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Latest News
19/11/2008 - Welcome RECRUITadvantage Newsletter
Company News
We have had a busy couple of months starting a new client programme called Lunch and Learn “mini workshop”, including Google search techniques. We also had the opportunity of sponsoring two events, Recruitment Extra Awards and Savage Seminars.
Greg Savage Events
As a client initiative to become more engaged with our clients we started a series of Lunch and Learn “Mini Workshops”. Our first webinar session on October 17th was received warmly. We had the opportunity to work with Glenn Gutmacher of JobMachine.net, who has over twenty years experience in the recruitment industry and is a leading innovator in online sourcing methods and applying Internet recruiting tools. The webinar session that Glen presented explained effective ways to build your difficult candidate pipelines using free online search methods.
The Google searching techniques have been trialled, proven and work very well. We even posted on our blog site, Google candidate searching methods. You can visit our blog at http://marketing.recruitadvantage.com/BlogRetrieve.aspx?BlogID=981.
Conferences and Seminars
We sponsored this month the Savage events in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane (Auckland is coming soon) and listened to what Greg Savage had to say about the economic downturn. It is always enlightening to listen to Greg, but given the drastic changes we are witnessing in the industry it was particularly interesting to understand his views in this area. In a nutshell, he sees this period as an opportunity to go back to the foundations of your businesses and look for ways of making it (your business) more efficient. He recommends spending more time on face-to-face activities with your clients (“rain making”), in training your people (again back to fundamentals) and in monitoring closely the performance of your staff. He also recommends postponing “nice-to-haves” and concentrating on “must-haves”. As any crisis, it is a temporary phenomenon and if you put the appropriate measures in place, your business will be stronger when it comes out on the other side of the crisis.
We also sponsored this month the Recruitment Excellence Awards (REA), where some of the industry’s raising stars and some of the more established players came together to celebrate excellence. The funny and charismatic Julie Morris hosted the event. Jafeth Rodriguez enjoyed the night and had the honour to hand over some of the awards, which included, among others: Best Start-Up, Best Boutique Agency, Best National Agency, Best Multi-National Agency, Best Candidate Management Program, Best Recruitment Agency Website and Best Brand. Congratulations to the winners and finalists.
On a slightly more serious note Jafeth Rodriguez, Chief Innovations Officer would like to share his views on the current economic conditions and new product features.
Views from the Chief Innovations Officer Desk
The global recruitment market seems to be in a lot of pressure due to the GFC (Global Financial Crisis). Some countries worse than others, with top sufferers being the US and the UK featuring top marks in publicising doom and gloom. The Australian scenario is certainly changing, but no near as dramatically as other markets. A key indicator, such as the number of online jobs posted to job boards is showing softening signs. We hear from some of our recruitment clients that some of their clients (some industries better than others) have become a bit unresponsive to new recruitment needs, whilst some others have put a freeze in permanent recruitment. Some industries, however, continue to perform strongly (even in the US and the UK), being one that comes to mind the engineering industry, where there seems to be a lot of demand for qualified people and the candidate-short nature of that market doesn’t seem to have changed that much, despite of negative economic indicators.
Whatever the industry sector or space you operate in, one common trait is a ubiquitous sense of uncertainty. It can be overwhelming and draining but cannot be ignored. I don’t believe it is a time to panic though. I do believe, however, it is a time to re-evaluate where we are and where it is that we going in our respective industry sectors. I believe we should be optimistic and embrace change. We should be more proactive about our sales activities and pragmatic about expenses. We should be productive, efficient and proactive in our approach to business. The World continues to spin, so we cannot just get it to stop and get off. Every crisis brings lots of opportunities and being willing to adapt will make a lot of these opportunities surface, and become clear.
I hear a lot of people trying to quantify the crisis. I believe there is a consensus among experts (and not so experts) when it comes to qualifying the financial crisis experienced in Australia as a much lighter one to the one being experienced in other parts of the World (USA and UK in particular). On the optimistic side, a downturn (as opposed to a recession) may help us focus on the important things, focus on efficiency, on re-evaluating the markets we service, on our cost structure and margins and on the foundations of our businesses. Perhaps we can see it as a healthy cycle, make the most of it, adapt and grow in the pertinent areas.
One of the behaviours shown by employers during a downturn is the use of more temporary and contracting resources. This behaviour is a natural response to mid-term uncertainty. Hence temp/contract activity, as predicted by many, is rising. The recruitment organisations that are not focussing on temp or have not had any experience in this space are becoming more interested as the market is clearly pushing in that direction for a lot of industries. The idea of “moving to temp” offers a few good challenges. The operational side of the traditional temp business is a bit more administratively challenging and the inherent associated tasks, to manage both efficiencies and controls, tend to be good candidates for automation and technology-based processes. Temp activities are faster in nature, with more aggressive timeframes and more focus on short to medium-term productivity as opposed to long-term relationships and predictability. In a number of ways, the temp/contract market is very different World to the perm market and as a recruiter you need to be aware of the differences and what is required from you to be successful in that sector.
From the product perspective, we have continued to put a lot more effort into our temp and contracting capabilities, to make sure we support our clients in the best possible way in current economic and financial global trends. The effort is going into workflow, transactional capabilities and re-addressing shift and rostering management in our core product.
Keep tuned and embrace change gracefully.
