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Episode 76
132 Plays4 months ago
Adele and Ross discuss the sessions at RCSA's SHAPE 2024 that impacted them most.
This is part 1, featuring Trudy MacDonald, Ashely Fell, Joe Brumm and Arun Pradham.
#RNA #RecruitmentNewsAustralia #RecruitmentPodcast
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Transcript
Introduction of Bullhorn as Sponsor
00:00:10
Speaker
Recruitment News Australia is so delighted to announce our very first sponsorship arrangement. We have our first sponsor. Who is it, Ross? It's Bullhorn and Elle. Yay, welcome Bullhorn. We're so excited to have you on board. Who's Bullhorn, Ross? Bullhorn, for those of you who don't know who Bullhorn is, I doubt anyone listening is in the dark about Bullhorn, but they are the fastest applicant tracking system on the market. We love fast.
00:00:39
Speaker
What else? we do Well, Bullhorn's recruitment software helps you make better decisions, improve sales and recruit a productivity and manage the entire recruitment and applicant management process from a single easy to use interface. Convinced Adele? Absolutely. And I know that they are building in some fabulous things in utilizing AI and huge automation time saving elements to the system as well. So we look forward to sharing more.
00:01:09
Speaker
with you about Bullhorn and our partnership with them, and we're really excited to have them aboard. Welcome Bullhorn to the RNA podcast.
RCSA SHAPE 2024 Conference: First Impressions
00:01:29
Speaker
Welcome to the re Recruitment News Australia special podcast summary of the SHAPE 2024 conference from the RCSA. So we ah Ross and I both attended the event. We made lots of notes and we're here to share with you our overall impressions about a number of speakers and the event overall. Would you like to kick us off Ross?
00:01:50
Speaker
Well, I think overall it was a very good conference. I've been to, I've lost count how many RCSA conferences are dealt. It's got to be probably 17 or 18. I've been to Noosa before for the RCSA conference. Peppers at Noosa, very good venue for the event. I think it's the appropriate size. Noosa in August, we had a lovely weather, 24, 25 degrees.
00:02:16
Speaker
I think the food was very good overall Adele. and Talking about food, right? That's right. After last year, yes we had three social events and we had two days of speakers ably led by Andrew Klein. Overall, I thought it was a very good event. It was probably one of the smaller RCSA conferences I've been to. Obviously it's been a tough year.
00:02:43
Speaker
in terms of financial results for many in the industry. But the people who were there were enthusiastic, but I certainly noted there were quite a few normal attendees or regular attendees who were not there. But overall, I would say it's an eight out of 10 conference for me. What about
Networking Benefits at RCSA SHAPE 2024
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Speaker
you? yeah Yeah, I think the smaller numbers had a different feel to the room and as a result,
00:03:11
Speaker
i felt like people were connecting better. I felt like I had more conversations and deeper conversations with people because there were less of us in the room. And and it wasn't that it was empty. I mean, it was a very, um it was a good venue, as you said, and it was well organised and orchestrated. But it felt a lot more intimate, particularly at some of the social events where you're able to get around and have good conversations with people. So I kind of liked that, I think, um as a difference to some of the larger ones. ah The other thing I feel like I noticed was that the speaker lineup um may have had to have been adapted last minute or or later in the piece, because obviously conferences like this are booked a year in advance. So RCSA will be going ahead and booking now for 2025. And the topics and the issues that the industry is facing right now in 2024 may not be the same in 2025. And I suspect that was the case
00:04:04
Speaker
given how quickly the market changed. So these this was all booked in 2023. And I feel like some speakers were kind of put in there, potentially last minute or some some changes were made around the kind of topics that needed to now focus on, you know, um owner, kind of survival in the current market and and getting your business in the right shape and and, you know, sales-related things. And so it just had a slightly different, some of the speakers, yeah, had a slightly different focus, I think, to maybe what it originally had started out as But I still think overall, yeah, it was a great conference. Yeah, I would give it ah a high rating. I think eight out of 10 is pretty fair. And that's factoring in, you know, all of those elements, the the speaker quality, the conference itself, the social events and the networking as well. Yep. Great. All right. Well, what we are proposing to do is pick a few speakers and have a bit of a conversation about their content. So I'm going to kick off.
