The real problem with recruitment organisations is their lack of spine. They enforce ageist selection criteria and in the main are nothing more than middlewomen (mainly young women) who rarely understand the brief or the nature of the positions advertised.

HR recruitment is a parasitic activity and the costs are passed on to management. Whether they get value for money is dubious. The writer makes a good distinction between inhouse recruiters and those who work for agencies such as Hays, Hudson, etc.

Inhouse recruiters in the main work hard to find the right candidate. The others are hacks in it for profit and to meet targets. The Fed Gov should look hard at how and why recruitment companies have forsaken merit in favour of the lowest common denominator - profit.

Recruitment agencies should be avoided wherever possible. They seem to have little real understanding of the industries they are recruiting for. They are arguably good at fitting round pegs into round holes - jobs like accountant, human resources, IT - but no idea of how to use someone with a broad range of complex skills who doesn't have a recognisable title. I was recently approached by a recruitment agency for a position that I was so unsuitable for it wasn't funny and I suspect my lack of interest will mean I stand little chance of any further consideration. I was once interviewed by a recruiter who spent more time discussing my wife's musical interests than my skills and experience despite my best efforts to keep to the requirements of the job.

I suspect recruitment agencies are easily swayed by candidates with few skills other than self promotion rather than truly skilled but with more modest evaluation of their talents. It might explain why the quality of managers is so low. Very few I have met have good team building skills and most have very little ability to accommodate lateral thinkers.

Lastly I must point out that some of the agencies do have good recruiters but they are few and far between and the good ones don't seem to last.

Malcolm while I agree with much of your article, I think you are missing the point with your reference to the "closed shop" as you see it, & your some what condescending attitude to what you obviously see as "Hick" places.

Firstly I will add a few for you. I would include The Whitsundays, Cairns, PNG, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, & in fact most places that are a little different.

Contrary to the idea that hick managers are scared of highly qualified newcomers, they are absolutely sick of these types lasting just a few weeks, & shooting through.

Firstly many of these people have the wife syndrome. She has one look at the town, housing, schools, roads or whatever, & he's gone.

Secondly you find most of these types can't actually do the job, without the entourage of helpers they are used to. I had one marine manager who flew out of town the moment he found he was responsible for crew rosters. Apparently math was not his thing.

After a few failures you start to grow your own. It is most pleasing to watch some kid grow into a job they never even aspired to, until pushed a bit. Perhaps the most important qualification is that they like the place, want to stay, are willing to learn, & have a go.

My best restaurant manager started as a 17 year old waitress. By 24 she was the manager, a real asset.

My best marine manager started as a deck hand. It took a bit longer for him, as he worked through his masters qualifications, but there was not too much he didn't know, after 8 years.

The best & longest serving manager Hayman Island ever had, started as a cook. Don't tell him that, he reckons he was a chief. So Malcolm, don't talk someone out of going bush, but do warn them, there is an apprenticeship to surve, as a local resedint, & they may have to start at the bottom again, but after that the sky's the limit, & you can get there on ability.

Hasbeen.....what a lovely segment of reality....but still many don't get the support/time period that makes the great employment gem that all mum's and dad's that puts their time and money into, with whats expected.

The age old question is......

I'll let you finish it off.:)

Mathematically.....people+people+space+time+energy+resources+7 billion+time-line-of-heritability....This reflects all the genetic contributions to a population's phenotypic variance including ...Any particular phenotype can be modelled as the sum of genetic and environmental effects:[5]

Phenotype (P) = Genotype (G) + Environment (E).

Likewise the variance in the trait – Var (P) – is the sum of genetic effects as follows:

Var(P) = Var(G) + Var(E) + 2 Cov(G,E).

In a planned experiment Cov(G,E) can be controlled and held at 0. In this case, heritability is defined as:

H^2 = \frac{Var(G)}{Var(P)} .

H2 is the broad-sense heritability. This reflects all the genetic contributions to a population's phenotypic variance including additive, dominant, and epistatic (multi-genic interactions), as well as maternal and paternal effects, where individuals are directly affected by their parents' phenotype (such as with milk production in mammals).

These additional terms can be decomposed in some genetic models. 'An important example is capturing only portion of the variance due to additive (allelic) genetic effects. This additive genetic portion is known as Narrow-sense heritability' and is defined as

h^2 = \frac{Var(A)}{Var(P)}

Which=time-displacement+numbers=just a bit more than we need:)

Overpopulation=extinction.

And are smart....why?

LEAP

Leap

I have been doing battle for years with those "qualified' people who satisfied the selection criteria. After expensive relocation to our area & at the expense of many locals they then have to ask advise for every little decision they have to make. 95% don't actually make decisions. The problem is this selection criteria madness. People with actual experience can't get their foot in the door yet some incompetent & inexperienced & utterly disinterested bureaucrat gets the position. This system has brought this country to its knees & actually ruined many indigenous communities. Sadly but also totally undeniable, Labor is the organisation who are directly responsible for this mess. It was Labor that started all this 3-day TAFE course expertise & handing out certificates on no merit at all.
As I stated in another thread we now have two generations of people who can't hold a spanner because of this system. On one hand the communities get incompetent manager after incompetent manager & the young people aren't offered any training of substance. This system isn't working. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands to train people the Govt spends millions on ruining them.

I tend to agree with Hasbeen on King's selective attack on employment in rural areas.

