This blog started as cautionary tale of how an overly bureaucratic and uber-PC recruitment process can negatively impact an organisation’s culture and the performance of its employees. However the impact has also had a profound impact on the victim’s mental health – in direct contravention of the organisation’s stated values.

This is a shameful tale of a significant Victorian City Council and how the sheer bloody-mindedness and bureaucracy of an HR process can destroy trust and morale within an organisation.

A Park Ranger was appointed in 2022 on an 11 month fixed term contract. The contract was extended in November 2023 and would come to an end at the end of March 2024. Because the contract was extended once it was not able to be extended again under new (but badly flawed) Federal Fair Work legislation. In order to keep the Park Ranger the only option the City had was to offer him a permanent contract.

The Ranger was a very high performer, his performance appraisals were excellent and signed off as such by the highest levels of the Council’s Parks’ department. The Ranger was verbally assured by his Manager numerous times from January through March that the council did not want to lose him and that he would be offered a role. Because of this he did not look for other work. By March no contract was forthcoming and he started to agitate further. The week before his contract was due to expire he was informed that although there were currently open positions and temporarily vacant roles, his role was in fact coming to an end, adding that if they could extend him again, they would. He was rightly devastated given the constant assurances he had received. His colleagues were also shocked. If it could happen to him, it could happen to them too.

A few days after his last day, two new permanent Park Rangers’ positions became available at the and the Ranger’s former Manager told him to apply, which he duly did. A panel interview was held a week later and they were unable to make a decision, so a new panel was convened and another round of interviews was held the following week. Apart from the Ranger there were a number of internal candidates as well, (the Ranger’s fellow team members also on final fixed term contracts). They all talked about the process among themselves as they were all colleagues and friends. All stated it was a humiliating and demeaning process that saw each of them effectively begging for their roles. One described it as being like the Hunger Games. It became clear that past performance in the roles accounted for nothing.

In fact the Ranger in question was asked in the interview why he thought he was good fit for the role. He answered “because I’ve been doing it for 18 months and have the highest performance ratings available.” He then gave the panel a copy of his last appraisal.

The Ranger was then called back for a third panel interview, with panel members drawn from other departments on the basis the previous panels could not form a consensus. These members were drawn from other council departments and had no day to day interaction with Ranger team.

Eventually, two weeks later the Park Ranger was called back by HR and told he had been unsuccessful. She was unable to provide a rationale explanation for the decision and in fact tried to garner sympathy from the unsuccessful candidate for what a difficult decision she had had to make – as though she were the victim, rather than he. It was unprofessional, tone deaf and frankly, callous.

So what has this process achieved;

1. The Ranger is out of a job and has missed out on months of other opportunities, both internal and external, because he did not apply for them based on the assurances of his former Manager. The process has had a significant adverse affect on his mental health.
2. There is now zero trust within the Ranger team for the Manager or the HR department. They now know, without question, that the Manager’s words cannot be trusted. If it can happen to their well-liked and high-performing colleague, it can happen to them as well. It has also impacted the mental health of others on the team, particularly those on fixed-term contracts as the lack of job security, even if they perform at a high level, is very stressful.​
3. The unsuccessful candidate was a very high performer who went above and beyond to fulfill his tasks. The Ranger team now know that accounts for nothing, and many have openly stated that they will now only do the bare minimum as high-performance and/or dedication is no longer rewarded, or in fact, even recognised.
4. Further, the Ranger in question was well known across numerous council departments. His image had been used across multiple internal and external advertising formats. As questions were asked; What happened to him? His former team members spread the message about how the Ranger had been treated by HR and similar reactions of mistrust in HR and the lack of respect for performance has now spread across the council like a virus.

To add further insult, a few months later the Council advertised another two Park Ranger vacancies. The former Ranger duly applied and the Ranger Team Manager expressed a desire to interview him, but was soundly over-ruled by the HR team stating it was “because of what the Ranger had told them about the process in his final exit interview”. In other words, rather than acknowledge what he said was true, HR has tried to bury the mess – and ignore the damage they have done to both the organisation's culture and the mental health of the Ranger and his colleagues.

In 25 years working in HR, only in the public sector would this nonsense arise. In the Private Sector the Ranger would have simply been offered a permanent role. Good people are too hard to find and hold onto to treat like this.

The Council’s values include references to integrity, courage, accountability, respect and excellence. Clearly respect for individuals was lacking. As was recognition of past excellence in the recruitment process. All it has left is a demoralised, demotivated, highly-stressed and untrusting work force.

Which brings us back to RUOK. The Council’s HR Team talks a big game on mental health but their own processes and bureaucracy demonstrate a complete lack of regard for the mental health of the City’s employees, and an unwillingness to acknowledge and learn from its mistakes. These are public tax dollars at work.
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RUOK is a great initiative. But slapping a few posters up in tea-rooms and making public motherhood statements is NOT enough. It needs to be backed with real actions that include treating all employees with respect and reviewing all processes (including recruitment) to ensure employees are not treated as the Ranger above was.