High-Performance Culture and Incentive Design
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Speaker
and I'm gonna kick off with a speaker on day two, Trudy McDonald. Trudy spoke about, wait for the exciting title, remuneration and incentive design for recruitment businesses. And you're probably thinking,
00:05:12
Speaker
Really, Ross, you're going to be talking about this, but I'm going to talk about this because Trudy was a delight. She was an excellent presenter and she knew her topic and she was extremely well prepared. Now, as I know, you know Adele because you have the same sorts of questions. The conversations that owners have with me and have had with me for years about issues inside their business involve people and how to pay them effectively. Like that's 85% of the conversations. And those conversations inevitably progress to, well, what should I pay someone? What's the best remuneration or commission scheme? And I give them my feedback. I've written a blog about it.
00:06:00
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And yet this is the first time that I can recall that we have had a conference speaker at an RCSA conference dig into this topic and she did it extremely well. Now, what Trudy wasn't there to do was to say.
00:06:15
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in the recruitment industry, you should do X and Y, but she communicated the framework that she uses in her business in the consulting practice with her clients. And I think broadly you can describe it as that if you want to set up a bonus and commission scheme to reward high performance behavior, you need to start with a high performance culture.
00:06:44
Speaker
because you can't overlay a commission and bonus scheme and expect it to work regardless of the culture. And the model that Trudy put up, I thought was extremely helpful where it's a four quadrant model where you've got high empathy and support down to low empathy and support, that's the leadership support for employees, and then high accountability to low accountability. So therefore in terms of the four quadrants, when you have high empathy and support,
00:07:14
Speaker
and high accountability, you do have a high performance culture. When you have high accountability and low empathy and support, you have a high stress environment. When you have high empathy and support and low accountability, you have a high comfort or an entitlement environment. And when you have low accountability and low empathy and support it's apathetic.
00:07:40
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Basically, people are unenthusiastic and they lack purpose. Trudy went on to talk about the psychology of remuneration, making the following points. Money matters when employees are not paid fairly, which basically means If people perceive they're not paid fairly, that's a significant issue for them in terms of their motivation. But once they believe they've paid they are paid fairly, then additional remuneration doesn't really help productivity. And the problem is when you have people who are overpaid and not performing aligned to that remuneration, you find an entitlement attitude.
00:08:26
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And what may have been a high performer being rewarded with high reward becomes potentially a average to mediocre performer who's being well ah overpaid.
00:08:40
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um so The three solid foundations of a high performance culture were defined great. So what does great mean in your business? Secondly, you've got to have measurement. And thirdly, on top of that is the reward structure. And clearly, as she said,
00:09:04
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when you implement something, you've got to reward the results and the behavior you want more of. People are much more motivated when they can see that what they're doing and the results that they're producing flow through to their total remuneration.
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um And then the analogy or sorry, the acronym was OKR. So these are objective key results, ah sorry, yes, objectives and key results. And that's where key results need to contain both qualitative and quantitative measures.
00:09:49
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So anything that you'd like to add Adil from what you took from Trudy's presentation? can I would like to add that it was a really interesting presentation because it was actually really specific. She was almost giving us a full kind of roadmap of um how to take this away into your business. And it was quite structured, um quite formal, I think maybe more formal than recruitment agencies are used to being. And I think that some people, um they will get that and some, you know, won't understand it to the to the extent they need to implement it in their business. But I agree, the the culture part was really interesting, starting at the culture level. But when she got into the actual details of how to set up
00:10:29
Speaker
a structure relating to attaching rewards to specific things, um specifically results, and also um yeah looking at um you know a more formal salary structure where there might be bands or there might actually be salaries attached to the level of the position in the organisation. Again, I don't see that in a lot of recruitment agencies because they tend to be just performance-based discussions or employment contracts or someone who knows you know if they've got more knowledge or more experience or bringing you know more value, they're getting paid higher and and you know it's ah it's a private discussion. So I don't see formal structured salary bans in most organizations, but I don't think that's a bad thing. I think her suggesting that should be something that you can put in place, even as a small business owner starting to think about for that kind of job, this is how much I'm going to pay. And you might know that in your head, but getting that down into some formal structure around how you will
00:11:24
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remunerate base salaries and how and where the where the commission kicks in can actually help you um manage people better, I think. and That's the message she was really sending. So I like the formality she was bringing to what is, in recruitment, a really informal and unstructured and a little bit kind of fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants thing that goes on. So I really thought that was a powerful um conversation she was starting. And she gave some good data. Yeah. ah give Trudy nine and a half out of 10, like just ah just a really good presentation. And I'd be surprised if anyone who sat in that room didn't take a hell of a lot out of what she had to say. Yeah. And then similar to her presentation on the basis of a good presenter and a bit unexpected, you know, you said um the topic seemed initially one that wouldn't be one of your favourites, but it ended up being so good because of
00:12:17
Speaker
her being so well prepareded prepared and well presented. For me, a standout was Ashley Fell.
