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Episode 11
370 Plays1 year ago
Episode 11
Don't miss this episode where not only do you get to hear the news of the industry but also you get to listen in while Ross and Adele tackle important questions.
Question of the Week:What are the arguments for and against going internal if I am an agency recruiter?
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Transcript
Global Staffing Industry Trends
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to Recruitment News Australia. This is the news for week commencing 29th of May, 2023. Global revenue in the staffing industry grew 4% last year to US$648 billion, slowing from the fast-paced growth of 23% in 2021. According to the staffing industry analysts, global staffing market estimates and forecasts, May 2023 reports.
00:00:34
Speaker
The US was the largest contributor to the global spend, representing 34%, which was $220 billion, with Japan next accounting for 13%, $84 billion, and the UK third with 8% at $52 billion. Australia ranks seventh with a 4% market share.
00:00:53
Speaker
WorkSafe Victoria has issued the recruitment industry with new codes for work cover premiums after decades of placement and labour hire services being grouped together. It's good news for placement firms with the premiums dropping to 1.84% of payroll compared to 3.043. However, labour hire firms are slugged with a more than doubling of premiums at 7.469%.
Corporate Acquisitions and Strategies
00:01:21
Speaker
Global recruiter Hayes has purchased a majority stake in Verceda Consulting, a diversity, equity and inclusion advisory organisation. Hayes will immediately look to put Verceda Consulting at the forefront of its DE&I offering as part of its advisory services. It is currently focused in the UK market, although it has a presence through an associate network in the US and parts of Europe. Hayes says it intends to expand the business globally, targeting the US, Australia and New Zealand,
00:01:51
Speaker
and Germany in the initial phase.
00:02:11
Speaker
Gross profit will increase by between 4.9% and 7.4% when compared to restated gross profit data reported for the comparative period last year. The group said the results of the reporting period have been impacted by considerable contract losses at All About Expert, the subsidiary of Adcorp Holdings Australia, which was placed in the voluntary administration last December.
Regional Salary Growth in Australia
00:02:36
Speaker
SEEK reported that advertised salaries grew in every state and territory in the year to April 2023, although its growth still lags inflation. Nationally, the average advertised salary growth was 4.8%, although SEEK reported that there had been more modest growth in the past six months. On a state-by-state basis, jobs in Queensland exceeded the salary growth of jobs in other states with 5.5% growth.
00:03:02
Speaker
Trades and services experience the fastest growth at 6.7% year on year and the lowest paid jobs recording the fastest growth across all salary levels.
00:03:13
Speaker
Australia's inability to recruit enough new Defence Force members and retain its current personnel has been branded pretty scary.
Challenges in Military Recruitment and Retention
00:03:22
Speaker
Parliamentary Committee is examining new ways to attract and keep people in the armed forces as the Australian Defence Force faces a high churn rate and a failure to meet recruitment targets. Official data revealed a separation rate from the ADF of 11.3%
00:03:38
Speaker
which amounted to 6600 people leaving every year. Figures Labor MP and Defence Subcommittee Chair Julian Hill said were pretty scary. The ADF is also falling behind in its 2023 recruitment target, estimating it will get to 73% and it has also short 600 public servants within the Department of Defence. Major General Wade Shothart
00:04:04
Speaker
said defense undertook exit surveys for personal leaving and found the reasons were relatively consistent. Those reasons were usually due to family circumstances, including spouse employment, community connections, and schooling for children. In a bid to halt the number of personnel leaving the Defense Force, the federal government has pledged a $50,000 cash bonus for personnel if they commit to the military for three additional years after they have served their mandatory
00:04:34
Speaker
service period. The Guardian has reported that a taxpayer funded employability course is under fire after job seekers complained that much of the compulsory training involved being shown irrelevant, inappropriate and at times bizarre YouTube videos.
Critiques of Employability Courses
00:04:50
Speaker
Private providers are paid a total of about $500 million over five years to run employability skills training EST courses as part of the Commonwealth $7 billion workforce Australia program.
00:05:04
Speaker
The Guardian detailed the experiences of Arthur, a 26-year-old honours graduate who was compelled to do the training to keep receiving JobSeeker payments. He told a news site that much of the course he completed consisted of watching YouTube videos. These included a motivational montage created from a YouTube channel called Law of Attraction Coaching, as well as videos about safety protocols at a Dutch gas company and the application guidelines for a Victorian government tender.
