Transcript
Speaker: know Who helps recruitment agencies recruit, Adele? It's Wingman Recruitment, flexible recruitment support built by recruiters for recruiters. More capacity, less pressure, better results.
Speaker: Learn more at wingmangroup.com.au and visit the services tab. Welcome to Recruitment News Australia. This is the news for the 29th of September, 2026. My name's Adele Last. I'm flying solo as Ross Clennant is still on extended annual leave, lucky him. So I'll jump straight into the news.
Speaker: Australia's unemployment rate has climbed to 4.6%, the highest since the pandemic. The ABS says all of the job growth in August came from part-time work. Employment rose by 39,500 people, but part-time jobs jumped while full-time employment fell
Speaker: The number of unemployed Australians rose by 28,000 to nearly 723,000 and the rate is 0.4 points higher than a year ago. Participation also rose to 67.1%.
Speaker: CBA's Ashwin Clark says households are likely working more to make up for lower real incomes after higher inflation and interest rates. By state, Victoria has the highest unemployment rate at 5.2%, followed by Tasmania at 5%.
Speaker: New South Wales is lowest at 4.3%. South Australia has had the sharpest rise up half a point, to 4.6% and Queensland rose 0.3 points to 4.5%. There was a small bright spot in job ads. Jobs and Skills Australia's internet vacancy index rose 0.3% in August to ads.
Speaker: Seek share price closed at $11.35 last week, the lowest since early September have lost well over half their value. a year ago the shares were at twenty eight dollars and sixty three cents so investors have lost well over half their value The slide has been sharp since the company's financial year 2026 results. Three days before they were released on the 12th of August, shares were at $16.45. That's a 31% fall in about six weeks. The market is clearly bearish on SIC's financial performance of late.
Speaker: Staying with the online jobs market, ASX-listed Decider AI Industries has renewed its partnership with Job Board CareerOne for another 12 months. It's the second renewal, taking the arrangement into a third year. However, no financial terms were disclosed.
Speaker: Under the deal, Decider supplies the AI behind CareerOne's matching. The company says its system models job seekers across more than 2000 dimensions, rather than relying on job titles and keywords.
Speaker: Job seekers get matched openings on a dashboard and employers are sent what CareerOne describes as the top 50 applicants for a role. Decider also stresses that all data and AI processing is kept in Australia, which it markets as sovereign ai It also says the technology reduces the need for a recruitment sales team. a claim worth watching for an industry that sells on relationships.
Speaker: CareerOne, owned by Career Media Group since 2017, is trying to reposition against much larger rivals. Whether AI matching can shift that market is still unproven.
Speaker: The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2026 shows a sharp divide in women's representation in the C-suite. Women hold 65% of Chief People Officer roles and 64% of CHRO roles and slightly under half of Chief Marketing Officer roles, but they only hold 19% of CEO roles and 9% of Chief Technology Officer roles.
Speaker: Women's share of top level positions overall has stalled at around 29.4% after growing from 26.7% in 2015. Across 57 economies, women make up 46% of entry level workers, but only 23% of the C-suite.
Speaker: The report calls this the drop from the top. It says parity needs two things, protecting gains at senior levels and lifting women's representation at entry level.
Speaker: The federal government's latest intergenerational report landed last week, and one of its key themes is workforce participation. More Australians are working than Treasury expected, largely because more women are working.
Speaker: Female participation is projected to keep rising until the mid-2040s, with the gap to men narrowing from 7.7 points 5.4 points
Speaker: Older Australians are also working more. Participation among people over 65 has risen 9.5% since the 2002 report, extra 1% Australians have kept working 65 since 2023.
Speaker: Jim Chalmers said an ageing population means a proportionately smaller workforce and greater demand for health and aged care. The number of Australians over 85 will triple by 2066. Even so, he said Australia's participation will keep growing while most OECD countries see it fall, and Treasury expects migration to keep growing the working age population.
Speaker: That's the news for the 29th of September, 2026. Stay tuned now for Question of the Week.