Gen Z Work Behaviors and Engagement
00:12:23
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And Ashley was from the McCrindle Institute who call themselves social researchers. So they provide research data and information to organisations and governments um around behaviours and around um yeah work behaviours essentially. And Ashley was a very very polished presenter in terms of the way she presented and her information, her slides and her um and her data. I found it really interesting. She spoke about um ah data in relation to ah generational um ah groups. So we a lot of us are obviously really familiar with um with that concept around the different generational groups in the workforce and what that means in terms of leadership and managing them.
00:13:12
Speaker
She zoned in and focused on Gen Z because that is the category of people that are currently 15 to 29 years old and ah already in your workforce and potentially giving you a bit of a ah toothache or coming into the workforce over the next five to 10 years. And so she focused heavily on that group. And I found, even though this is a topic I'm really familiar with, I found some of the things she'd brought up quite insightful and knew I hadn't heard of some of this stuff. So I'll share some of that.
00:13:41
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um The language has changed. There's a whole new language for this group. You know, they've created um a level of of slang and and words that many of us are not familiar with. And I found that really interesting. But they've done it unlike any other generation because they've had the digital element to it. So yes, there's always been slang words and and and colloquialisms that we use in any generation. But this one is at a next level. They've almost created a whole new dictionary. There are different words for virtually everything that they do.
00:14:10
Speaker
um They um are exposed to tech and have embedded it um better than anybody else. Obviously, their exposure to to tech in their lifetimes um ah has been really high and it's been from a young age. So they've embedded really heavily or they are embedded heavily in tech um because they've been exposed to it for so from so young. She used a stat that that Gen Z will have 18 jobs across six careers. I mean,
00:14:39
Speaker
When we think about that, kind of blows your mind a little bit to think 18 jobs, that sounds like a lot of jobs, but 6 careers. And that actually means different pathways, different, doing something completely different. um Again, pretty unheard of for generations before that. um They're very visually and socially engaged. And she talked about that evolution from Google, where we search for things, to YouTube, where we want to see, search for things and see it.
00:15:06
Speaker
to TikTok, where it's short snips of video in short, sharp bits of information um in video form. And this is the generation that, that, you know, um that gave birth to TikTok. So, you know, I think those things are really interesting to think and ponder about with people in your teams. And she talked also about um how people process information in the different generations. So if you're trying to reach that group, particularly, say, from a candidate perspective, um you know, and you're producing, say, a blog or a podcast,
00:15:37
Speaker
They're not interested in that. They're not looking, at they're not listening to that. They want to see it. So, you know, if you are trying, if your candidate target market is in that age group from 15 to 29 right now and you're not on TikTok, um you're missing them. You're totally missing them and you're not connecting um with that group in the way that they want to be connected with. But she also said that they were very, um they were very interested in purpose and impact to the business.
00:16:02
Speaker
So they're looking for leadership that that is more mentoring style than managing style. So they want to be mentored and they want to know the impact to the business. So if you are trying to attract or retain people in your own business, 15 to 29 years old, you've got to tell the stories about how we impact business, um how we impact people. So um what do we do for our clients? What are we doing for our candidates? So sharing those good news stories inside your own business will really um engage and light up that generation in your own workforce. So I found it really interesting, as I said, mostly to do with her presentation style and how organised and polished she was, but also because I learnt something about the generational conversation, which, as I said, I love to have and I know a lot about this and I've researched and read a lot myself, but I still learnt things from her presentation, which I loved. And just to um add in something about the purpose and engagement for Gen Z,
00:17:00
Speaker
that the note I made is that Gen Z They don't need a compelling reason to leave. Like they don't have to dislike their environment. They don't need to be bored, but they do need a compelling reason to stay. And that I think speaks to that key message of, well, what is your vision? What is your mission? What is, what's your purpose? What are your values? How do you create an environment where people feel that they're having a real impact?
