Early access for Victorians

From 1 Jan 2006 employees in Victoria will be able to get access to their long service leave early.

You can read about the details at Deacons Legal Update. Some of the changes are:-

  • Most Victorian employees will now get 2 months long service leave after 10 years service, rather than 3 months long service leave after 15 years service.
  • Employees get pro rata long service leave after 7 years service regardless of whether the employer dismisses the employee or the employee resigns. This applies even if dismissed for serious misconduct.
  • Employers will not be able to unreasonably refuse an employee taking double leave at half pay.
  • Paid maternity or paternity leave counts as service for long service leave purposes.

    • For those of you not in Australia and have no idea about long service leave it is one of those colonial throw backs. Back when most Australians were from England, after 10-15 years of services employees were given 3 months off. Just about the time it took for a boat trip back to “the motherland”, spend a month there and boat trip back to the colonial outpost.

    Now it is just a good deal for employees.

Vertical Search and India

Gautam posts on an interesting development in India around vertical search, could it be illegal in India?

It seems Naukri has successfully defended got an interim injunction againstBixee for (updated 14 Jan 2006) scraping of their jobs by another site. I have been wondering when this would happen and it is probably one of the aspects limiting the development of vertical search in countries outside of the US.

I can kind of understand where a traditional job board would see a threat from vertical search and why their lawyers and management would want to stop this before it takes hold. Let’s look here in Australia where we have 3 major job boards (Seek, mycareer.com.au and CareerOne) all who charge an amount to list your job with them. These organisations have spent huge sums of money building a brand so that when job seekers and employers think about recruitment they think of their sites.

Now if vertical search takes off and all of the jobs from corporate sites are aggregated within minutes of them being posted for free, why would you need a traditional fee based job board? The business model just died. From this point I see Naukri’s move as defensive and I would expect to see the same from the top job boards in Australia.

Job boards need to add value to the recruitment process not just be a classified engine. If a job board can begin the move up into the recruitment firm space, by adding useful features, then they add value and employers will continue pay for the service. From my perspective this is a far better result, except for the lawyers.

Is your resume mission critical?

Back in December CIO published a story on the importance of CIO résumé’s being not just good or very good but being remarkable.

Here are the six key attributes from the story of a fantastic CIO resume:-
1. Speak the language of business
2. Underscore strategic abilities
3. Demonstrate your knowledge of and expertise in handling current “hot” issues
4. Minimize potential liabilities
5. Use detail to create impact
6. Pay attention to the little details

While the story is focused on CIO’s the outcomes are relevant to all executives and in fact all job seekers regardless of level of industry.

Trends for 2006

While we were all still digesting our Christmas dinners Wayson Wyatt Canada released their Top 10 trends for 2006. While many are specific to the Canadian market I can foresee them being relevant in other countries.

In summary they were:-
1. The war for top talent will continue to intensify, as organizations struggle to attract and retain the best and brightest employees in an increasingly competitive market.
2. Organizations will increasingly move to integrated performance management – or leadership that provides the system required to provide necessary information to identify and develop high potential employees.
3. The pay-for-performance philosophy will take hold more strongly among Canadian companies.
4. Organizations will formalize and enhance employee communication efforts to positively affect business performance.
5. Progress will be made toward resolution of the debates surrounding defined benefit (DB) pension plan funding rules.
6. Pension plan designs will be revised to more equitably distribute the risks – and rewards – between plan sponsors and plan members.
7. There will be increased governance related to pensions and increased participation of plan members in pension decisions.
8. Market conditions will continue to be difficult for pension funds.
9. There will be much debate regarding how to act in light of the removal of foreign content limits.
10. Progressive employers will realize the opportunity costs of not taking action to manage mental health and workplace disability issues and put practices in place to improve workplace health and employee productivity.

Australian job players

In response to my post on Seek their annual report and the state of the job board market in Australia, Bonita commented about a service called People Online. People Online “was formed as a boutique Australian job search agency established in Adelaide, South Australia in 2004. ” They say they provide a matching service between employers and job seekers online at reasonable rates, welcome

Another new player to the market is the silent Jobs Portal. Jobs Portal took a back page ad in the Sydney Morning Herald during the week between Christmas and New Years. At the time a web site existed at http://www.jobsportal.com.au, now there does not seem to be anything there. What stuck struck me was the name, will they be the first vertical search player in the Australian job market? Or will they just be another job board? Of they are a job board I hope they have a remarkable offering to outplace the current major players. Does anyone know about them?

Back on deck

After a fantasic two week break we are back in Melbourne looking forward to a fantastic 2006. The year holds lots in store on many fronts.

Blogging will continue both here and on my internal corporate blog, look for follow up posts on several items from the tail end of last year. Some of the topics that will be covered very soon are Performance Management in Australia, online advertising and the recruitment marketplace, identify management and HR systems, more on employee engagement and company performance.

hrblogs.org will continue to grow as time permits. Right now we have 44 and like all free platforms it does get it’s fair share of spam, splogs or whatever and some of the blogs have been set up never to be used again by the owners. But that is all part of the process. If you know someone who wants a blog and is in HR point them to hrblogs.org.

On a personal front, I expect to finding a new job part way through the year as my current contract ends around May, before this we have two major go lives. If there is still money in the HRIS space I might look at some consulting. To this end I will be spending some time researching and hopefully publishing one or two papers on the Australian market place and recruitment. I have also been reading up on writing for magazines etc, maybe I could do a bit of freelance work as well, you never know.

On the home front things will be busy. My wife will continue with her steps into the HR profession and by the end of the year will probably be fulltime again after a 5 year break. Our son moves into grade 3 and I expect will continue to expand his social calendar to completely exceed both of ours combined.

All in all a good year ahead.

A Christmas break

Tomorrow morning we are driving back to Sydney to spend Christmas and New Years with family and friends. I doubt I will be posting between now and 7th or 8th of January after we have returned and got our life in back in order.

2005 has been a great year, I thought of doing a top 10 listing but so many others are doing it and I just ran out of time!

Good luck to all those nominated in the Recruiting.com Best Blogs Awards. If you are celebrating Christmas I hope Santa is good to you all, I know my 8 year old is hoping he is.

To all have a great holiday and see you in 2006!