Speaker: Question of the Week. I've had to Botox my CV. Is there a hidden bias in hiring algorithms? Where does this question come from, Ross?
Speaker: Well, Adele, you know my wife Michelle's broad skills and experience, don't you? Yes, I do. Why do you ask? Well, last week something happened and then today read an article that gave me some insight into what may have caused that.
Speaker: Okay. Please share. Michelle applied for a senior ah HR role with key selection criteria that included senior ah HR leadership, project change management, and internal comms. That's a pretty unusual combination for a senior HR role.
Speaker: It was in pharma. Michelle's had experience in pharma, although not a lot. After applying, she said to me, she'd be pretty surprised if she didn't get at least a call.
Speaker: Well, knowing Michelle, that does sound like a relevant role for her, but let me guess, she got rejected. She did. Within 24 hours, the thanks but no thanks email arrived. The relevance was that I just read an article on the BBC website about AI recruitment tools and whether they're quietly pushing out midlife women out of the job market.
Speaker: Yeah, after you sent me that article and I read it, I can see why you're wondering whether Michelle's case matches what the article was outlining. The case that struck me in the article was one by a person called Stacey DeGuide. She was age 52, decades of senior fashion experience, and she'd spent 16 months sending out resumes with almost nothing coming back. She ended up stripping out much of her experience out of the resume just to make sure she could get a response. She called it having to Botox my CV, which is such a telling phrase.
Speaker: and She's not alone. um BBC spoke to more than 60 women aged between 40 and 65, most with decades of senior experience, and the pattern was the same. Endless applications, automated rejections or silence.
Speaker: One woman had applied to over 400 jobs without success. It's interesting nobody can prove AI is the cause in an individual case because employers really disclose how their screening works. But the pattern is consistent enough that a City of London task force focused on women in financial services has flagged it as a real structural risk, not just anecdotal.
Speaker: The research pointed to something specific, screening tools not recognising the value of skills that experienced women bring and resume gaps, often from childcare, being read as a negative signal rather than context.
Speaker: That task force also estimated AI and automation could displace hundreds of thousands of women's jobs by 2035 and that most women surveyed hadn't been offered any retraining.
Speaker: That's the part hiring managers and even recruiters should sit up for. This isn't just a fairness issue. It's a talent pipeline issue. If you're systematically screening out experienced mid-career women, you're losing a huge pool of skilled people at a time when everyone complains about talent shortages.
Speaker: Let's get into the mechanics because the article had good detail from an AI lawyer, Laura Holden. She described tools that grade resumes on a simple A to E scale and nudge recruiters towards the top graded candidates and others that flag things like multi-year career a gap as a point of concern, which can quietly bias a human reviewer before they've even read the resume properly.
Speaker: And her broader point was that providers market these decision support tools as decision support tools But, you know, in practice, when a business is rejecting large volumes of applicants based on an AI-generated score, that tool isn't just functioning as – it is functioning as – and her broader point was that providers market these as decision support tools. But in practice, when a business is rejecting large volumes of applicants based on an AI-generated score, that tool is just –
Speaker: and her broader point was that providers are And her broader point was that providers market these as decision support tools. But in practice, when a business is rejecting large volumes of applicants based on an AI-generated score, that tool is functioning as the decision maker, whether it's labelled that way or not.
Speaker: There was also a Cambridge researcher quoted in the article, Dr Eleanor Drage, who made an interesting distinction. She said it's genuinely hard to prove these systems are biased in a legal sense, but she argues the underlying logic is flawed regardless. Because these systems can't assess a person's judgment, adaptability or the value of a career break the way a human recruiter would.
Speaker: human recruiter can look at someone who stepped away for two years and ask about what they did with that time. An algorithm just sees the gap. Well, not all ATSs do that. Atlas, whom, for full disclosure, I represent in the local market, scores an applicant against the job's criteria split into required, preferred and nice to have.
Speaker: It shows a rationale alongside the score rather than just a bare number. To me, it's trying to answer Holden's objection before anyone raises it. If a recruiter can see why someone scored low they can catch the moment a gap or a career break has dragged the score down for the wrong reasons.