00:17:34
Speaker
in the work that they do each day. And this sort of moves on to what Dr. Kirsten Ferguson was saying, but we'll circle back to that. um So yeah, I agree. I really enjoyed what Ashley had to say. And I messaged my Gen Z son, who's just turned 25, who's in the workplace, who's already on his second career at his third job.
00:17:59
Speaker
And I send him photos of some of the slides about the differences across generations and he basically messaged back, get by to basically agree with what ah she said about Gen Z. Good. So you did your own market research. I did my own market research of one.
00:18:16
Speaker
I'm rather Gen Z family member in the workforce. My daughter is actually in Canada at the moment, so it wasn't, it wasn't as easy to communicate with her. But that was Ashley. All right. um Joe Brum.
Joe Brum on Recruitment and Show Success
00:18:29
Speaker
Now, Joe was the final speaker on the second day. Joe Brum is, for those of you not aware, is the Queenslander who is responsible for the creation of Bluey.
00:18:41
Speaker
the cartoon that's blown up around the world, the blue healer, Bluey and her family, and the seven minute episodes that have become legendary, amusing, not just children, but adults alike. And I love Joe.
00:19:02
Speaker
He just stood up there, he told his story about working on Charlie and Lola and wanting to create an Australian version of Peppa Pig and that he took a chance and left his job, which was about a $60,000 job to go out on his own. And he pitched with um the, I think the Asia animators um conference in 2017, a five minute launch reel of Bluey or a pilot, you might say. And the ABC and the BBC picked it up and they gave him $6 million dollars to produce 52 episodes. So then he had to go about building a team. And that's where he got into the details of how he went about his recruitment.
00:19:57
Speaker
And it was fascinating to hear him say that because Brisbane, where he was based and this is in 2020 or sorry, 2019, 2020, that very difficult to get good animators. So he had to get a lot of students and how he went about recruiting them was looking at.
00:20:17
Speaker
try to find something special because he said most of the student films are pretty mediocre but you're just looking for a snapshot of something and he gave an example of one of the animators he hired was there was a scene, this is 2D animation just for those of you who have not seen Bluey and it was of a person walking towards the camera And as Joe said, that's an incredibly difficult and time consuming thing to do as a 2D animator. So he was impressed with the technical expertise, but also impressed with the perseverance and the commitment it would take to actually complete that work.
00:20:54
Speaker
So Bluey's up to 50 animators now, and he said in this sort of blew my mind that there's an average of 10 seconds for each animator in each episode of Bluey. And these are people working full time for up to three months on an episode. Now they are working on more than one episode ah ah at once, but kind of blew my mind to think, wow, there's seven minutes and you've got to catch your 10 seconds. You've got to be fulfilled by that 10 seconds. And Joe also shared about the things that were non-negotiable for him, the things that he was not prepared to compromise on when it came to Bluey, which was no co-production. So he wanted to stay in charge. No writer's room, which meant he didn't want people who previously written on children's shows
00:21:46
Speaker
because the themes tended to be the same. He wanted to do the writing, which he did for the first season, and he based it on his experiences in playing with his two daughters who were um babies and infants.
00:21:59
Speaker
and not toy ethic. In other words, it wasn't going to be driven the stories and what was in Egypt. So it wasn't going to be driven by merchandising or potential merchandising opportunities. um He was clear that Australian accents were part of it.
00:22:16
Speaker
That's one of the most powerful ones, I think. It was. And fascinatingly, when Disney were looking at coming on board as a worldwide distributor, that they conducted pretty expensive market research with audiences doing test screenings in the United States of Bluey to see how the accent went. And what they found was not only was there no problems in understanding the Australian accents in Bluey, but in fact, it was one of the highlights and one of the things that members of the test audiences mentioned as something they found very endearing. And as Joe said, there's a whole generation of young Americans who are just starting school that are used to calling the bathroom the dunny. Yeah, I love that. Which is of course confusing um in America. um So yeah, Joe was great. Anything to add to that?
