Transcript
Speaker: Do you 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. We have a special episode for you this week with Ross and i both overseas at the moment. We decided to spin the roulette wheel and ask our publishing platform to bring up a recording from our archives, something that you may have heard before but we think is worth another listen.
Speaker: So join us now to listen to a recap episode
Speaker: Question of the week. What are you grateful for in your recruitment career, Adele? This is a very reflective one for this time of year. Good time to be thinking about what you're grateful for, I suppose.
Speaker: The thing that comes to mind when you ask me this question, Ross, that I started in rec recruitment when I was reasonably young. you know I was in my 20s and I'm grateful that I did it then because it took quite a bit of energy and focus and attention and I had the capacity to do that then and I don't know i would have the same energy and focus now just being older and and, you know, tired and juggling more balls. So I'm glad that I started when I was young.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, I started at 22 and a half and definitely I needed the energy i had as a 20-something to put in the way that I put in. What about for you? What stands out? and Yeah, I think, look, overwhelmingly I'm just very grateful that overall I had really good bosses.
Speaker: And I mean, I've written about Greg, Greg Savage, um who most people listening to this would know. But in London, my first boss, Kim, was fantastic. I've got no doubt I would not...
Speaker: have been a recruiter if it had not been for her support. My next boss, Bridget, she was fantastic. in fact, actually had a secret crush on her. Confessions of recruiter for different kinds. Bridget was great. And then when I returned to Australia, Bronwyn, and I've written about her in a recent blog, the most emotionally intelligent leader I work for. Bronwyn was fantastic to work for. And I just think, across my recruitment career, i was 14 years as an employee and I probably had, I don't know, nine or 10 bosses and I only had two duds in that whole time.
Speaker: And really, I think that's pretty good to be able to say 75, 80% of your bosses are good to really good to great. And I'm Yeah, I'm very grateful for that because I suspect most people in their whole career, whether the recruiters or not, would probably not be able to have that level of hit rate with a great boss. You'd hope that our industry probably attracts people who are good people-oriented people, I suppose, as you know, good leaders. And that that makes me think of another one for me. I'm really grateful to the leaders that I had in my in my career that kind of created a path for me. I think of incidences where I had leaders who saw my potential before I was able to recognise it or they could see things in me before I was able to identify them. And so, you know, I'm grateful that there were people that, you know, um you know paid it forward, so to speak, and half created that pathway for people coming behind them. So, you know, it's something I think about. And they may not even know that they did that. And that makes it even Okay, well, name one. Name one. Come on.
Speaker: Say a person. I think about... um I think about female leaders, I think there was there was certainly one manager I had early in my career who, and she was kind of two levels up from me. So she didn't directly, I didn't directly report to her, but I would have interaction with her. You know, she was a general manager. I reported to the to the branch manager and, but she saw something. She saw something there really early and she was really encouraging and and kept telling me, you know, every time I kind of had a hesitation, she was like, you can do this. I've got faith in you. And Her belief in me gave me the confidence I needed to then deliver what she was telling me I could do. and it was powerful.
Speaker: Yeah, that's that's great. I'd say for me, the next thing would be I started and the job was really difficult. Like in London, you had to book interviews on the phone. There was no such thing as client visits. You weren't sending resumes by post or courier. You literally had to pick up the phone, speak to the hiring manager and put the candidate forward over the phone and the hiring manager would agree to interview the candidate. Like literally, that's the only way that you booked interviews. And if you were not successful at doing that, you did not survive as a recruiter.
Speaker: And so that was pretty intimidating for a 22-year-old in London, don't know anything about the geography of London, I don't know anything about accounting or um or even working in an office. And I still, to this day, not quite sure how I survived, but I did. And that stood me in good stead because when I came back to Australia at the end of 1990 and I started work beginning of 91, that was Mr Keating's recession we had to have and it was really tough in Australia. So I had the resilience to just get on the phone every day and just call and call and call yeah and call and not give up. And I think... Anyone who's had that experience of starting their recruitment career in a tough market will always look back and go, oh God, that was tough. But gee, I'm glad i had that grounding because it really helped me later on.
Speaker: Yeah, I think there was kind of, for me, a level of, you know, naiveness, naivety around what I didn't know. you know, you don't know what you don't know. and that was a good thing then because you weren't as scared. You know, you couldn't you couldn't see the the full, you know, road in front of you and it didn't matter.
Speaker: And you just kind of ploughed on anyway, even though there were probably some dangers there. And even though things are tough or even though you got setbacks, you just kept going. And so, you know, being a bit kind of young and dumb in some way. Young and dumb. Yes, that's right. It was not a bad, you know, i'm great yeah I'm grateful for that in that sense that I was young enough and and, you know, dumb enough, stupid enough to just keep going forward even when, you know, I look back now and I'm like, it was pretty ballsy. There were some things I did that I don't know if I would even have the guts nowadays.
Speaker: Yeah, ignorance is bliss. It's a cliche, but it's but it's a cliche for a reason because it's broadly true. What else are you grateful for, Ross? Just, look, the quality of people generally. When i consider my whole 35 years in the industry, and I suppose specifically the 14 years that I was an employee, just the people who I'm still in contact with, who are still friends.
