Q: With industry specialisation a key factor for success in recruitment, graduates are now a valuable source of potential consultants, how does or will your organisation help the transition of graduates from study into the recruitment workforce in the future?

It is doubtful whether the way the recruitment industry is currently structured makes it a suitable place to begin a career. Recruitment requires life skills and maturity, and the current industry model requires people to sell and then do the actual recruitment work themselves.

Before recruiting, you need to work in the real world to develop life skills and some understanding of how the world of work functions. A good analogy is with politics: it is populated with people who have never had real jobs. They have been political staffers or union officials. They really need to understand business, jobs and the importance of profit and how it is created if they are to represent us. But they know virtually nothing about it.

With recruitment, a key part of our role is to advise people on their careers and career choices, and advise employers, our clients, on how to structure their teams on such vital issues as succession planning.

A major contributor to the tragedy that is the recruitment industry is the extraordinary reliance at the big firms on ‘twenty something’ salespeople. Often these are travellers from the UK, with great sales skills honed in the aggressive London market. But not much in the way of life skills or maturity.

At Abacus, we have 4 students we use to help with our administration while they are studying, giving them great office and work skills. Most of them join us in Year 10 and many stay till they finish University – we give them broader responsibilities the longer they stay.

But recruitment is a fairly narrow skill. You need a broad background to be good at it, so graduates need to do other roles first. And join recruitment later with greater skills and maturity. Shame our Pollies don’t do the same.