00:23:08
Speaker
Yeah, it was just a great good Australian news story about success, but he really related it to the to the audience in terms of his recruitment um activities, as you said. um And he was very down to earth and he hung around for quite a while afterwards signing um anything that anybody wanted to sign. And some people brought their kids in, in fact, um at the end of the day. So it was really lovely to see that kind of generosity from a speaker like that. I did hear through the grapevine that was his last corporate speaking um job that he was going to do. Yeah, he was not going to do them anymore. I heard through the great van, whether that's true or not, I don't know, but it's not something I think he loves to do. Like he doesn't enjoy it that much because he's an animator and he loves to draw. um But also, yeah, he's on to other things now. So it might have been one of the last times to hear him speak, which makes it even more valuable. Yeah, agree.
00:23:58
Speaker
And then we're on to Arun, which was a breakout session and you are particularly captivated by Arun
Learning Agility and Retention Techniques
00:24:05
Speaker
Adil. So tell me what was Arun speaking on and why did he captivate you? Yeah, so Arun Pradhan is from um modelthinkers dot.com is his um business organization, but he works for the ANZ Bank. And ah some of you may have heard the name and and sound familiar because he was at Talent X. So he did a ah small session at Talent X And I only caught the that the last half of it, but I was really blown away there. And so when I saw him in the lineup, I jumped into that breakout session. And I'm so glad I did, because he was talking about building the learning agility. And essentially, it was about learning how to learn. And he's saying, as adults, we actually, as we get older, we resist the ability to learn, even though we might say we're open-minded or we're a perpetual student or we love to learn new things.
00:24:55
Speaker
You know, we say all of these things, but as adults, there are factors at play that um prevent us from learning in the way that we used to as children, or that would come more easily. So um he said, Generally, we're we're pretty bad at it. He used the word suck. We suck at learning. um So I just love his style. He's very open, honest. um He kind of, he's got that lecture vibe. You feel like you're kind of in a uni lecture with him, and he's Um, and he's sharing information, um, at a very grassroots level. Um, but yeah, he, he just gave some really good data, um, psych, psychology-based, psychological study-based data around learning and why it is hard to learn. And he took some surveys in the room, you know, put your hand up if you think this is true or this is false. We did a false, true and false kind of questionnaire. Um, and everything was false. We took us a little while to work out that. So he did three slides like that.
00:25:49
Speaker
And everything he put up on those, like, those 6 points on each slide, and they were all false. But of course, the first one, we're analyzing each one. The second one, we're working it out. And by the third one, some people caught onto it. Everything on his slide is false. um And some of us are still voting true and trying to analyze and, you know, so that in itself was an exercise in realizing we're not fast learners in that sense. But the data he was presenting were things um like um the fact that it takes 10,000 hours to master something.
00:26:19
Speaker
um but you know to learn it and master something, it takes an average person 10,000 hours. So that would be like a fact he'd put up. And you were deciding whether that was true or false. um And it's false, is it? It's false. One in particular is false. They were all false, but some of them seemed really true. They were things that we would have heard of before. So I loved that he was kind of blowing out some of those myths as well. um But he was talking really about kind of how to learn, how to relearn things,
00:26:45
Speaker
um if you want to, and that's so important in recruitment, because we know that so much of what we do is about learning every day. There's always new things to learn in recruitment. So learning how to learn, I think is really important, as well as for new people coming into the industry as well. And you and I obviously as trainers, um you know, really value this element that people do need to keep learning and keep absorbing information all through their careers. So he talked about embedding good learning habits, things like spreading um learning out, ah learning over out over time. um So that was one of the other myths, you know, he said, um a lot of people think about, you know, or training courses are designed to do it in a day, or, you know, we'll just get it all done, and we'll we'll finish it, we'll be off the tools just for one day, and then we'll go back to our desks. But he said that spreading learning over time actually helps you embed it into your long-term memory. So he talked about, um like a desk, he said, imagine that your, your work, your desk is your working memory. That's what you need to remember today.
