant for the recruitment industry because
00:01:32
Speaker
It's obviously a really stressful job, and there are times when it's stressful for an extended period as well. I really liked her honesty. I felt like she broke the science elements demanding for late terms, which I really needed to understand. She showed information and slides that, you know, explained, said the science, but it might help us understand, you know, the stress to our body and what it's doing and what happened over a long period of time.
00:02:00
Speaker
I found it really interesting to hear, but I also firstly felt a little validated because I have been sharing some of this information myself in my own course around techniques, around breathing and ways to control your body in stressful situations.
Evolutionary Brain and Modern Stress
00:02:17
Speaker
So that was good for me.
00:02:19
Speaker
The core metaphor that she used to help us understand why we act the way we act is homo sapiens if you use the analogous 24 hour clock in terms of the total existence of homo sapiens and the last 100 years represents four seconds on the 24 hour clock. What that means is that our evolutionary brain
00:02:47
Speaker
is still wired to the caveman times. It's desperately trying to catch up on processing all of the things that modern life throws at us. New tech, litigious society, public scrutiny and transparency.
00:03:06
Speaker
complexity of very many different interpersonal relationships and because we've still got this let's call it our lizard brain
00:03:18
Speaker
that it goes into amygdala hijack and our brain stops working in the way that it should. And so what are some of the things Dr. King shared with us about how to recognize this amygdala hijack? And as I read the list out, I'm sure it'll be familiar.
Breathing Techniques for Stress Reduction
00:03:38
Speaker
We can't learn or process information. It's hard to access our working memory.
00:03:42
Speaker
We've got poor decision-making capabilities or we make decisions based on our emotions. We become close-minded.
00:03:53
Speaker
problem-oriented rather than solutions-oriented. It's low trust, we become selfish, and we have a loss of perspective. And all of those things are predictable. And then Dr. King went into how we can manage ourselves so the amygdala hijack does not cause us a disservice, does not cause us to
00:04:19
Speaker
not function at a critical moment. And as you said, breathing is a critical one of those things, learning how to sort of reset your breathing. I really like the way she brought this into relevancy around psychological safety as well and how that applies in your workplace, how leaders need to lead from the top down around managing that in the workplace and managing stress and those things. So it was a really informative presentation
00:04:49
Speaker
And just to sort of finish off with that about psychological safety, in very simple terms, psychological safety is there's a high level of trust inside a team and you experience being
00:05:07
Speaker
in the in group, like there's no out group as such rather than organizational cultures where it's quite fractured and there's clearly the in group and the out group because if you're not in the in group, it's very hard to focus and concentrate and do high quality work because your brain is reminding you
00:05:30
Speaker
that you're in the out-group and it's trying to help you find a way to get into the in-group and all of that is very unhelpful for your doing in terms of doing your job.
AI in Recruitment Debate
00:05:41
Speaker
Right, the next presentation was from Zeeple one of the sponsors and they had a client of their Sue Healy. Sue's a very well-known recruitment leader in the industry. She's owned and run several very successful recruitment businesses and this presentation was titled AI and Aliens talking about the you know
00:06:00
Speaker
I guess crossover between where tech and efficiency work in business. So it was an interesting presentation to hear what Sue is doing with some of the tech in her business and the growth that they've seen. I unfortunately felt like this was a little bit of a sales pitch, a little too salesy for me. And it seemed to jump around a little bit. I was a little bit lost as to what the exact message of that one was.
00:06:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think I agree in the sort of theme, although it was very closely tied to some of the points that Simon Lust had made yesterday in his presentation, it just got a little bit lost along the way. However, the thing that I really took out of it was through talking about in her business having a program manager or a transformation manager, certainly recruitment agencies, the role of operations manager would be familiar to many people.
00:06:54
Speaker
but that is not the same as a transformation manager someone who is charged with and continuously concerned with the ongoing improvement inside a business and ensuring that whatever investments are made in tech or anything else can improve performance that they actually translate to performance and I think Sue again proving that she's ahead of the curve using
00:07:23
Speaker
a person in such a role and I suspect there are some owners in the business who have got businesses of a much larger size than Sue's.
Tech Outcomes vs. Vendors
00:07:31
Speaker
I suspect took notice when Sue mentioned that.
00:07:34
Speaker
Yeah, and of course, smaller businesses may not have a dedicated resource or the ability to have a dedicated resource, but maybe it's somebody with their eyes on that function, somebody having that as champion for that sign. Oh, and just one other thing to say is that Sue did make, I thought, a really important point. I hadn't quite thought about it before, but she said there's 25 different pieces of tech inside her business.