Speaker: So what does this mean for recruiters? I'd say the first implication is audit your own tech stack. if you're using an ATS or a third-party screening tool, you need to understand what it's basing its scoring on, not just trust the vendor's assurances that it's legally compliant.
Speaker: Well, Workday, one of the biggest players in the corporate ATS market, is facing legal claims in the US over this, which we did report in ah RNA last year. Whilst they dispute it and say that their tools don't make hiring decisions, it's exactly the kind of ambiguity Holden was warning about. If a recruiter or a hiring manager can't explain why the tool ranks someone low, it's got to be a massive red flag.
Speaker: Another implication built...
Speaker: Another implication, build in a human review step for anything the algorithm flags as borderline, especially around gaps or overqualified flags. Don't let a machine-generated shortlist become the finalized shortlist.
Speaker: Well, again, referring to Atlas because I know exactly what the system does. It keeps applicants sitting apart from the live database until someone actively approves them. So nothing gets buried or auto-rejected into the CRM without a person's sign-off.
Speaker: Every approve or reject is logged against the name of whoever made the call, which is designed to keep the human in the loop. And it's worth remembering... That's not something the AI worked out on its own.
Speaker: A human decided what counts as required versus nice to have in the criteria. And if the tool is trained or fine-tuned on a company's own hiring history, it's learning from whatever pattern of who got shortlisted already has existed in the data, gaps and all.
Speaker: That's basically what happened with Amazon's old internal recruiting tool. Trained on a decade of male-dominated hiring history, it started marking down resumes that even mentioned women's, like a women's chess club.
Speaker: So the bias isn't injected by the algorithm out of nowhere. It's inherited from the people and decisions that built and fed it. Well, let's talk now about the job seekers because that's who's really hurting as part of this story. What would you tell someone who has experienced what these women in the BBC article are going through?
Speaker: I mean, we would say this in the recruitment industry, but job seekers don't rely solely on online applications through big job boards. One of the women interviewed, Anna Cowie, said she'd had far more luck through community and networking events than through submitting resumes online. She made the point that in person, you're seen as a person, not just lines on a page.
Speaker: That's not just a nice sentiment. It's genuinely a way to bypass the algorithm entirely. The second tip, be deliberate about how you frame your resume, but don't scale it back too much. There's a difference between tailoring your resume to highlight relevant current skills and keywords for a role versus panicking and deleting a whole decade of achievement.
Speaker: Work with a career coach or a trusted recruiter to find that balance rather than guessing. Third tip, seek out companies that have been transparent about scaling back or auditing their AI tools in recruitment. The article mentioned some London employers have already paused ai screening over bias concerns. Those are worth researching because it signals a hiring culture that at least is thinking about this issue.
Speaker: It's a sobering read, Ross, but I don't think the answer is to, like, avoid AI in hiring entirely. Even Dr. Dharaj acknowledged there are legitimate uses, like helping employers analyse their historical hiring patterns.
Speaker: Right. The issue isn't the technology existing. It's deploying it against vulnerable groups, as she put it, without transparency or testing and without a human safety net catching what it misses.
Speaker: Which brings us back to where we started, gendered ageism. Stacey's message wasn't that this is only a woman's issue. She'd heard from men too. In fact, a 55-year-old friend of mine called me recently, incredibly frustrated that he's getting nowhere applying for jobs in management consulting, and he has a lot of experience in that. field and he was scathing about a couple of recruiters, naming them in his rant.
Speaker: I knew those recruiters, but I didn't tell him that. So the bias does run along both age and gender lines. In a world where so many employees complain about skill shortages, we have to be proactive about championing relevant candidates regardless of age and gender.
Speaker: For recruiters and hiring managers, audit your tools, keep humans in the loop and invest in your existing talent. The research pointed to something specific, screening tools not recognising the value of skills that experienced women bring, and resume may gaps, often from childcare, being read as a negative signal rather than context.
Speaker: That task force also estimated ai and automation could displace hundreds of thousands of women's jobs by 2035 that most women surveyed hadn't been offered any retraining.