Even so, in Adelaide, HR is actually weeding out excellent candidates by dubious use of selection criteria and probably illegal word choice in ads such as 'dynamic', 'recent graduate', 'enthusiastic' - if it wasn't for the Anti-discrimination act they'd just say Young People Only. Although young people are being forced out because HR recruiters want people with 'experience'. It's a lose-lose for young and old alike.

Apart from the writer's holier-than-thou Tory attitude at times - and the fact that he has only inferred that good leaders are rubbed out by recruiters - the article is the most damning I have read on HR recruitment (agencies). One day a reckoning will come to these flim flam men and women.

Any body remember when the federal & state governments had a "public service board"?

Young Australians leaving the education system, after junior, senior, tech college or university could fill in a form, sit an entrance exam, apply for a public service job, could opt for plodding along, unskilled &/or do further studies part time while working part time, etc.

Who destoyed this stable system?

Who politicised the public service, chose to "outsource"?

Oh yes, it was the closet communists again wasn't it? Comrades Whitlam, Hawke, Keating, Dunstan, etc, "modernising", "reforming", all of which are weasel words for communist sabotage & failure agenda.

The left's aversion to fact/truth becomes so clearly evident by the lack of flak to fact/truth-based threads such as this one. Now that they've been playing ostrich for some years by sticking their head into the sand the consequences are simply too overwhelming even for the lefties to respond with their trademark lack-of-integrity based nasty remarks.

Recruitment agencies are businesses and it pays to put 'bums on seats'. I worked in an agency for a short time hiring temps and have been a 'candidate' many times and have seen the view from both sides.

Many times I was interviewed by a young person who had never worked in the public service and had no idea about the position they were recruiting for. Agencies use young people with little experiene because they come more cheaply. Not all agencies are 'mickey mouse' agencies some do hire more mature people and ex-public servants who do possess relevant knowledge.

The Commonwealth Government is outsourcing more and more functions and positions despite the mantra of 'equal pay for equal work'. Where agencies are paying the wages directly casuals sourced from 'labour hire' groups are paid less per hour than their permanent counterparts sitting side-by-side doing the same work. Even with the casual loading the rate is lower often by a few dollars per hour.

There is a big push to outsource lower level functions such as mail opening, courier services, scanning, shredding of secure documents and of course the early stages of the recruitment processes.

My pet hate is the generic selection criteria which often has little to do with the work actually performed. I have seen a number of times people being told they were not selected for interview because they did not have a background in 'X' (eg. law enforcement) yet the selection criteria did not mention anything about that requirement or they did not possess a skill such as fast typing which was also never mentioned. Sometimes the opposite happened where the successful candidate turned up and could not do the job because the basic work skills required were not included as part of selection criteria. Generic selection criteria is lazy and encourages incompetence.

They are very often meaningless especially when you can pay $200-$600 to get someone to write the application for you. It has become a business in itself just to get people to the interview.

I have worked through Recruitment agencies as a contractor for about 10 years and have tried to give consideration to the tough market it must be.

I have become conditioned to not expecting a reply on supplying a CV although some do, some don’t. It’s not something that bothers me but nice when it happens. Although I’ve been doing it for a while, for someone in more precarious financial/employment circumstances perhaps they might feel different.

I have also become conditioned to not expecting any communication after submitting a job application, besides confirmation that it has been submitted, unless I get an interview. Thinking about it, I really would rather someone following this up after they’ve sought me out and then me putting in several days work for the application.

What has finally given me pause to wonder if I can get work without using these agencies is the fact that for 4 out of 5 job interviews for contracts this year through 3 agencies, I received no contact after the interview to advise that I was unsuccessful without me chasing them up weeks later (or just concluding after a while that this must be the case). Not nice and not what I’d expect of HR professionals.

I wish federal government wouldn’t predominately limit some contract work to multiple and exclusive panels that only these agencies have the resources to get onto - complex tender responses, high insurance etc and then also complain fairly consistently about the obviously higher rates that must be charged to cover agency costs and margin but assume the individual contractor is earning.

I must agree with Pelican...I hate selection criteria, but the system does not seem to think it can work without them. They mean nothing and are a poor substitute for life experiece.

I have sat on numerous panels (in government) and been appalled at the systems' attempt to absolve itself from all responsiblity of the selection process by trying to put all the onus on the applicant's responses to criteria - which can run into reams of dribble. I would happily dump the selection criteria and rely on the CV, cover letter, and an interview process.

Any half-intelligent person can bluff their way through the criteria, but when you are talking to their referees and putting them on the spot with an interview question - that's when you learn most about them.

And these criteria also put an artificial emphasis on paper qualifications over actual ability to get a job done, as others have pointed out. This is really annoys me.

What HR recruitment does is dumb down the process so much that anyone with any intelligence and integrity withdraws.

I think this is a reflection of the people who work in agency recruitment offices. They are not the sharpest tools in the shed. They seem driven to want to 'help people' but really, if they wanted to help people, they should do volunteer work - preferably overseas.

I don't know why corporations and the public service have added ANOTHER layer of bureaucracy in the form of HR. Lord knows Australia's public service and administrative protocols are Indian enough.

I have jumped through many recruitment hoops in my life time to get a job, and then when I finally score a position, I look around the room expecting to see Einstein's - but no. All is see are people like me who can rig their CV's, selection criteria and interviews to what HR people want to hear. There has got to be a better way.