00:27:43
Speaker
And anything that's on your desk right now, you'll remember. But as soon as you don't need to remember it, you'll either forget it or, if it's important enough, you'll commit it to your long-term memory. So you use it as a really easy example, like, you know, staying at the hotel there, you remember your room number, right? While you're staying at Pepper's, you remember the room number that you're in. Now, you might remember it this week because it's still fresh in your memory. But if I ask you in a month, you probably go, I can't remember. I think it was on the third floor or something, you know? So it's not something you need to commit to your long-term memory. So it's on your working desk.
00:28:12
Speaker
memory, but then it gets chucked out. So he said it's about deciding which things need to commit to the long-term memory so that you retain them. And he talked about a technique called the Feynman technique, which was created by Dr. Feynman, who is a very known um ah physicist um and was involved in um lots of other things, including the nuclear bomb and all the other things that you know they go along with that. um But he talked about um explaining things to an imaginary child. This is this is the technique, the Feynman technique.
00:28:42
Speaker
is if you're trying to commit something to your long-term memory, go ahead and repeat it as if you're explaining it to a child um because it allows you to break it down. So um I love this one and I kind of do this inadvertently because at my in my home, um we have no tech we have a no technology rule at the dining table. We have dinner every night as a family and we have no tech at all. So there's no TV. um Sometimes there might be music in the back, but generally not. um Certainly no phones, no iPads, nothing is brought to the table. And we have conversations.
00:29:11
Speaker
And the conversations are always about, um and it has been with my children, you know, what did you learn today? What was something new that happened to you? Getting them just to recount count experiences through the day. And that's the kind of stuff that actually makes it stay in your memory, because you're having to, one, explain it. So my daughter is currently, you know, studying science, and she'll talk about something she's learned that's highly technical. I don't understand it. So she's having to recount it to me like I'm a child. And that's helping her remember it, as well as educating me in the process as well. So You know, inadvertently I've been sort of doing this Feynman technique, which I really love. So yeah, I just really enjoyed his style, um ah his relaxed method of delivery. um He talked about, um you know, creating um a cue to remind you of things as well. So you might, some of you have done uni might um remember doing that, things that associate, you know, different topics with different colors or different situations. So you can recall it.
00:30:05
Speaker
um And he called that spaced um retrieval. So creating, yeah, it was all like based on psychology and and um psychological studies that have been done. So if you get a chance to hear him speak, please go along to that. And as as I said, maybe even I'm gonna do some more research on his own website as well, but I found it really interesting. So I'm glad to hear a lot of that, particularly the spaced learning, because quite a few years ago, I decided to stop doing one day webinars and workshops for the RCSA. I said to them, look, my experience is they don't really work. And I want to do programs because my experience tells me that when you have something like, for example, my leadership coaching and high performance in my advanced program, they're both across three months. My experience is you need to drip feed people so they retain it. And the RCSA said at that point, we we can't make that commercially work
00:31:03
Speaker
So I'm sorry. And I said, well, I'm sorry too, but I'm effectively going to stop training for you because of that. I mean, it was all on good terms and everything. But since then, all the programs that I run are that spaced learning across two to three months. And certainly the feedback that I get from participants is that it really helps them embed the learning in their day to day. The fact that it is over a longer period of time, that they come back and that they talk about the action that they've taken, the results that they've generated.
00:31:33
Speaker
when the next session um commences? Yeah, he definitely talked about the conversation as well. So um as um as difficult as as or awkward sometimes as it is when people go off to a conference, say, and they come back and have to talk about the content um or re-canned it or you ask them to come and do a little presentation, that's actually really valuable, he's saying, because it requires them to recall what they've learnt and then explain it to other people. So that idea of taking the information and then repeating it on is a way to embed it for yourself. So, um you know, even this podcast, in fact, is a way, if you were at the conference and you're listening to what we're saying now, we're reinforcing some of the messages and the thoughts that you would have picked up and the notes that you took, and it actually helps embed it. So, um so I'm going to put our podcast up as part of the Feynman Technique as well.
00:32:23
Speaker
Excellent all right well that's the end of RCSA conference recap part one there will be a part two out in two days time a special advanced episode really of the following week so look out for that so