I'm right! Yes, it does happen occasionally. 

I now have substantial evidence from a highly credible global consulting firm that supports one of my more common rants; the ludicrous waste of time and money that a vast number of tenders and Preferred Supplier Agreements (PSAs) prove to be. 

Wasteful recruitment tender and PSA processes are one of my pet hates, and I am willing to bet my house on the fact that they are also a very big hate of many recruiters. 

Last…

The recent RCSA (Australia and New Zealand) International Conference held in Queenstown, New Zealand had a variety of industry speakers and one of the most interesting was Barry Asin, the President of Staffing Industry Analysts who, as the name suggests, compile data and undertake research on the staffing (recruitment) industry on…

At the Australasian Talent Conference held in Sydney last month, I attended an interesting break-out session on the future of interviewing and whether assessment would make interviews redundant. 

The panel made plenty of interesting points in response to questions and comments. Unsurprisingly nobody was predicting the end of interviews any time soon. 

One of…

Last year I was coaching a newly acquired client of mine. As the sole owner of a small but very successful agency, she was working with me on various strategies to capitalise on her recent growth. 

She has a team of six relatively successful consultants. Three of those have been employed long term with her. One of those consultants was easily the biggest biller of the…

When have you been most confident at work, in any job? 

I strongly suspect it was when you had a high level of competence in that job. 

I recently had reason to recall the start of my recruitment agency career, in London twenty five years ago. I was twenty two years old. I was working in an office for the first time. I was living out of home for the first time. I was resident in a country that was not my own. I was in a job that I had zero previous experience in…

Two very interesting and relevant US court cases were settled in the past three weeks involving anti-competitive behavior, namely no-headhunting agreements between large and high profile publicly listed companies. 

In the most high profile case, four massive tech firms (Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel) who were the defendants in a class action suit, agreed to a…

There's an old recruitment joke that's been doing the rounds for years about a recently deceased HR Manager (insert lawyer, management consultant etc) arriving at the Pearly Gates and being given a tour of Heaven and Hell with a view to choosing where they wish to…

No matter how far we think businesses have come with respect to recruitment and employment practices, there are always plenty of reminders that old habits die hard. 

One of these old habits is the classic client response to a recruiter who requests a job description; ‘I don't need a job description, I'll know them when I meet them'. 

This would be…

Having conducted over three thousand interviews, mainly with accounting staff of all levels of skill from accounts clerks to CFOs, I became very used to minimising the charisma factor in an interview. From hard experience I…

Every recruiter has had, or will have, the experience of a candidate declining a job offer, contrary to everything the candidate has said or done up until that point. 

This is a very expensive failure of your recruitment process because at the time of the offer you have completed around 95% of the necessary work and have collected (if you are a contingent…

‘Objection! Leading the witness! 

‘Objection! Speculation!' 

‘Objection! Relevance?' 

These lines are classic courtroom interjections I have heard in movie and TV dramas for as long as I can remember. 

It's all designed to create greater dramatic tension. How true is it all to real life in a US courtroom? I don't know, as I have never been in one but I certainly enjoy watching the fictionalised courtrooms that the characters in the various…

Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink: the power of thinking without thinking, (Penguin, 2005) provided me with some fantastic insights highly relevant for recruiters, specifically when Gladwell explores the ‘less is more' syndrome.

Gladwell asserts that in certain circumstances, receiving more information about an issue can cause you to become more inaccurate or ineffective in your response to, or conclusions about, that issue with a corresponding increase in your…

If you're a top biller and you wonder whether the grass might be greener on the other side, the evidence is likely to have you recommit to your current employer.

Here's why:

Recently Harvard Business Review published an article based on detailed research over seven years into the…

In The Start Up of You by Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha (Crown Business, 2012) the real gold is in Chapter 7. The chapter opens thus: 

A decade ago, Bill Gates wrote: 'The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or…

Having spent a couple of days of my holidays reading the Steve Jobs biography I couldn't help but reflect on the remarkable accomplishments of the man and the lessons applicable for business owners everywhere, big or small.

This could have been a very long list, but here are the seven things that are most strongly front of mind for me (text is paraphrased and quoted from the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster, 2011).

1)   …

When I am running my Building a Profitable Desk workshop and it comes around to the discussion of High Pay-Off Activities (or KPIs, if you prefer), I will inevitably have a participant nominate ‘interviews' as a high pay-off activity.

When I disagree, there is often a slight pause and then this look of confusion appears on the face of one or more participants. To those recruiters I am sure it seem like I'm slightly odd - I…