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Episode 56
207 Plays7 months ago
News for the week beginning 8 April 2024
and Question of the Week: "What should you leave out and what should you include, when you refer a candidate via a resume?"
#rna #recruitmentnewsaustralia #recruitmentpodcast
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview
2024 Industry Awards Finalists Revealed
00:00:09
Speaker
This is the news for week commencing the 8th of April, 2024. I'm Adele Last. The RCSA has announced the 44 finalists for the 2024 Industry Awards. There were 136 submissions received across the 13 categories. The finalists are Excellence in Business Innovation, Fuse, Wisdom and Ex-Recruiter, Excellence in Candidate Care, Caring for You, People to People and Truku,
00:00:36
Speaker
Excellence in Client Service, Chandler McLeod, Horner, People to People and Truku. Excellence in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, A Quint, Rainy Day and Talent Web. Excellence in Social Purpose, Med Recruit, Prescript and Truku. Excellence in Safety and Wellbeing Culture, Connect Staffing Group, Unidex Healthcare and Volley Recruit. Recruitment Professional,
00:01:01
Speaker
Finalists are John Cam from Rainy Day, Haniel De La Rosa from Horner, Matthew Du from Smart, Martin Hill from Zenith Search, and Shane Morgan from Sapshia. The Rising Star finalists are Julia Ayog from Serious People, Lynette Cardinal, Vertical Scope Group, John Shaddick from Sunstrom, Yasmin Shrabati from Two Scots, and Sabrina Turner from Robert Walters. Recruitment leader category finalists are John Cam from Rainy Day,
00:01:31
Speaker
Laura Fraser from Fraser Trimble and Sarah Swodersky from Purcell Kelly. In the Outstanding Agency category up to 10 staff, the finalists of Fraser Trimble, Halo People and Rainy Day. In the same Outstanding category up to 30 staff, Entre, Horner and Smart. Up to 80 staff was Fuse, Talent and Truku. And the Outstanding Agency for over 80 staff, Chandler McLeod, People to People and Programmed.
Australian Job Market Update
00:02:02
Speaker
National job vacancies decreased by 6.1% to 364,000 in February, according to the latest three-monthly update released by the ABS. Despite this being the seventh consecutive quarterly decrease, job vacancies in February 2024
00:02:18
Speaker
were still 60% higher than in February 2020, prior to the start of the pandemic. The proportion of businesses reporting at least one vacancy decreased from 19.7% in November last year to 18.3% in February. The record higher remains November 2022's figure of 27.7%.
PwC Controversy and Senate Report
00:02:39
Speaker
Disgrace consulting firm PwC has failed to genuinely change since it was exposed for sharing confidential government information.
00:02:48
Speaker
with other clients according to an interim Senate report. The Senate Finance and Public Administration References Committee opened hearings into the management of assurance and integrity by government consulting services in May 2023. The inquiry was sparked by the discovery that from May 2015, PwC shared confidential tax information relating to the introduction of multinational anti-avoidance laws with potential and existing clients.
00:03:16
Speaker
The failure of PwC to be completely open and honest, as per the committee's recommendations in its first report, is reflective of PwC's failure to genuinely change, it says. The committee does not see how PwC can recover their reputation while it continues to cover up because the two are incompatible. Indeed, the cover-up worsens the crime. PwC has still made no genuine effort to fully investigate and address the issues. Rather, their approach
00:03:43
Speaker
appears to be to hide behind legal professional privilege and hope it will go away," the report says. The committee's final report is due at the end of May and additionally the AFP investigation continues to be ongoing.
US Staffing Industry Revenue Decline
00:03:58
Speaker
Staffing industry revenue in the United States this year will shrink by 3% to $184.6 billion, according to a new report by staffing industry analysts. Driving the decline is travel nurse revenue, which continues to normalise after its pandemic highs. Travel nurse revenue is expected to decrease by 20% this year. Excluding travel nurse and per diem nurse revenue, overall staffing industry revenue is expected to be roughly flat year over year.
00:04:27
Speaker
In comparison, the US staffing industry is estimated to have declined by 15% in 2023. By segment, SIA expects industrial staffing revenue to fall 5% this year, office clerical will hold steady, and IT staffing revenue is expected to fall 3%. By segment, the highest growth is forecast for education, temporary staffing up 7%, followed by engineering staffing up 6%.
