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?