00:05:32
Speaker
The Department of Workplace Relations and Training said the contracted EST provider WISE Employment and its subcontractor Paramount Training all said Arthur's courses are deviated from the usual curriculum. Few of them, half of Australian employees are reporting high levels of wellbeing in 2023, according to a new report.
Employee Wellbeing in Australia
00:05:53
Speaker
with younger workers significantly hit harder than the older generations. Gallagher's Workforce Trends Report 2023, which surveyed over 2,600 employees, found only 48% reported high levels of wellbeing, below the 52% registered in 2022. Younger workers also showed significantly lower levels of wellbeing than older employees, and that employees above 65 years of age had the highest level of wellbeing.
00:06:22
Speaker
People with high wellbeing have a 2.3 times greater engagement at work, according to the report.
Innovations in Work Conditions at Bunnings
00:06:31
Speaker
Bunnings will be the first Australian retailer to trial a four-day week for thousands of its full-time workers, with the hardware giant announcing it had made a landmark agreement earlier in the month. The agreement will also entitle Bunnings staff to pay rises over the next three years and more holidays.
00:06:48
Speaker
The SDA union agreed to Bunnings proposal to deliver a 10.5% pay rise to 40,000 staff over three years and increased annual leave to five weeks a year. The deal will allow full-time workers the option to request to work 38 hours over four days. Bunnings will now trial different models of a four-day work week or a nine-day fortnight and test the benefits for their workers.
Career Paths: Agency vs. Internal Recruitment
00:07:18
Speaker
Adele, our question this week, what are the arguments for and against going internal if I'm an agency recruiter? So why don't you start the against? What are the arguments against an agency recruiter going internal, Adele? I think there's probably a lot of people out there pondering this one at the moment. So this is a really good topic actually for us to discuss both sides. But look,
00:07:46
Speaker
First and foremost, agency recruiters are frontline workers, essentially. You know, you're at the whole face of dealing with clients and candidates. It's what you would consider front office. So it's really, I guess, at the pointy end, you know, you're driving the car, you're not one of the pit crew. And I see internal as being a lot more of a back office. So for me, the advantage of that is
00:08:12
Speaker
that you're working in a key and core role in a business when you're an agency recruiter. Yep, agree. So the flip side, of course, there is there's no sales element as an internal recruiter. So if you're an agency recruiter and you really don't like the sales and accountability aspect or the degree of accountability that most agencies have,
00:08:37
Speaker
then internal recruitment is certainly something that you should consider because those people who aren't that sales motivated aren't that money motivated and i don't know about your experience Adele but i would have guessed that a large majority not all but a large majority of internal recruiters
00:08:58
Speaker
receive no bonus or a bonus quite small proportional to their base salary. Whereas of course, if you're an agency recruiter, you can receive, well, potentially a multiple of two or three times of your base remuneration. Yeah, which makes a really good point for me again of why you'd want to stay in agency because you're earning capacity
00:09:24
Speaker
is far greater and is able to be influenced by you. So you've got a greater capacity to earn more money by the work that you do. Work harder, earn more is really sort of a known philosophy. So I think that's one of the reasons for me about going against going internal, because if you are wanting to maximise your earning capacity, you've got a better chance of doing that in the agency side.
00:09:51
Speaker
I think the bonus thing is an interesting one because, as you said, some agencies, most agencies will pay a bonus or some sort of commission structure and it's relatively rare internally. But I think that also impacts your performance in some way of being able to sort of get to the outcome as well because you want to be able to achieve the outcome.
00:10:18
Speaker
being driven from a very different reason internally to agency. Well, yeah, and I suppose the flip side of that is that you're going to almost always have a larger base salary in internal recruitment. So if you're a person that a larger base salary is more important than the potential total earnings, then internal recruitment is, well, I would say in almost all cases, going to be a better bet. Yeah.
