Aaron Dodd's Blog (22)

Leadership and Life’s Little Luxuries: Are you rubbing your employees’ noses in it?

Last week I received a call from prospective client who was struggling with a high staff turnover. He pleaded with me to help him stem the outflow. He is a small manufacturer that sells his products largely through distributors. I arranged to visit his offices in the Eastern suburbs the next day.

As I pulled into his carpark it wasn’t hard to spot his Porsche parked next to the front door. Upon entering the building it looked as though the premises hadn’t been renovated since…

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Added by Aaron Dodd on September 15, 2011 at 4:34am — No Comments

Top 3 Insights from the 2011 RCSA International Conference

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend the 2011 RCSA International Conference in Port Douglas. This year’s theme was innovation, and there were number of excellent world class speakers on the topic.

The three key points that resonated with me were;

Successful innovation is the result of many small incremental changes or improvements made over time and is rarely about a big shiny new…

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Added by Aaron Dodd on September 6, 2011 at 12:21am — 4 Comments

Are You a Trusted Adviser or Shark Bait?

Yesterday, one of our consultants had a question posed to her by a client. The question itself doesn’t matter, but it was, in effect, questioning her judgement and thus her credibility. She asked me how she should handle it.

I told her she needed to back herself 100%. This is critical for recruiters. A client has retained us to provide them with advice on who they should employ in their organisations. If we make a recommendation it’s for a reason, and we need to be able to support…

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Added by Aaron Dodd on July 27, 2011 at 7:09pm — 4 Comments

Retained Recruitment: What are you scared of?

A couple of weeks ago I had a Twitter discussion with a well known NZ recruitment industry figure Jonathan Rice about selling retained versus contingent recruitment. Jonathan made the point that, “[many recruiters] provide an excellent service but are too scared to ask for some money up front, probably missing a trick somewhere there!”

It was immediately obvious to me then that many recruiters’…

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Added by Aaron Dodd on May 24, 2011 at 10:59pm — 9 Comments

Is Your Gatekeeper Holding the Keys To Your Office or Your Kingdom?

"This is great, but we should have started six months ago.”

That statement was said to me by the CEO of a not insignificant Melbourne manufacturing company last week. Mindset has just commenced a large organisational transformation project with them that will see significant cultural and personnel change over the next 12 months. The company has been losing market share and profit dramatically so the CEO is perched precariously on a burning platform.

Let’s analyse his… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on April 18, 2011 at 8:23pm — 12 Comments

Judo, Golf, Scuba Diving and Personality Fit

As many of my followers know I am quite active within the Victorian Judo scene. I have been involved in Judo on and off since I was about ten. Over that time I have trained, competed and coached with participants ranging from novices through to the sport’s elites.

Over this time I have observed that…

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Added by Aaron Dodd on March 29, 2011 at 10:49pm — 1 Comment

Do You Have the HR Department You Deserve?

There is an ongoing wail from the HR profession. We have heard the clichés and platitudes ad nauseum. “HR needs a seat at the table”, “HR is the key to the future” etc, yet nothing ever changes. Ever.

Why is this? Well, it’s simple. The vast majority of HR roles in companies have developed informally over many years. They have…

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Added by Aaron Dodd on February 1, 2011 at 5:58pm — 2 Comments

Survive or Thrive… Your Choice

Although Australia was not hit by the GFC nearly as badly as the rest of the Western world, we still felt the effects. Commerce slowed down, and we had to fight harder for business we won. Revenue was good but not buoyant through most of 2010. For Mindset, our activity and profit sky-rocketed in the last quarter. It was like someone suddenly turned the tap on full again.

Why was this?…

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Added by Aaron Dodd on January 17, 2011 at 11:57pm — No Comments

Social Media, Confidentiality, Wikileaks and Generational Disparity

In the recruitment world over the last twelve months much has been written about privacy concerns and social media. Should potential employers source additional and sometimes irrelevant additional material about potential employees? It’s largely an academic argument as many employers will do it regardless.

Many industry commentators, including myself have noticed that Gen Y employees, i.e. younger employees brought up in the… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on December 9, 2010 at 4:12pm — No Comments

The Recruitment Partnership; You get back, what you put in!

It’s my experience that in business many companies talk of being in “partnership” with their suppliers. However the reality is that almost all so-called partnerships are simply marketing spin. The relationships are usually very uneven, often with one overly dependent on the other; this will inevitably mean that one side is either being overcharged for their service or product or vice versa.

In the recruitment industry the best results for both parties without question comes from… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on August 17, 2010 at 11:30pm — 1 Comment

Shouldn’t HR be able to recruit their own people?

