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?
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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