In fierce salary negotiations with your preferred candidate? Stressed that you can’t seem to get them over the line? If you’re looking for budget control, loyalty, productivity, and a solid team player, you may be wise to look at your ‘second-best’ candidate.
Employment contracts aren’t mandatory in Australia but their absence can create all sorts of confusion and resentment for everyone. Just like a prenup, understanding who owes who what can be a solid foundation upon which to build. So, what should be in an employment contract? And how can they protect employers?
The 2022 Jobs Summit held in Australia this month came up with 36 initiatives they believe will position Australia better for the future. What was it all about and how do they affect you? And are they the solutions we’re looking for?
Expecting your employees to discharge their job descriptions as agreed is not unreasonable. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not difficult to dismiss serial poor performers. There’s no general rule that you have to give an employee 3 warnings, or even 1 warning, before ending their employment. But there’s a way to do it that is fair and reasonable and keeps you out of trouble.
Research tells us that the number 1 reason people leave jobs is because they don’t feel their contribution is being valued or they don’t feel ‘heard’ and it’s often not until their resignation is on the table that a manager sits up and takes notice. A solid Grievance Handling Policy can prevent this. But what is it and how does it work?
Pareto’s Law, or the 80/20 rule is well known to most of us but how does it apply to recruiting in a sparse candidate market? Also called the Law of the Vital Few, it’s more relevant than ever in a market where the demand for skilled candidates is outstripping supply. So how do we apply it to get the best outcomes for our clients?
The top 5 reasons why Australians quit their jobs or start looking for a new one have been pretty much the same for a while now. Yet we still see people resigning for the same reasons. And it’s not what most employers think. So, what are the reasons and what can you do to pre-empt them?
If you want to get the best out of your recruitment advertising you need to look at the way your ads are crafted. It’s not the Job Boards such as Seek and Indeed that are the problem. It’s the content they are working with. So, how do you craft great ads that result in a great hire?
We’ve had three female candidates in the last month asked in separate job interviews whether they are planning to have children any time soon. All three women withdrew their applications as a result. So, why can’t you ask that question? And what questions can you ask?
Engaging contractors to keep your employee headcount down can seem like a good idea – no tax, super or work cover obligations to worry about and you can finish them up when it suits you. But if it’s found they aren’t genuine contractors, you can be hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket. So how do you tell the difference between an employee and a contractor?
Here we explore the Australian candidate market in 2022 – how it’s different from last year and why, and what you need to do if you want to attract the best staff. The path out of COVID is well and truly here. But things are different. What does this mean for you as a Hiring Manager in 2022?
Hiring Managers are often despondent about what they see as ‘a lack of decent candidates’ when they’re recruiting. Knowing the tricks of effective shortlisting, the psychological traps that all humans fall into, and how not to fall foul of Australian anti-discrimination legislation not only speeds up your recruitment process but guarantees you’re on the right track to the best hire possible.
Every company strives to achieve and maintain the two big “P’s” – Productivity and Profitability. It’s universally accepted that a huge part of achieving both is making sure the third ‘P’ is working for you – your People. But in your efforts to get the most out of your people, are you ‘killing’ them? So, what are the secrets to keeping you and your team on track, happy to be at work and performing at their very best?
Every year, we review applicant and candidate behaviours to see what’s “floating their boats”. This is the best way for us to accurately share what we know about market behaviour with our clients. When you know what people are attracted to, you can offer that. It’s a simple equation – find out what people are attracted to, make yourself attractive and snare a match. So, what’s floating candidate boats right now?
The biggest game-changer we’ve seen in the recruitment industry for a while is here – a Recruit Now, Pay Later option. You need people, you need help to find them quickly to get your business going but you don’t have the budget or the cashflow to do it. Imagine if you could hire the talent you need and then pay the fee off in smaller instalments over a few months while not losing the placement guarantee?
Most of the pitfalls Hiring Managers fall into are categorised by a common theme – a lack of training in how to engage with the applicant in the first instance and then how to find out about the things you really need to know about them.
The emotional long haul of the pandemic has taken a toll on everyone and we need to understand how that will impact productivity and profitability as everyone starts drifting back to the office. It’s called ‘languishing’ and here’s what you can do about it.
The ‘great resignation’ that was predicted has started. Are you confident that your staff are all really locked in and secure for the coming year? Like any relationship breakdown, the signs of a pending resignation are often there. It’s just that we prefer not to see them, so we don’t – the head in the sand approach that is all too familiar. So, what are the signs that someone is fed up and about to leave?
If you decide to mandate vaccines for staff in order to comply with the re-opening rules, are you going to be hit with a claim after December 1st? Data gathered from employees suggests you can approach your vaccine policy with confidence.
Around 80% of Australian employers and recruitment firms use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and there are over 200 to choose from. But is this rush to ‘improve’ the recruitment process actually creating more problems than solutions? In times of candidate shortages, it may be that humans are smarter than robots after all.
Last week we had our first candidate instruct us not to represent her to any firms who intend to mandate COVID vaccines. Welcome to the new world! But employers must tread carefully on this subject of mandating vaccines.
