On opposing ends of a continuum, there are those amongst us who love a good verbal tussle, a professional challenge or a debate and then there are those amongst us that run headlong from the slightest frown. Usually it has something to do with our experience of conflict as kids; I know my parents used to see it as a personal slight on their marriage if anyone heard them so much as disagree – so guess which end of the continuum I tend…

Family Friendly is a business and employee benefit

If you struggle to get the very best people to come and work for you.   If you believe your employees aren’t giving their best, or are stressed because their working life and domestic life don’t work well together.  Or if you have a high rate of unexplained absence, then you may wish to consider reviewing your family friendly offer.

If you want to attract and retain top talent now and in the future;  to remain…

The Federal Magistrates Court recently shed some light on the operation of the general protections provisions in respect of prospective employees, confirming that a person would not usually be regarded as a “prospective employee” unless they had actually made an application for employment or were negotiating in relation to possible employment.

Referring to a string of Federal Court decisions, Federal Magistrate Cameron noted that the expression prospective employee “implies a…

A request for feedback on a new tool for hiring managers.

RecruitLoop has recently released a tool for employers and HR managers to automate the screening process, with recorded video interviews.

It's a free tool, which can save hours in the screening process.

We'd appreciate feedback from the community, as it's an early release. Is it something you'd use? What questions/concerns would you have? Is it easy/difficult to understand?…

As a result of the decision of the minimum wage panel of Fair Work Australia to increase the federal minimum wage and award wages, employers should take note that the high income threshold (for unfair dismissal claims and other purposes) will increase to $123,300 from 1 July 2012.

This also results in an increase to the compensation cap for unfair dismissal claims to $61,650

The merge of social networking technology and business has caused an epic shift in working culture as a whole, especially when it comes to the new required levels of transparency in businesses. Enterprises are now obliged to be more interactive on a personal level with their customer, whether their customers are other businesses or the general public. The whole marketing monologue of a company now needs to be shifted to an ongoing dialogue with customers over a wholly public channel, moving…

The current rise of social recruiting and in-house sophistication is the most significant change I’ve seen in my 13 year career within the recruitment sector across Australia, New Zealand and United Kingdom. Whilst that should be no surprise to anyone in the industry, I do wonder if a majority of the industry truly understand that it’s only getting bigger and, therefore, we need to adjust our value proposition. It would seem not!

It is great that employers now have so many…

It struck me recently during a program called Strategic Relationship Development run by one of the largest companies in the world, that the investment and focus of contemporary sales and influencing skills training was in trying to regain something in the workplace we all do naturally outside of it… connecting as human beings.…

There is an elephant in the room when it comes to the basic business model of our industry. People don’t talk about it much, yet it’s a fundamental flaw in the relationship between client and recruiter, and it drives poor service and lack of satisfaction for all parties.

Multi-listing of job orders across multiple agencies, and recruiters accepting briefs on a contingent and in-competition basis.

There are three primary reasons client multi-list job orders and expect…

Experience is often essential, but it takes time!

One of the most valued attributes an employee can bring to the workplace is their experience.  In a fast changing world where employees are more likely to move from job to job for a number of reasons;  sometimes great knowledge and skill are present, but not necessarily experience.  The problem is of course experience takes time and often we are short of that commodity!

If you have great staff but they simply…

"Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things." - Theodore Levitt

In your workplace, the ultimate goal is to achieve a level of full engagement from each and every employee, if all your workers are engaged and innovating, your business will no doubt flourish. However, within every workplace there is likely to be both innovators and objectors. Whilst your innovators are fully engaged and working…

Seems in a recent decision (Applicant vs Linfox Armaguard PTy Ltd) its ok in moderation. 

Whilst I don't agree that behaviour of the nature outlined in this dispute is acceptable at all, particularly when loaded firearms are present, it does spark the question of "When is what might be harmless bad language and mucking around step over the line into inappropriate behaviour?".

For me the answer is simple. It's not acceptable, and should not be condoned or ignored. In order to…

Welcome to my blog!

EI is an employment solutions provider specialising in Employment Law; Migration, Human Resources, Payroll; Incentives and Recognition.

Or simply put, we make being an employer easy.

I will be blogging about everything involved with being an employer, the latest news on all things HR and Workplace Law-shaped and anything else in between that catches my eye - let's keep things fresh and interesting.

So please bookmark, share, add our Google…

The idea that one needs “a coach” has become pervasive.  There are sports coaches, life coaches, health coaches and executive coaches.  There are coaches acting as cheerleaders, confidantes, guidance counselors and psychologists.  The term coach is bandied about and it seems everyone can be a coach these days.  Now the idea of the “coach” has even hit mainstream TV with the hit program The Voice.



Don’t get me wrong, like many Australians I have been captivated by…

Today, a search on Amazon.com showed 98,516 results for “leadership”.  A further search for “followship” came back with a mere 39 results.  I searched again for “team player” and received over 101,000 results, although “team player” wasn’t quite what I was looking for.   I know sometimes part of great leadership is setting out what you expect and need from your followers, and “followship” is a little used word, but the yawning gap between the results surprised even me.

You may be a…

Performance reviews are essential to increase employee engagement and staff performance, and so they need to be structured in a way that fosters engagement. They can be a high stress situation for employees as sometimes pay, promotions and benefits can rely on the outcome.

Two common mistakes made when conducting a performance review are a managerial attitude of a ‘tick the box’ process and using annual performance reviews as a standalone method, without regular performance…