00:04:54
Speaker
SIA expects a return to growth next year, forecasting US staffing industry revenue will grow 3% to US$190 billion in 2025.
UK Teacher Recruitment and Jamaica's Shortage
00:05:05
Speaker
British schools are following their counterparts in the health sector by increasing their recruitment from developing countries to fill vacancies, leaving target countries such as Jamaica struggling to cope with the brain drain of teachers.
00:05:19
Speaker
The UK immigration figures show a jump in the number of skilled worker visas issued to teachers from abroad. While the government in England is using bonuses to boost the number of teacher trainees from overseas at a time when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said legal migration to the UK was too high and vowed to reduce it. Last year, nearly 1,100 work visas were issued to qualified secondary school teachers. Double the visas issued in 2022
00:05:47
Speaker
and well above the 205 issued in 2021. So far this year, more than one in four applicants to teacher training courses in England have come from outside Europe. Jamaica alone was the source country of 486 teachers last year, twice as many as in 2022, as schools in England launched recruiting drives in a country with a population of just 2.8 million and suffering its own chronic shortages of qualified teachers.
00:06:14
Speaker
The President of the Jamaica Teachers Association has accused British teacher recruiters of offering Jamaican teachers who relocate to the UK financial incentives to act as intermediaries in the recruitment of their former colleagues.
Workday Bias Allegations Defense
00:06:28
Speaker
The question of whether an HR Tech vendor or its users bear the responsibility when facing a bias claim
00:06:35
Speaker
is in the process of being decided in California. HR software giant Workday is defending itself in a lawsuit filed by applicant Derek Mobley last year. He alleges he applied for 80 to 100 jobs through various employers, all of which he believes use Workday's hiring software. And despite holding finance and network system administration degrees, employers consistently rejected him. Mobley claims these rejections arose from biases in the software.
00:07:02
Speaker
Workday's defense strategy demarcates the line of responsibility, arguing that the users, not Workday, control the hiring process. Lawsuit is now at a critical juncture as it awaits a judge's ruling on Workday's motion to dismiss. Among the allegations made by Mobley is that Workday is an indirect employer and therefore its software is acting as a discriminatory gatekeeper. Workday has vehemently denied these claims stating that it's the customers who configure and use its software to screen candidates.
00:07:32
Speaker
Workday added, it has no control over a customer's day to day operations and no ability to force a customer to make decisions in the hiring process or otherwise. And therefore, the lawsuit is without merit.
US Employment Growth and Unemployment Rate
00:07:45
Speaker
Total United States non-farm employment reported its largest monthly gains since July 2023, and the unemployment rate declined by 0.1% to 3.8% when the March 2024 results were released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last week.
00:08:02
Speaker
March's 303,000 new jobs easily exceeded the average monthly gain of 231,000 over the prior 12 months. The aggregated revised job numbers for both January and February added 22,000 jobs to total employment. In March, the most significant job gains occurred in healthcare, government construction and leisure and hospitality. The median change in annual pay for those switching jobs rose for the second consecutive month
00:08:30
Speaker
to reach 10% up from 7.6% in February. For those staying in their jobs, the median change in annual pay remained unchanged at 5.1%.
US Workers' Resistance to RTO Policies
00:08:40
Speaker
A recent study shows that 77% of workers in the United States believe the primary motivation for return to office policies is for employers to exert more control over the activities of their workers. The 2024 RTO survey for My Perfect Regime conducted in early February
00:08:59
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with over 4200 US respondents reveal that 40% of participants say their employer wants to increase office attendance while 42% think companies want to reinstate on-site work to force attrition without the need for severance packages and 28%
00:09:14
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reported that their employer has threatened to fire workers who don't comply. As companies increasingly enforce RTO policies, some are offering perks including monetary incentives to ease the pain for employees returning to on-site work. However, most workers say not even a higher salary will lure them back on-site full-time. The desire to remain in a remote position is so strong that 36% of respondents say there is no perk their company could offer to justify a full-time return to the office.