Too often, employers get irritated and feel exploited when candidates negotiate their worth in the candidate money wars. But it harks back to a Master-Servant sociocultural model that lost its credibility a hundred years ago. When you understand what skills and experience you need and why you need it, negotiating salary with the right candidate becomes an exercise in securing your investment, rather than fighting an outdated ideology.
Here we are again in another lockdown. Throw into this a challenging candidate market and it’s easy to just stay under the doona. But remember what happened last time? Things bounced back more quickly than we thought and many of us were caught with our pants down when it came to being resourced well enough to meet the demand. How do we not repeat the same mistake?
The impact this pandemic and our initial response has had on our economy is coming home to roost a year on. The most talked about thing in the business world is no longer how hard it is to find ‘good’ staff but how hard it is to find staff at all. And everyone’s asking the same question, “Why aren’t they out there?”, followed quickly by “How do we attract them?”.
Getting someone to start with you is only the beginning of the employment relationship. The first 4 minutes, the first four hours, the first four days and the first four weeks are the critical milestones in laying the groundwork for the success and longevity of your new hire.
Australia is experiencing a candidate shortage never seen before. 700,000 people who were in the job market prior to the global COVID pandemic are no longer here. So, we have a conundrum of more jobs than people to fill them, with candidate sourcing becoming the primary focus of anyone recruiting. For those organisations who have opted to do their recruitment themselves, the biggest question on everyone’s lips is “Where do we start?”.
Not so long ago, a candidate called our office very angry and distressed. An unauthorised reference check had resulted in him being sacked and he was threatening to sue. But we hadn’t done the check. Who did and why shouldn’t they have done it?
The best recruitment outcomes happen when both parties feel confident their needs will be met. The interview process is the best way to feel really confident you’ve got the right person in your sights. But before you start asking any questions, there’s a few steps that will help you get off to a great start!
The measure of a great job ad isn’t in the number of applications that swamp your Inbox – it’s the quality of the applications you receive that matters. You don’t want to waste precious time and energy wading through unsuitable applicants.
Even though unemployment levels are still high in a number of sectors, Hiring Managers and Recruiters are struggling to get the candidate response rate they’ve been used to. The candidate market is thinking, feeling and engaging differently as a result of the last year and we need to catch up with that.
A shortlist of candidates doesn’t always guarantee they are the most suitable ones for you. In fact it could be a disadvantage to your business to rely on it, particularly if you’ve taken a “hands-off” approach to the process.
Hiring the right people for your business isn’t as straightforward as you think. Finding someone with the skills you need is just the first step. Here’s our eight simple steps to get you the right people you need to help your business flourish.
Testing for integrity is always a good place to start. Recruiting is about more than just finding a skill set that you need. Organisational fit is equally, or perhaps even more important. And the first thing we want to know is whether our potential hire can be trusted to do the right thing, even when no-one is looking.
Job Fit Assessment ensures that you are getting the right person in the job by using psychometric testing techniques that offer valuable hiring insights into candidate personality traits and their organisational fit.
Here’s what every business owner or hiring manager needs to know about the four recruitment pricing models – the percentage of salary model, retained search, fixed fee (flat fee) recruitment, and an hourly billed fee-for-service approach.
Any interviewing process exposes recruiters and hiring managers to cognitive biases – psychological errors of judgement that are the source of all sorts of untruths. Exclusively relying only on your gut feeling could be costing you a good hire.
It’s easy to think that the thousands of people who have lost their jobs because of COVID must make candidate sourcing for hiring managers easier – after all, more candidates must mean easier recruitment, right? Not so! This week’s blog explores why candidate sourcing is actually more difficult in an economic crisis like this one.
Behavioural Interviewing is understanding how someone will behave in a certain situation based on how they’ve behaved in the past. Here are four interview questions that will enable you to ‘test’ the candidate and five things you’ll learn from each question if you listen properly. That’s uncovering 20 behaviours and/or personality traits in just four questions! At the end of the day, you’re recruiting a person, not just a skill set.
The world of recruitment fees can be confusing. The traditional model of paying a percentage of the salary as the fee is continually being challenged by other, more accessible models. But sometimes they too are confusing. In this blog, we try to clear the fog that swirls around the difference between fixed fee and flat fee recruitment.
What can Winnie the Pooh, Piglet and Tigger teach us about effective leadership? And team behaviour? Well, quite a lot it seems. For starters, we know that Tigger will be the one posting inappropriate content. And Owl and Rabbit have the potential to drive everyone mad. And Pooh thinks injecting bleach sounds like a good idea. Thank goodness for Christopher Robin!
These past weeks have been surreal, to say the least. All of us have been riding the wave of uncertainty, fear, inertia and hope as we come to terms with this new way of living. It is easy to stay stuck on what we are losing… But I can’t help but wonder about what we are gaining and learning.
Business is slowly coming back and many of us are thinking about how we can do it differently, including reviewing our providers and advisers. Before deciding on a recruiter, think first about what you want to achieve – service, flexibility, speed, availability, guarantees, price – then partner with someone who can meet those needs.
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