Speaker: I think of two people in particular who I met as candidates, who I placed and have become very close friends and I'm still in contact with decades later. The people who at Recruitment Solutions and Temporary Solutions were part of what I would call a golden period, golden few years when the company grew from sort of 20 people to or people, just some fantastic quality people that I got to work with and got to know. I just, you I just think back with a great deal of fondness and feel blessed that I was in an environment where there were so many great people. And again, it's only when you hear As you get older, the experience of other people in your life and all the places they've worked to realise, well, it's not necessarily common. Some people have that experience of working with really great people for a long period of time, but not everyone does. So I feel very grateful for that.
Speaker: Is this the point where I'm supposed to mention that there are some people you got to know a little too well that were candidates or...? ah Can I say no comment, Adele? He's taken the no comment. You guys decide whether he's allowed to do that one. If you don't know that story, go back and listen to previous podcasts you were talking about. I was young and unattached.
Speaker: That's all I will say. We're cool. But, yeah, you kind of make me think about, you know, a different time and a simpler time in some ways. Like I'm grateful I started recruitment, you know, back when I did in the, you know, late through the 2000s. it was kind of a simpler time in terms of the way we do what we do. There's so much that we've got now that certainly makes us more efficient and better and faster and, you know, all of these things. But recruitment used to just be about people.
Speaker: It really was. It was really just about building a network of people, connecting with people in a genuine way, you know, having a good client meeting that resulted in an honest relationship and work. You know, you used to be able to give your client a gift and they could accept it, you know, just little things like that. The niceties of, the people interaction are what I'm grateful for in terms of having cut my teeth in that kind of market.
Speaker: ah Today, as I said, is is so different and it's not better or worse. It's just different. um But it's, you know, it was so much more simple back then. Yeah. Oh, there's absolutely no doubt. there There weren't a lot of things you had to think too much about. That's for sure. And I think kind of on a similar note, when I think that I started working for Greg at the beginning of 1991, The 90s were an extraordinary period in the recruitment industry. Like there were so many big characters, Jeff Morgan, Andrew Banks, you know, Greg, ah Julia Ross was like that. That was her prime, um you know, guys. These names, the names of these companies were real people. That's what I don't think people realise, you know. Slade and is Jeff Slade and, you know, Ross was Julia Ross and, You know, even Hoban was Lynn Hoban. You know, these were real people who started these businesses. Yeah, completely. And ah John Plummer, who famously built Centacom, sold it for millions. John and I were on the NAPC. New South Wales Committee and the NAPC was the forerunner to the RCSA.
Speaker: ah so yeah, just these what I would call pioneers. um Rosemary Scott would be another one. I got to know Rosemary very well. So all of these pioneers were people who, when I was just this young 20-something, they were the big characters of the industry and i got I certainly didn't get to know them all, but certainly I was you know relatively close to all the action being in George Street Sydney and yeah it was just a fascinating perspective of course you don't appreciate it at the time but you look back now or certainly I look look back now and go wow you know it was kind of really a golden age
Speaker: Yeah, it almost ah sounds like a reality TV show. That's right. They should make a reality TV show based on recruitment in the 90s. My God, that'd be great.
Speaker: All the big shoulder pads and the high heels and the ties, I can just see it. ah It'd be absolutely fantastic. um And my final thing is, it's kind of a little quirky, but when I arrived in London, I got a job as a recruiter straight away and I got a job in Sydney before I'd actually moved there. And being a recruiter in those two fantastic cities was a great way to get to know the cities. you know Where are candidates based? Where are clients based? How does a candidate get from this place to that place? So very quickly, i got to learn the geography of both cities. I got to learn the interesting parts of both cities, how to get around both cities, because both both occasions I did not have a car. I was relying on public transport. So that's kind of ah like a quirky thing that I'm grateful for. Well, I've got a quirky one too, and mine is to actually say I'm grateful for Ben.
Speaker: And what I mean by that is i had a candidate very early in my career, may have even been one of the very first placements I made, a candidate called Ben who wouldn't let me off the hook, I suppose. he He was really determined to make me help him. You know, he wanted to get a job in a commercial real estate. He had no commercial real estate experience, but he met with me and I interviewed him and, you know, I really connected with him and clicked. But I said to him, I can't help you, Ben. I don't work in that space. I was doing office support recruitment at the time.
Speaker: And I said, I don't know that I can help you. I don't have any clients in that space. But he wouldn't let me off the hook. He said to me, no, I believe you're going to help me. You're a good recruiter. You're going to find me a job. And I said, all right, let me think about this a different way. And I asked him for a list of companies that he wanted to work for. I said, well, who would you work for if you wanted this job? And he gave me a list and I i went through and and called them them all. And, you know, one of them was Knight Frank and I contacted Knight Frank and I got him an interview and and, you know, floated him in on spec and got him an interview and he got a job. And I'll never forget that. It was kind of like this, I guess it was that realisation that I can do this, you know, i can i can make a job of this and I'm good at it. But it was actually thanks to Ben and him pushing me. So, Wherever you are, Ben, you're not listening to this, but thank you.
Speaker: Fabulous story. So, listener, what are you grateful for? Love to hear some comments about what you're grateful for in your recruitment career.
