Meeting the Moment – Highlights from Jeff Neumann’s Keynote at Engage Sydney 2022
The last time Jeff Neumann, Bullhorn’s VP Product Marketing was in Australia was in March 2020. A lot has happened since then, but one thing is for sure: the recruitment industry in APAC has endured, adapted, and even seen growth like no one could have imagined. Read on to see highlights from Jeff’s insightful keynote as he challenged us all to meet the moment.
Challenges and Priorities Misaligned
Each year Bullhorn releases the Global Recruitment Insights and Data (GRID) report which highlights the top priorities, challenges, and opportunities that are top of mind for recruitment professionals around the world. This year the top two challenges highlighted by respondents were ‘reskilling’ and ‘talent shortage’. Jeff explained, “This makes sense for APAC, as there’s a limited talent supply and an even greater need than in the past for specialised skill sets”.
Interestingly, however, the report highlighted that the top priority for 2022 is ‘talent acquisition’. There’s a mismatch between our top challenges and priorities. “We’re still thinking in our old ways”, Jeff highlights. Recruiters are constantly looking for new candidates instead of taking advantage of reskilling opportunities or tapping into their existing pool of talent to tackle the talent shortage.
Meet the Moment
The time is now to meet the moment and accelerate your business growth activities. This was the key message in Jeff’s keynote address, and it was also a core theme that ran throughout the day at Engage Sydney 2022.
Make investments in your internal teams, not just financial but also personal and emotional. Implement processes and activities that excite your team to increase satisfaction and productivity. Think about the client experience and how you can foster stronger relationships with them. Lastly, it’s about improving the talent experience and engaging them when and how they want. Increasingly this is via mobile experiences, but we must also account for generational motivations and needs.
“You have a wealth of talent at your fingertips”, Jeff said. He reinforces this by saying, “The time is now to think through your strategies, think through your approaches of how you’re going to engage talent both internal and external. We have the ability to change the way we engage our teams, our talent, and our clients to help you grow and accelerate your business. This is what meeting the moment is all about.”
Experience is Everything
We all know candidate experience is paramount. Have you stopped to think about the experience of clients or your internal teams? What strategies do you have in place to improve the experience of these two key pillars of a successful agency?
During the session, Jeff invited three recruitment leaders from different agencies to share their stories on digital transformation and how it has allowed them to focus not just on candidates but their internal staff and clients to meet the moment. Kerrie Gregory from the Accordant Group in New Zealand detailed how they’ve been on a journey to replace their clunky on-premise system to now have a whole suite of technology partners, with Bullhorn at the heart of it. “Technology should be an enabler,” Kerrie said. The process has led Accordant to improve its client and candidate experience while making things much easier and more efficient for internal consultants.
Emily Bowen from Rarekind, shared how they’ve taken the ‘gamechanger’ approach over the last two years by turning negative situations into positive opportunities. Rarekind changed a range of its systems, including payroll, finance, employee experience, HR, rates, and quoting. Emily has “left no stone unturned,” and they aren’t finished with the process yet. They’ve even recently rebranded from Forsythes Recruitment & HR to Rarekind. At the heart of Rarekind is the belief that people are anything but ordinary and celebrating the uncommon.
Fuse Recruitment is located in four states across Australia. Tyson McNeilly, their CEO, shared insight on their challenges of keeping internal employees connected while also balancing connections with candidates and clients during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. To combat this, they started using technology to measure their engagement scores. Tyson notes, “We saw a directly proportional relationship as we improved our engagement scores to the performance of the business”.
“Digitalisation offers us an ability to find solutions to operational issues through technology”, Tyson said. Fuse has used automation to deliver relevant messages to candidates and clients, engaging them, how and when they want. This initiative has been so successful that Tyson attributes 25 to 30 percent of inbound business to timely, automated outreach.
Jeff highlighted the powerful combination these three businesses have unlocked. They are all investing internally in their consultant experiences and leveraging technology to drive positive experiences for candidates and clients to see positive results.
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