00:07:57
Speaker
She's not trying to, nor has tried to create one sort of platform that'll work across the four different delivery models. She's very conscious that if it means there's more tech because there's some piece of tech that's better for one part of the business than another, then she'll always think about the outcome for that business, not think about, oh, we should have fewer different pieces of tech. She's always thinking about the outcome, which I think can certainly get lost.
00:08:26
Speaker
in companies attempting to be rational or rationalize the tech, the number of tech vendors. Okay, and then we had Ben Darwin with us. Is that right?
00:08:40
Speaker
We had James's panel. Oh, we had an expert bar in the mix there with James. James Wickham. So I owe James an apology because I said in yesterday's summary that there should have been a deep dive into something like remote work. Of course, if I paid attention to the agenda of day two, I would have noticed that it was already scheduled. So sorry, James.
00:09:03
Speaker
I left a little red face there. So anyway, that's what was discussed with AQUENT Workpack and a lot of it's Australia and quite different because Monique at AQUENT said they're now 100% remote. Hamish Workpack said basically everyone's back in the office with some exceptions and James had a, I should say more a hybrid model
00:09:33
Speaker
And the overall summary of the horses for horses, like there is no right way to do hybrid work. You've got to look at your own organizational culture and you've got to look at, although listening to your staff, being more concerned about the outcomes for customers and making decisions accordingly. Anything else from that?
Team Cohesion vs. Individual Skills
00:09:59
Speaker
Okay. Then we went to Ben Darwin.
00:10:02
Speaker
Now, Ben Darwin is a former Wallaby that's, for those of you who don't know, that's an Australian rugby union player, played for the national team. He then became a coach in rugby and then an analyst. And his topic was understanding the impact of talent acquisition and what actually leads to high performance.
00:10:32
Speaker
And to summarize, I mean, there was so much great stuff. Like I could not take notes fast enough in terms of this presentation. And like literally every slide there was gold. And I suppose to summarize,
00:10:49
Speaker
What's most important isn't the skill of the individuals in a team. It's the cohesion of the team. And by cohesion, he means that individual members of the team know their roles.
00:11:05
Speaker
they know how to execute their roles. And just as importantly, they know how their roles fit into the team context and how that means they need to interact with other team members. What did you take from that? I thought he was a highlight today. He was a highlight speaker and
00:11:28
Speaker
It was really interesting to me being, I guess, a non-sporting person and finding his presentation so interesting because he was making those correlations between high-performing sports teams and business ones as well. But not in the traditional sense. That's what I really liked about him. He challenged our thought around it. He was throwing out some concepts that were a bit unusual and a bit different to hear. And like you said, talking about
00:11:55
Speaker
that cohesion over skills I found really interesting and he used an example actually of the mafia. He said the mafia is a really good organized crime, is a really good example of complete cohesion, but it's not about the culture is obviously terribly flawed, but it works as an organization because of the cohesion. Obviously that's not a model to aspire to, but he was really just challenging us around these ideas that we think that the skills and culture rather be on end or maybe we need to approach things differently.
00:12:25
Speaker
Well, another fantastic sporting metaphor for the point he was making was Iceland famously beat England in the 2016 Euros. That's the soccer championship football. And Iceland has a population of less than a million people. And England has a population of 55, 60 million and has some of the best
00:12:54
Speaker
highest played soccer players in the world. It's well funded. But Iceland, although their players are professional, very few of them play in the highest leagues. But the advantage they had was that all of the players had played with each other right through the underage leagues. And so by the time they're adults and they're playing in the Euros, they've got a very, very strong
00:13:20
Speaker
understanding of each other's strengths and weaknesses. They've got a great understanding overall as a team. And that was something that enabled them to be England when on paper, England basically should have beaten them 10-0. I know you love that one. It's always with the sports elements, it always appeals.
00:13:43
Speaker
All right, final few sections we
Balancing Tech and Human Elements
00:13:47
Speaker
had. We had Clara McCarthy from LinkedIn who talked about recruitment evolution and her presentation was a little bit of statistical data and some advice around how to make sure you can gel the tech with the human elements, which has kind of been a bit of a theme all the way through. One of the interesting stats she shared was that
00:14:07
Speaker
According to LinkedIn, it's about 6.5 months on average from the time a candidate engages with a job, so they may look at a job or apply for a job to when they change their LinkedIn profile.
00:14:20
Speaker
So that was interesting. I felt a bit longer than I would have thought actually. And jobs offering remote work opportunities get two times more applications. I guess that one's not that much of a surprise, but yeah. Her presentation was very well organized. Slides were broad. She spoke really well. I haven't heard her speak. She spoke instead of guy who normally speaks, but I'm going to enjoy her presentation as well.