Yesterday, Aaron Dodd our Managing Partner attended an event in Melbourne put on by the Canadian Australian Chamber of Commerce. It was titled Leading in a New Era, and focused how leaders must facilitate inclusion and diversity initiatives if their teams are to operate at peak performance. The Keynote Speech was made by the Honourable Carla Qualtrough - Former Paralympian and Canada's Minister for Sport, followed by an excellent discussion panel composed of Charmaine Crooks - President of Soccer Canada, Kate Roffey - the CEO of the Melbourne Football Club, and Kieren Perkins - former Australian Olympian and now CEO of the Australian Sports Commission.

All three panelists offered valuable insights into the way they each operate - a key that they all agreed on was the need for recruiters, both internal and external, to confidently present diverse candidates for roles, and that hiring managers must demand and/or accept diverse candidate pools. They must also consider how roles can be adapted to be more inclusive. Selection is key to inclusion.

For Aaron, Kieren Perkins' comments resonated the loudest. Following his swimming career, Perkins found his way into Senior Leadership roles within National Australia Bank and Australian Unity before becoming CEO of the Australian Sports Commission (and the Australian Institute of Sport). Perkins commented that he shouldn't have been in the roles he had had at NAB, as he didn't have the requisite qualifications - he had no MBA, he hadn't studied finance or economics etc. But what he did have was the ability and empathy to understand the needs of others, and the ability to use that understanding to motivate, facilitate and support his team members to be successful. That was his role as a leader - to facilitate and support others to deliver their goals.

Perkins' success has been and continues to be a result of his intelligence and personality - excellent people skills, empathy and EQ. He does not claim to be the smartest person in the room, but rather he recruits and selects smarter people and then supports them to be successful. This is true leadership.

The other point Perkins made was when he is interviewing candidates, he does not focus on their technical skills. He takes them as a given. Rather, he focuses on their personality and what makes them tick, how they interact with others, their EQ, what motivates them, ability and willingness to learn, their drive for success and their individuality vs team-orientation. In other words, their personality is the key selection criteria, not so much their technical skills. Perkins also said he used personality assessments (particularly around EQ) to gain added insight into candidates.

The focus on personality for key selection decisions has always been Locum People's key strength, which is why Perkins' comments resonated with Aaron. It is why Prevue Assessments are such an important part of our service offerings and are integral to our search and selection programs.

Contact us if you would like more information on how Prevue can augment your selection decisions and facilitate inclusive recruitment practices.

Locum People is proud to announce that our New Zealand clients can now be invoiced in, and pay in New Zealand Dollars.
All of our current Kiwi clients will be given the option next time they are invoiced.
New NZ clients will be invoiced in NZD automatically.
Please don't hesitate to contact us if you need more information!

Budgeting for salespeople is a fraught process. We all know this, but when you have poor managers using it to batter salespeople major problems can arise. We were involved in mediating a dispute at one of our clients between a salesperson and the company's CEO - a brief summary follows;

The company is a newly created small subsidiary or a much larger European multinational. The company has an established customer base in Australia as their new direct sales operation took over from a distributor. In 2022 the company recruited industry recognised, well-connected technically strong salespeople in each state to lead their direct sales efforts.

At the beginning of 2023 sales budgets were handed down to each salesperson without consultation with them. As it transpired the numbers had been set in head-office in Europe and were grossly excessive for the Australian market. The new Australian CEO did not push back on Europe on the numbers. He just meekly passed the numbers on to the team.
The salespeople all pushed back on him and the CEO's response (in writing) was that he knew they were "a stretch", but they would be provided with every resource needed to achieve the goals. The salespeople were not convinced.

By April it was clear that the targets were never going to be met and pressure was being applied to the salespeople who were already stretched. It was inferred that the salespeople were not working hard enough. By end of April the pressure from the CEO had effectively morphed into bullying. Two of the salespeople lodged general protections claims with Fair Work Australia. This was the point Locum People was asked to mediate a resolution.

It was clear from the communications from the CEO to the sales team that he was blaming them for not meeting the budgets set for them, even though they had had no say in the numbers and given their knowledge of the market, had known from the outset that the market size simply did not support the sales expectations. He was blaming the salespeople to cover for his own incompetence in not listening to them and setting them targets he knew they would not meet. He set them up to fail. Had he terminated them, the company would have likely lost an unfair dismissal claim. Had the employees resigned in disgust at their treatment, it would have likely been a successful constructive dismissal claim.

The company sells highly specialised products and there are few salespeople in the market with the level of industry and technical knowledge required to be successful. That the company has these salespeople was a coup in itself - nor could it afford to lose them as they were essentially irreplaceable. There would also have been reputational damage to the company had they lost them.

