All Blog Posts (271)

For those who read my blog, you'll know I've recently changed jobs, and I've been pretty slack in posting here in the last year.  Some will say "again?" others have been congratulatory, I have to say it has been an interesting experience.  I'm 37 years old and I'm into my 5th professional job (not counting the moss farming, kitchen hand and service station attendant during University and high school).  Being the new boy again, facing those nerves of the unknown, will they like me? will I…

Last Friday, after two days of excellent workshops and presentations at the Australasian Talent Conference's annual Social Media event, I attended the inaugural The Recruiting Unconference (TRU) Australia in Melbourne. I shared a taxi to the TRU venue, the Royal Melbourne Hotel, with the founder and conference dis-organiser of TRU, Bill…

I meet with a number of Recruitment Consultants every week who are looking to move on from their current position, or step up to their next opportunity… I probably speak with a further 10, or more on the phone….

And, to be perfectly honest I’m lucky if I meet with one a week who I consider a good, old fashioned ‘A’ Candidate…

It’s not to say that these candidates are not fantastic on paper… On paper most of these candidates look great…. On…

Conjures up images of Cher and that song - that charted at number 1 in Australia and Norway, number 3 in the United States and number 6 in the United Kingdom. 

And that music video set on the USS Missouri with Cher straddling a cannon, and wearing a fishnet body stocking…. But that’s not what I want to talk about…

I was representing a candidate to the market last week.  A candidate that I thought was very strong… You know the type: a walking…

I was in an interesting Client meeting last week, getting feedback on a candidate who had been through 2 interviews and had 3 reference checks taken.

‘Craig,’ the client began, ‘We’re not going to proceed with John….. We just don’t believe he makes the boat go faster…’

Did he just say what I thought he’d said?  Make the boat go faster??  Last time I looked John was neither a Mercury 150hp outboard, nor an America’s Cup sailing want-to-be….

My obvious confusion…

It’s been exactly 2 years since the first #truLondon, which took place in Canary Wharfe on the 18′th November 2009.70 people attended the first time, mostly dressed in suits, (me included), crammed in to the top floor of Barclay’s tower. It was only supposed to be one event, and this blog was only supposed to run for three months to promote the event.

On that…

A study I read a few years back has always stuck in my mind. It was conducted by a US University (apologies for not remembering which), and the purpose of the study was to evaluate the ability of lecturers to engage students and better understand how they engaged their students.

To gather data, a range of lecturers were filmed during their classes and the video was shown to a control group of students, who were not from these classes. The control group were asked to rank each of the…

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;

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

This Monday just gone, I found myself at my desk with no meetings planned for the week. I know the recruitment matrix well and I understand what activity creates a bustling desk of placements. However, when dealing at CEO level, things happen and meetings fall by the wayside. The pipeline dries up!



Faced with a similar situation twelve months ago, I would have been engulfed in a wave of panic. Fear would have taken control and I would have been drowning in destructive internal…

I've been hypnotised. I'll come back to this point in a sec. 

Over the past 2 weeks I've been busy tripping across the Tasman Sea from NZ attending 2 inaugural sourcing events in Australia, the Australasian Sourcing Summit (10-11 August) in Sydney and SourcEvent (17-18 August) in Melbourne from…

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…

Jason Timor, a Badu Island man from the Torres Strait, is an …

I learned a valuable lesson a few years back. I was managing a team of thirteen B2B sales recruiters (They weren't quite as green as Gary's list, but we had a few rookies in the mix). We had a Monday morning breakfast meeting every week where we would talk about the week that was, how we are tracking for the quarter, the plan for the week…

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’…

“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…

How is employer branding evolving in Australian and New Zealand companies compared to the rest of the world?

We invite you to participate in the world's largest Employer Branding Global Research Study.

Employer Branding Global Survey - …

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…

Scroll down to comments section below post - adding new examples as they come through ...

It appears New Zealand and Australia are leading the way when it comes to one area of social recruiting.  Working with Deloitte New Zealand, we adopted an approach used by celebrities and politicians and applied this to a graduate recruitment context. About 15 months ago we ran our first interactive live streaming video show on our…