00:14:44
Speaker
While I was across the road touring Robert and Stockholm, Robert spoke about the sale of DFP recruitment that he executed with his business partner Eddie and the 18 year journey from the purchase of DFP, which was originally called Dorothy Farmer Personnel, rebranding to DFP recruitment and then the sale to the Wheel Group, a Japanese publicly listed company.
00:15:08
Speaker
The main thing I took from Robert's presentation is, well there's a couple of things, you've always got to be thinking long term in terms of your exit. It's never too early to be thinking about your exit strategy and how it's going to occur.
00:15:24
Speaker
And one of the things that Robert Nettie did was acquire businesses. And he said they looked at 35 different businesses and they acquired eight. And what was the critical difference? What were the differences in terms of the companies they acquired versus those they passed on? No surprise Adele, leadership. Lower staff turnover, clear market strengths, empowering leadership.
00:15:47
Speaker
and the owner of the business had been able to develop leaders through the business and was a less important person in terms of the day-to-day running of the business. None of that's probably a surprise but I know even though many business owners would understand that in theory they find it very very hard to let go.
00:16:07
Speaker
I attended another expert bar with James and he had Nick from Chandler McLeod and Catherine Mayday and Picky from Sissenbach. They were talking about KPIs and what structures they have in their own businesses. They all talked about having to have changed the KPI structure in the last six to eight months post COVID. So what they had coming out of COVID has had to evolve even further. There was probably nothing really groundbreaking here. Most organizations or those three examples had
00:16:37
Speaker
KPI structures in there, they were calling them targets or goals and packaging them up a little differently. The main takeaway, I think, was that they were all focused on quality over quantity. So I think that was probably just the main takeaway there. It wasn't in that session. I don't have anything to add. There was also Bullhorn. That was a session by Tom Pham, who's an APAC director, sales director. He shared some of the statistical data that Bullhorn collects on their surveys.
00:17:07
Speaker
He talked about how to, again, kind of integrate your tech better with your customer experience and gave a little bit of advice here and there around what you thought people could be doing at this time to boost sales. And that took us to the final speaker
Ronnie Kahn and Oz Harvest
00:17:22
Speaker
of the panel.
00:17:22
Speaker
Yeah, Ronnie Kahn, the founder of Oz Harvest, Oz Harvest ensures that food waste or as much food waste as possible goes to hungry people and feeds hungry people and Ronnie shared her story as a South African growing up in the apartheid era and then moving to Israel when she was 16 and then moving to Australia.
00:17:48
Speaker
and how she created the organization and the drive that
00:17:56
Speaker
the way in which you built the organisation. So that was the final session and very worthy cause and Ronnie's charismatic. I think what would have taken her to another level for me would be, I suppose the recruitment in me, but she's built this organisation which has more than 300 staff and has got thousands of volunteers. It's like
00:18:22
Speaker
How has she done that? How has she used social purpose as a way to build that organization? How does she recruit? How does she ensure that people are joining for the right reasons when they're going to stay? So it just left me feeling like I just got 30% of the story and there was so much more that I would like to have heard from the recruiting point of view.
00:18:45
Speaker
Yeah, I've got two things to say about this. One, I think they asked me to say every year with the conference set us up for a very high expectation on the last speaker around it being somebody very highly inspirational, leaving you with some sort of emotive response. And we felt that yesterday, I think, with Eddie Betts more so. And I didn't have it as much this time with Ronnie, although, as you said, the story is so interesting. And what she's doing is amazing, of course.
00:19:16
Speaker
have as high an impact I think as previous year's final speakers.
00:19:21
Speaker
You know, it was a really interesting story to hear. I also just want to say my final thing about it is I was feeling a little embarrassed, I have to say, Ross. We've been criticizing the food at the conference very openly, particularly saying the lunches were a little kind of light on. And they told us that at the end that was on purpose because Ronnie was involved in helping the RCSA and Hamilton Island functions to make sure that we
00:19:50
Speaker
food that was less food away. So I will take my foot out of my mouth now and apologize in that sense. The food was good quality. It just wasn't probably what we expected. But actually, you know what, again, could have been a great opportunity for them to pop some Oz Harbor signs up around the food table to tell us that we're actually all contributing to that for the whole conference. I would have loved that.
Conference Reflections and Closing
00:20:14
Speaker
Yes, yes, I think that's probably a good idea.
00:20:16
Speaker
All right. Well, that's it. We have a streets party. Is it the closing event? I'm not sure what it's called. It's just down the road. So we'll be attending that. We will be contemplating what we've experienced the last couple of days and we'll have another conversation about the conference. There's a couple of things that
00:20:37
Speaker
we haven't talked about in these last couple of sessions or episodes that we'll probably talk a bit more about. So there will be more about the ICSA conference in next week's episode. So until then, we'll see you soon. Thanks everyone.