Our goal was to keep the salespeople in the business while trying to rescue the relationship they had with the CEO. The salespeople were actually reasonably easy to mollify. They just needed an acknowledgement from the CEO that he had got the budgets wrong. Unfortunately he was unprepared to do this, and was unable to demonstrate to us how he came up with the numbers - other than saying "this is what head-office wanted".

As this was his response we then contacted the European head-office and spoke with global CEO. We explained the situation, He was completely unaware of the dissatisfaction in Australia. He then said the local CEO should have come back to him at the start and told him the numbers were wrong way back at the beginning of the year. He also knew he could not afford to lose the salespeople. It turned out he was quite reasonable. He even said he expects his local CEOs to push back on this type of stuff as they have the local knowledge not him. That's what he is paying them for.

The final result was a re-writing of the budget with the input, and buy-in, of the salespeople and an apology from the local CEO to the salespeople. Further the local CEO engaged a Locum People consultant to be his executive coach to assist him in changing his behaviours so that such instances did not recur. All parties put a line in the sand and are now working together professionally and will be successful. The Fair Work claims have been dropped.

The lessons here are as follows;

1. CEOs of Australian subsidiaries need to push back on unreasonable requests from head-office. It's their job. If you're a local CEO who is not prepared to do this - you shouldn't be in the job.
2. When budgeting it is critical to get the input of your sales team. Salespeople are not afraid of sales growth, but targets need to be realistic. If sales people are not listened to, and their suggestions ignored there will be no buy-in, and it is unlikely you will be able to hold them accountable for not meeting the targets.
3. Setting expectations that cannot be met and then blaming an employee for not meeting them is bullying under the definition of FWA. This applies to budgeting as it does other management tasks. Don't do it.
   
   

If you have concerns about how your budgets are being set, please contact Locum People for a confidential no obligations talk. 

Over the last month Locum People has been asked to independently investigate 3 different bullying complaints by three different clients across two Australian states. A quick summary of cases follows;

The first was a middle manager who was making homophobic comments and taking other actions against an openly gay member of his customer service team. This was a cut and dry case complete with recordings of the manager doing it, as well as other evidence including witnesses. The manager was terminated.

The second was a complaint made against a manager by an under-performing female employee who objected to being more closely managed and observed than her colleagues (who weren’t under-performing). We reviewed the company data on her performance, compared it to her colleagues in parallel roles, and interviewed the employee and her manager. We concluded that she was not being bullied. The company has a legal right to manage and provide feedback to and coach under-performing employees. The employee resigned in this case as her complaint made her position untenable.

The last case was that of a highly experienced 60 year old female salesperson who was being “performance managed” out of the business even though she was the second highest performing salesperson (of 10) in the country. Her Manager had simply decided she was too old and wanted her to leave the business so she could be replaced with a younger person. She was clearly being unfairly treated – despite her performance she was being given substantial additional reporting and targets to meet that weren’t required of her younger colleagues. In fact the additional tasks and reporting were having an adverse effect on her sales as she was spending less time with customers in order to complete them. Our conclusion was the manager was bullying the employee because of her age, but tried to disguise it as legitimate performance management. The manager resigned when presented with our findings.

Company Directors has significant legal responsibilities to provide safe workplaces. Bullying is psycho-socially an unsafe behaviour and must not be tolerated in the workplace. Significant penalties including imprisonment apply to Directors who fail to stop bullying when they become aware of it. As an added protection, Directors will often use an external consultant like Locum People to ensure there is no personal bias applied to the investigations. In the third case mentioned above the company’s HR manager was implicated as she had been involved in the sham “performance management” meetings (in her defence, she had not been provided with the facts by the now departed manager).

If you need support with neutral third party investigations into similar complaints, please don’t hesitate to contact Locum People.

One of our clients asked us about the AI capabilities with in our Prevue Applicant Tracking Software, and that got us  thinking. The Prevue ATS does not have AI capabilities yet, but we are certain AI will become a big part of recruitment in the future.

AI will become common in recruitment in various ways, including:

1. Resume screening: AI-powered systems will be able analyse resumes and extract relevant information such as work experience, skills, and education. This can help recruiters save time and effort in manually screening resumes. To an extent most quality ATS systems, including Prevue can do this now.
2. Candidate sourcing: AI algorithms will help recruiters find potential candidates by searching through job boards, social media platforms, and other sources of candidate information.
3. Candidate matching: AI will compare candidate profiles with job requirements to identify the best matches. This will help recruiters quickly identify candidates who meet the qualifications for a particular job.
4. Video interviews: AI-powered video interview platforms will analyse candidates' facial expressions, tone of voice, and other non-verbal cues to provide insights into their personality, communication skills, and other qualities.
5. Predictive analytics: AI will analyse past hiring data to identify patterns and predict which candidates are most likely to succeed in a particular role. This will help recruiters make more informed hiring decisions.
6. Onboarding: AI will assist in the onboarding process by providing personalised training and feedback to new employees based on their skills and performance.
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Overall, AI will help streamline the recruitment process, improve candidate quality, and reduce bias. However, it will be important to use AI tools ethically and transparently, and to ensure that human oversight is still present to avoid unintended consequences.