00:10:48
Speaker
Sure. What about some of the other reasons for Russ? What would you say why they should go into? Well, I mean, I think a pretty common one is the ability to move sideways. So if you're in agency recruitment, but you really want to look at other related areas like L and D or OD or HR or maybe IRE,
00:11:18
Speaker
then moving into internal recruitment will probably give you a better opportunity to move sideways inside that organization into one of those areas. And although certainly there are recruitment agencies that are large enough that I have seen people move from a desk into one of those internal functions, it's far less common simply because most recruitment agencies in Australia
00:11:47
Speaker
are not large enough to offer that sort of opportunity. And I think keep in mind though, most cases will need a full qualification or degree in those other areas. So it isn't a means of coming into recruitment and just because you're aligned to HR that you'll get a move into an HR position or an OD position. You would need qualifications in that space in order to move across. So I think that's an important point to make as well.
00:12:14
Speaker
I think that agency model gives people a greater exposure. You talked about that movement and the opportunity, but I think in most organizations, agency organizations, they're going to be greater opportunities for you to advance your career to higher levels of positions. So not a sideways move, but an increase up the ladder. There's going to be greater opportunities to climb further up.
00:12:44
Speaker
sometimes because the businesses are smaller and you'll have greater impact, you're working directly for an owner in a lot of cases and you'll be seen, you'll be seen and you'll be heard and noticed based on your performance. Yes, I certainly don't disagree with that. What about security Adele? Would you say that as an agency recruiter you have greater job security or as an internal recruiter you have greater job security? That's an interesting one because I think out there in the market there's probably
00:13:14
Speaker
a bit of a myth that internal is probably safer and securer because they tend to be within larger corporate organizations, companies that are large enough to have internal recruiters are often much bigger companies. So there's this perception that it's actually safer internally, but the reality is actually quite different because you have no control internally about where the work comes from. Your handed recruitment assignments from the business and the business makes those decisions on hiring,
00:13:43
Speaker
They also make those decisions on freezing. So if there is a recruitment freeze and you're an internal recruiter, you're pretty much out of a job. Even if it's temporarily, you don't have any work and you can't really go out and generate work if they're freezing the headcount. Whereas as an agency recruiter, if you're dealing with a client that puts something on hold or has its own freeze or isn't hiring, you can then speak to other clients, to other prospects. You can always find work.
00:14:10
Speaker
and ways to support clients and generate revenue. So it's much more in your hands. And for me, that makes it safer. I can control where the work's coming from and therefore continue to keep prospecting for work and keep myself in a job. Yeah. And I think related to that, of course, the big advantage of internal recruitment is it's much easier to impress your grandparents because
00:14:34
Speaker
If you told your grandparents you work for Hayes or Michael Page or Horner recruitment or aspect personnel, they're just going to look at you blankly. Whereas if you say, well, I'm an internal recruiter for Coles or Harvey Norman or Shell, like they won't perhaps fully understand maybe what an internal recruiter does, but they'll understand and recognize the brand name. So, you know, if you really want to be able to easily impress your grandparents and
00:15:02
Speaker
your elderly relatives, then probably internal recruitment is the best for you. Great. Well, hopefully we've given some really good insight in our opinion on both sides of that argument around the kind of for and against. And if it's something that you're thinking about, maybe you can consider some of those points we've covered off today. So Adele, before we finish, I have to ask you, did you ever seriously consider or were tapped up for an internal recruitment job?
00:15:31
Speaker
I did consider it for a very long time and fought early in my career, thought that it was really where I wanted to head. And the more successful I became in agency recruitment, the further away that came from my mind. And then actually more recently, I did take up an internal job through COVID actually, and worked as an internal recruiter, and that shall never be spoken of again. Thanks Ross.
00:15:59
Speaker
Well, a long, long time ago, I applied for an internal recruitment job. It's the only one I ever applied for. It's when I was working in Sydney and Macquarie Bank had an ad for internal recruiter. And this is back in like the early to mid 90s when there was like, it was almost unknown. And Macquarie Bank were like the big gorilla of Sydney CBD financial services recruitment. And so I thought, oh,
00:16:28
Speaker
OK, that sounds pretty interesting. They didn't have a salary. I applied kind of expecting, of course, to get an interview and probably get an offer. But I just got a thanks, but no thanks letter. And I thought, well, stuff it. Macquarie Bank don't want me. I'm not interested in internal recruitment. That was it. I never applied or showed any interest in internal recruitment. Well, just as well for us in the recruitment agency. We didn't want to lose you, Russ. You say all the right things.
00:16:58
Speaker
Okay, until next week. Thanks. That concludes this episode of Recruitment News Australia. Thanks for listening. We look forward to connecting with you in the next episode.