00:09:43
Speaker
with 41% of workers saying that even a four-day work week on site for five days pay would still be less attractive than remaining a predominantly remote worker. And that's the news for the week beginning the 8th of April 2024. I'm Ross Clannett.
Resume Crafting and Job Application Tips
00:10:12
Speaker
Question of the week this week, what should you leave out and what should you include when you refer a candidate via a resume? So Adele, let's start with what should you leave out? The first three things that come to mind for me are things that should not really be part of the assessment of the candidate through the recruitment process. So I would say date of birth, if that's still occurring there, or age, anything referenced to age,
00:10:41
Speaker
I would also say location. I remove a candidate's location specifically in terms of suburb, full address of course, but suburb because I don't want clients to make assumptions about where somebody lives in the distance that's required to travel for work. So remove that. And the other thing that I edit a little or have a look at is their hobbies, you know, outside interests, anything that they've got that's additional information.
00:11:09
Speaker
Sometimes I'll leave that in. I'm not saying I'll always remove it, but I want to make sure that, you know, it's valid. I'll always go through that with the candidate, make sure they can actually talk about what they've listed there. A lot of people will put something, you know, some sort of sport on there. And then when you pick, you know, further, they don't really know a lot about it. So I would rather them have nothing on there if it's not something that they're really passionate. If they can't speak about it passionately, then I take it off.
00:11:33
Speaker
Okay. What about you? So, so I'd add to those three, marital status. It's irrelevant. Take that out. Contact details. You don't want the candidate's contact details being that available to the client. Yes. And the third one's a bit of a pet hate. Career objectives or
00:11:55
Speaker
personal career statements. I just find those things just kind of, they're just motherhood statements that are just a big distraction. And I used to just take those out completely. Well, those poor candidates that agonize those hours writing those paragraphs, it's gone, deleted.
00:12:13
Speaker
I really did not like them. They went. Did you keep them in or did you take them out? No, I must admit I was never a fan. As you said, they're often broad brush statements that don't have a lot of validity. So again, I think we're in alignment around those kind of things that aren't relevant to the recruitment process.
Bias in Job Applications Against Non-English Names
00:12:32
Speaker
But I'm thinking there's a bit of an elephant in the room here, one we haven't mentioned, which is actually the person's name. The thing that's going to be right at the top of the document
00:12:42
Speaker
And I want to touch on this one because I want to address the idea around the discrimination and bias that goes on around people's names and whether they're chosen to proceed to the next level of a process based on their name, where they come from.
00:12:59
Speaker
And you know what Adil, there is evidence that we should look at this seriously because there was a study published last year, it was published in the leadership quarterly and it was an investigation by a team of researchers that were considering or wanted to understand the level of name discrimination in Australia.
00:13:23
Speaker
So what this research team did is they designed 12,000 identical resumes matched to more than 4,000 different job applications. And they altered only one thing, the applicant's name to represent different ethnicities. And these were submitted for jobs in Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney.
00:13:48
Speaker
And Adele, guess what? What do you think the difference was in terms of responses to candidates that had English names compared to the responses that were for candidates with non-English names? I know it's going to be significant, but tell me, Ross, what is it?
00:14:08
Speaker
OK, so firstly, so they differentiated for leadership positions and for non-leadership positions. So where do you think the greater discrimination was in favor of English names? Leadership positions. Correct. So what happened was
00:14:29
Speaker
Applicants with English names, these are for leadership positions, received 26.8% of positive responses. A positive response was a request for a phone call screen, more information. And those who applied with a non-English name, remembering exactly the same resume, 11.3% of positive responses. In other words, there was a 57.4% reduction
00:14:59
Speaker
in positive responses to the candidates who had a non-English name. And the difference for non-leadership positions was a 45.3% reduction in positive responses to candidates with identical resumes, but just a non-English name. So are you surprised to hear it? I'm not surprised. And I'm really sad to hear it. That's a really significant study in a number of ways. One, it's Australian. So it's local and relevant.