The most important thing in recruitment though that AI will never be able to replace is the human touch. The ability of a quality recruiter to develop and maintain relationships with candidates and employers, and bring the two together for a win-win employment relationship. AI may be able to identify a potential match but it will require a human to make it happen. AI will however replace the churn and burn paper shufflers at the shallow end of the recruitment gene pool.

Contact us if you would like to see how Prevue can streamline your recruitment in a very cost effective manner.

Locum People has been using, promoting and selling Prevue Assessments in Australia and New Zealand for well over a decade. Our clients are HR people, hiring managers, recruiters, industrial psychologists, other consultants and even a few academics. But we still get asked by new clients - why should we use Prevue?

Prevue can have several benefits, including:

1. Improved hiring and recruitment decisions: Prevue can help organisations make more informed hiring decisions by providing insight into a candidate's cognitive abilities, personality, and behavioral characteristics.
2. Better job fit: By matching the skills and personality of the candidate to the requirements of the job, Prevue can increase the likelihood of a good fit, leading to higher job satisfaction and improved performance.
3. Development of employees: Prevue can also be used to identify an employee's strengths and areas for improvement, and to design development plans to help them grow and progress in their careers.
4. Increased objectivity: Prevue is designed to be objective and free from bias, making it an effective way of removing subjectivity from the recruitment and selection process.
5. Increased fairness: By relying on scientifically validated measures, Prevue ensures that all candidates are evaluated in the same way, regardless of their background or experience, promoting fairness and equality in the selection process.
6. Improved team dynamics: Prevue can also be used to help teams work better together by identifying compatibility between team members and by providing insight into how different personalities and working styles can complement each other.

It's important to note that in recruitment and selection. Prevue is just one tool in the selection and development process, and should be used in conjunction with other methods, such as interviews and reference checks.

Want to find out more about Prevue? Perhaps a free trial? Contact us NOW

We've all read the news. You may have even tried to recruit yourself and struggled to find quality candidates. Australia and New Zealand are facing the tightest candidate markets for decades. Quite simply, there are more jobs going around than their are candidates to fill them. It means recruitment is expensive and supply and demand, as well as inflation, is pushing salaries ever higher. It also means good employees will be approached. Headhunting is rife. Other companies want your staff - if they can't find staff by advertising they will approach your people directly or via a recruiter and will sometimes be successful at luring them away from you. And you won't be able to easily replace them. How will that affect your business?

But it's not just more money that will be offered to your employees. A good headhunter will take the time to understand what really motivates an individual and will put a holistic package together to attract them. Salary will be part of it, but it could also include a promotion, development opportunities, more authority, travel (or less travel) and many other factors.

So how do you counter this? You need to really understand what makes each of your people get up and come to work for you. If they are satisfied with what they are getting from you, it will be much more difficult to for others to lure them away. As a manager, how certain are you about each of your people's motivators?

Locum People can help. Ask us about our Retention Plus program. Our consultants will assess each of your team using our Prevue assessment system. We will then meet with your employees and review with them what they like, what they don't, how they like to be managed, what their goals are - short, medium and long-term. We can then give each employee a score that is an indication of willingness to leave. We will also make recommendations for each employee that you can use as a guide to putting in place changes to make it harder for others to recruit them. We have found employees are often far more open to an independent consultant than to their manager, so the program has real validity.

If you would like more information, please don't hesitate to contact us.

​There are hundred of psychometric test providers in the market. Most have full validation from recognised national bodies such as the (American) Association for Psychological Science (APS), British Psychological Society (BPS) or the Australian Psychological Society (also APS). Usually it's a condition of receiving validation that test vendors have to provide formalised training to users, or even that users can only be recognised psychologists.

This is often because the tests results in the abstract need to be related back to cognitive and/or personality traits that are relevant to performance in the job and organisational culture. 

Many test providers now make significant money from training users in the interpretation of their products' results. Providing "accreditation" - that sometimes needs to be kept current annually. It's become a revenue stream for them in its own right. If the test can only be interpreted by a recognised psychologist, you will find yourself paying even more for a meeting and/or written report. It will also take much longer as you may need to wait for a psychologist to make time available for you or or your candidate.

But what if there was a fully-validated test, that could be delivered online that measures a candidate's cognitive abilities, motivators and personality against a benchmark tailored to your specific role and organisational culture? And required no expensive and time-hogging validation to use?