Welcome to the Just Right People blog

Latest insights, best practices & down-to-earth practical advice from recruitment and HR industry experts.

Tags:
All change management diy recruitment future of work hiring tips leadership performance management recruitment strategy workplace psychology
hiring tips

What do Employment Contracts and Prenups have in Common

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?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

How Ignoring the 80/20 Rule is Losing You Some Great Candidates

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?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Top 5 Reasons Why Australian Workers Resign and What You Can Do About It

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?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

How to Get the Best Results from Your Recruitment Advertising

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?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

What Questions Can and Can't You Ask an Applicant in a Job Interview?

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?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Employee or Contractor? The Cost of Getting it Wrong in Australia

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?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Australian Candidate Market in 2022

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?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

5 Reasons Why You Should Use a Professional Recruiter

Despite not being very popular many years ago, recruiters are now highly trained professionals. Just like other advisers in our lives, they can make or break your business. Here’s 5 reasons why you should consider using one.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Is your Shortlisting Process Actually Losing You the Best Candidate?

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

5 Things You Need to Know if You Want to Attract Great Staff

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?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Are Recruitment Fees Slowing Down Your Hiring? Recruit Now and Pay Later!

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?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

The Most Common Mistakes Hiring Managers Make

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Why are so Many Applicants being Rejected in Times of Candidate Shortage?

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Carrots & Sticks – Considering a COVID Vaccine Mandate in your Workplace

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Candidate Money Wars – How to Win them rather than Fight Them

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

7 Tips to Speed up your Recruitment Process in a Lockdown

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?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Australian Candidate Market – Why has it Changed and What to do About it?

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?”.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

DIY Recruitment – The ‘Rule of Four’ and Your New Hire

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

7 Tried and True Tips for Sourcing Candidates in a Tight Market

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?”.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

DIY Recruitment – When Reference Checking can land you in Hot Water

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?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

DIY Recruitment – Preparing for a Great Interview Process

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!

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

DIY Recruitment – Writing a Job Ad to Get the Talent You Want

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

How to Quickly Shortlist Candidates in 4 easy Steps

Shortlisting candidates can be an overwhelming exercise, threatening to sap your time and energy. But finding the right candidate is easier than you think and we show you how in just 4 easy steps.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

How an RPO provider can make your in-house recruitment team fly

We hear a lot about RPO these days when it comes to recruitment strategies. But what is it? What are the benefits for your in-house hiring team? And when would you make the decision to switch to RPO?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

What are disadvantages of shortlisting in recruitment? And how to avoid them.

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

8 simple steps to Hiring Right People

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

6 best Interview Questions to ask to test for Integrity

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

6 Benefits of Job Fit Assessment that make the difference in your hiring decisions

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

4 Recruitment Pricing Models, their advantages and disadvantages

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Angels and Devils – 7 Psychological traps of interviewing

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Want to hire the right people? Ask the right behavioural interview questions.

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Fixed Fee or Flat Fee recruitment. What is the difference?

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Why we should approach job video interviews with caution

The use of technology to speed up the recruitment process is not new. And in most cases it’s been a good thing. But are some of the recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) developments taking it too far?

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Why do we stereotype candidates in recruitment & how to stop it.

What you see isn’t always the full story. Assuming something about a person based on their appearance, gender or even what they wear to the interview – even when we don’t think we’re doing it, we are.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

A few smart tips for Hiring in the time of Coronavirus

We are in unprecedented times. Should we be hiring? Should we be laying people off? Should we just hunker down and sit it out. But a crisis like this doesn’t need to stop your business.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

10 Things you really need to know when Choosing a Recruiter

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.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Why dressing Ducks up as Geese just doesn’t work when it comes to Hiring

Finding the right person for the job that needs to be done is always a better business strategy than building a job around a person and then hoping for the best. It’s easier to do than you think!

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

hiring tips

Why some Candidates you Interview don’t match your Brief

In 10 minutes you realise the candidate your recruiter has sent for interview doesn’t match your brief. The reason why isn’t as straight-forward as you might think.

Bernadette Eichner
Bernadette Eichner

Get our updates delivered

From us to your inbox.