A couple of days ago a Twitter acquaintance of mine Ellison Bloomfield posted in her blog the rhetorical question; shouldn’t an internal HR department have the skills and knowledge to be able to recruit their own people?

Good question. Even though it was rhetorical, I’m going to answer it anyway as it’s a pet topic of mine. My view is this; recruitment AND selection… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on May 10, 2010 at 5:34pm — 3 Comments

Would You Outsource Your Career Management?

I’m sitting here at 11000m above the ground somewhere between Melbourne and Sydney thinking about career management. Why? You ask. Well late last week one of our consultants received within the space of an hour three emails from three different candidates attaching their CVs and asking politely for meetings with us and for their CVs to be added to our database for consideration for any current and future roles we may be trying to fill.

Nothing unusual in that, you think.

Each… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on May 3, 2010 at 8:09pm — No Comments

Life’s too Short to be a Drone.

The other day I took a call from a young HR practitioner enquiring about a position with Mindset as an HR consultant. She is a graduate with a good couple of years experience at officer level in public service and an SME. She was disillusioned with her current role feeling that it was too administrative, lacked intellectual challenge and wasn’t strategic enough. It was clear she had a real passion for HR and true belief in what good “HR” can do for a business and ultimately its bottom… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on April 15, 2010 at 4:37am — No Comments

Holding Back the Sea; Professional Bodies and Social Media

My company, Mindset or I personally are members of a number of professional bodies; the Recruitment and Consulting Services Association (RCSA), the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC), Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD), and the Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI) to name a few.

I have also in the past been a member of the Institute of Professional Engineers of New Zealand (IPENZ) and its Australian equivalent the IPEA. I’ve even been a member of union,… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on April 6, 2010 at 12:26am — No Comments

Don’t be Pond Scum, I beg you.

As many of you know, I am passionate about improving the standards of the executive search and recruitment industries. Recruiters by and large have a very bad name, often compared to real estate agents and used car salespeople. There is no smoke without fire, and much of the criticism is justified. Not all recruiters are suspect of course. Many are fine hard working individuals who create real value for their clients and are appreciated by their candidates. But many are not. These others are a… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on March 25, 2010 at 1:30am — 1 Comment

Social Media and Background Checks - Yes or No?

There have been some feisty twitter debates raging today around the ethics, legality and morality of the use of social media to conduct background checks on candidates. The debate is quite polarised.

The “anti camp” is claiming that using social media in this way is an invasion of privacy. They claim that recruitment selection decisions should only be based on professional criteria and to exclude someone from a position because of something they said on twitter or the football club… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on March 18, 2010 at 7:11am — 2 Comments

It’s amazing what you can uncover when you visit customers.

Today I was dismayed reading a twitter feed from a recruiter boasting that she had managed to talk her way out of meeting with a client who wanted a face-to-face with her. When I queried her she went on to boast that with technology she no longer had to even visit clients.

I have been in sales for most of my career. I first learned to sell with Pitney Bowes PLC in the UK, a truly excellent and professional sales environment that gave me a grounding and a sales ability that has… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on January 28, 2010 at 4:42am — 7 Comments

A Heart-felt Thank You to Contingent Recruiters Everywhere!

Much has been written of late about the many flaws in the contingent recruitment business model. Last week I experienced first-hand just how seriously poor the model is. Those that promulgate it and try to run their recruitment businesses with it will ultimately fail their businesses, clients and candidates. They also act as the best advertising money can’t buy for those recruiters who operate with better proven exclusive and ideally, retained models. The case story… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on November 2, 2009 at 4:52am — 2 Comments

How accountants can make recruiters’ jobs much easier

Over the last few weeks Mindset’s talent division started to receive an unusually high number of applicants from a large American medico-pharma company with a significant presence in Australia. This was unusual as this company has until recently had a high reputation for good HR practices and high staff engagement. Their employees have been hard to attract!

Our consultants started to probe deeper as to the reasons for the sudden change. It seems that with the GFC the company’s… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on October 25, 2009 at 10:18pm — No Comments

The economics of the talent shortage and what employers need to do NOW

Prior to the GFC we saw articles almost daily on the so-called talent shortage. Such clichéd headlines as “Winning the War for Talent” were commonplace. My own company, Mindset used them as did everyone else. These headlines and articles have subsided of late but the talent shortage is still there. It's like a wild beast hibernating; waiting for the thaw - which will be here sooner than most Australians think. In fact, many would argue that it’s waking now as the extra cold metaphorical winter… Continue

Added by Aaron Dodd on October 9, 2009 at 3:32am — 2 Comments