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…

Continue

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…

Continue

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…

Continue

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’…

Continue

"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