Since the Covid pandemic changed our attitudes towards working from home and accelerated an already growing trend towards remote working, there’s a common theme among business commentators that the world of work has moved on and businesses need to catch up. However, among staff who have become remote workers, some thrive in this ‘new normal’, whilst others genuinely miss the …

More research coming out of the UK, but equally applicable in New Zealand from the daily conversations we have with HR/People managers and business owners.   When ECI Partners polled 202 HR Managers in the UK summer of 2022, almost a fifth cited their biggest hiring obstacle as a lack of technical skills and knowledge among applicants.   Building long …

The knock-on effects of unfilled vacancies on existing staff were largely expected by employers, but this survey puts those effects in stark and alarming actual experiences.  While the survey was conducted in the UK, we could confidently expect the findings to be mirrored in New Zealand. More than a third of staff surveyed reported unmanageable workloads that are affecting their …

International recruitment consultancy Robert Half reported that 46% of the businesses surveyed to develop a recently released report had made a bad hire in the past 12 months, with small businesses feeling the greatest impact. At 61%, the biggest factor leading to a hire considered ‘bad’ was new staff not having the technical skills required in the role. Hey; People …

A recent UK survey of senior HR people revealed that whilst 53% of them ranked talent shortages as the biggest threat to their businesses continuity, only 19% felt they were ready to face the challenges of acute staff turnover and candidate scarcity. Piers Hudson, senior director at Gartner HR makes practical suggestions of how businesses can adapt to this hyper …

During my HR Manager days, I used to think Transparent Interviews were ‘cheating’; not taken seriously, used by public sector bodies to give internal applicants unfair advantage over external applicants. The list went on and I wasn’t a fan. In our continued world of candidate scarcity, I and most of my clients are regularly reviewing selection/vetting processes to ensure they …

With candidates being so hard to find, and employers making generous counter-offers to stop those thinking of leaving from doing so, what can you do to determine whether someone showing interest in joining your business is a genuine contender, or just gaming the candidate-driven employment market of 2022? Build these questions into your initial phone or video screening interview before …

Good candidates are hard to find, and when you do find them they typically have other interviews lined up and even job offers on the table already. You need to act fast if you’re going to beat those competing job offers, yet still feel satisfied that you have made a thorough assessment of whether that candidate is right for your …

I was talking to the owner of a small Chartered Accounting business last week who told me that they were so desperately short staffed that they would “literally take on anybody” who applied for their vacant accountant role. A few days before, a Practice Manager in a larger accounting firm asked for a refund on the Part/Non-Qualified Accountant test he …