00:15:28
Speaker
And two, that's a sizable amount of data, 12,000 resumes across 4,000 jobs. So we're not talking about, you know, just ad hoc information here. That is really sizable and really demonstrates the idea around, you know, name racism, name-based racism, which is obviously based on that data, very rife in our country, which, yeah, doesn't surprise me. And
00:15:54
Speaker
you know, maybe is something to address when you are looking at a candidate's resume. As a final bit of advice I would give around what you might leave out or perhaps edit might be around looking at the candidate's name. Now, I have done this myself always with the candidate's permission, but I have sometimes just simplified the name. I would never give somebody a completely different name, but sometimes with a very long
00:16:19
Speaker
name with a lot of letters or difficult pronunciation, I might edit it down to something that was a smaller, shorter variation of the same name. I've done that. Just to try and make it more simple. Yeah, I completely agree, Dale. I, back in the 90s, had an accounting candidate, I still remember him, Shri Hari Venkatachalam.
00:16:40
Speaker
and Sri Hari was raised in Australia. So he spoke with an Aussie accent like me, but with his permission, I sent his resume as Sri Venkat.
00:16:54
Speaker
And he got interviews straight away and an excellent candidate as well. But that is a very good example. And of course, in some countries, there's different naming conventions, which make, unfortunately, someone's full name four or five names, which creates its own problems. Yeah, you just want to try and create
00:17:17
Speaker
a document that is going to get through to the next stage. You don't want any bumps in the road. So sometimes something as simple as you said in terms of Colombian candidates who will put four names on a resume, reducing that down to two. Their first and their surname makes it much more simple for anybody receiving that to just smooth over the top of that and go to the next phase.
Enhancing Resumes for Success
00:17:43
Speaker
But we've talked about what to leave out. What about what we should include? What are the things that you think people miss in a resume? Well, the first thing is more information about previous employers. Most people are going to work mostly for organizations that most clients will not have heard of. So it's important that you list what products and services that business provides or that organization provides.
00:18:10
Speaker
many employees they have and where they're located as basic piece of information. Accomplishments that helps create context for a person's role. What were the accomplishments of that person in the role? They were things that
00:18:29
Speaker
we're typically going to have metrics attached to them. And then the third thing is always add in an explanation for a gap on a person's resume.
00:18:41
Speaker
My experience was clients hated resume gaps. They tended to view them negatively. They tended to see them as a reason to doubt a candidate or to exclude a candidate. So whether a candidate has been caring for a sick relative, has been on an extended holiday or studying six months for some form of certification or qualification, put that on the resume.
00:19:04
Speaker
Yeah, it reminds me of an example I had recently of a referral candidate referred to me for some recruitment advice and application advice. He had a six year gap in his resume or a six year pause where he hadn't worked for the most recent six years. And he was quite well qualified and experienced prior to that was applying for jobs, applying for the right kind of jobs in his space and just not getting callbacks or interviews or requests in any way.
00:19:31
Speaker
after I had a chat with him, I asked him about the six-year gap and he explained primarily in that time he had been caring for his own children. He had been the primary carer. His wife had gone back to work and he'd chosen to stay home and care for his children. He was really uncomfortable with that scenario and explaining that and felt like it was, you know, going to be seen very negatively by employers and so left it off and was really uncomfortable in explaining it.
00:19:56
Speaker
As soon as we could break that down with him and get him to feel more comfortable about the fact that there was nothing to be ashamed of in that, I told him to put it on the resume, he'd instantly changed his situation and he was lucky enough to secure employment after that. I think you're right. Explaining the gaps and being upfront about that is a very valuable part of it as well.
00:20:20
Speaker
leads really I think to the final point, sort of what I would say is universal advice. Remember that a resume is a marketing document.
00:20:30
Speaker
It is a document designed to provide enough information for the employer to say, yes, this candidate's worth interviewing. You don't have to have everything, but you certainly have enough to quell whatever doubts the client might have and to pique their interest that the candidate seems a good match for the job.
00:20:53
Speaker
And then let's get the interview booked because ultimately that's where the magic happens. That's where the decision is made. And I think in my experience, far too many recruiters see a resume as having to be comprehensive. And I think that in many cases does the candidate disservice. Hey, are you liking listening to our podcast Recruitment News Australia?
00:21:19
Speaker
If you are, it would really help if you could give Ross Clannan and I a five-star review. On whatever podcast app you listen to it on, please hop onto the review section and give us a review next time you're listening on your favorite episode. And thanks for listening.