As a kid, I used to love Agatha Christie. Firstly the TV mini series with both Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, and latterly the books. It’s only in recent years that I realised how problematic the title of her 1939 book/film was. “Ten Little Indians” was sensibly renamed to “And Then There Were None”, but if you dive into this the original title was even worse, incorporating a word now only used by hip-hop “artists”. Anyway, if you haven’t read or watched it, a group of supposedly random strangers are called to a remote island to be picked off one by one. It’s excellent and no wonder it’s listed as the seventh best-selling book of all time. Just lay off the N-word.
Called to the remote island this week is Hays Australia. Following on from what probably started with Robert Walters closing down Christchurch in 2024, this blog hasn’t been able to stop reporting on the failures and struggles of large recruitment firms. Every Friday I wake, hoping to bash out 700 words of knob-gags and vitriol aimed at David Seymour, and every week (at least recently), I have no choice but to write about another big recruitment firm dying. This week it’s a two-fer.
Let’s start with Hays. According to the always-right Ross Clennett (who has been a fantastic resource for recruitment news across the ditch by the way), this and last week has seen Hays ANZ strip out loads of their management team. The restructure, essentially replacing specialist divisional MDs with regional MDs, sees (according to Clennett) over 145 years of Hays experience leaving the business. If you ever worked across the ditch or for Hays, you can check out Clennett’s article here and you’ll no doubt know some of the names. One of the MDs has been there over 30 years, so you may have been trained by her, promoted by her, set up your own firm, sold it, and are now reading this from a retirement “village” (they’re not f*cking villages). Of special interest to us in NZ is Adam Shapley, who ran Hays NZ for nearly 5 years, being sent down the road, and in a move where “similar climate” seems to be a deciding factor, current NZ MD David Trollope will relocate to Melbourne to take on Victoria and Tasmania while retaining his NZ responsibilities. As much as Hays will tell their NZ team that this is a promotion and demonstrates just where Hays can take you if you “do the numbers”, it is not good news at all. It’s like when I finally tell Claudia the great news that following the death of a wealthy childless uncle, I’ll be running the business from Thailand. I am however fully committed to New Zealand khráp.
What is staggering is the numbers behind these recent events. Hays’ share price (or lack of) has been and is well documented. What I didn’t know was the number of billers left in the ANZ business. In December last year, Hays ANZ reported 645 fee-earners across Australia and New Zealand. Without knowing what they were previously, that seems incredibly low to me. Where I’m from, Hays would have that in one office and that’s no exaggeration. Well we actually do know the previous number in this case: 1,110 billing consultants in December 2022. That’s a 42% drop in 3 years. Ouch! And that brings me back to the opening paragraph. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians. This would have been a beautifully neat way to end a short blog if it wasn’t for Hudson.
Hudson you will remember featured here a couple of weeks ago as the most successful, profitable, happy business to ever go into administration. Well since then, information has been uncovered that, quelle surprise, suggests that Hudson wasn’t quite doing as well as its crack-smoking MD suggested. As opposed to being profitable, it turns out that Hudson “has been unprofitable for some time” – directly contradicting the “profitable and operating as usual” line from the administration announcement. The debt is also a slight issue. I reported on the AU$5.1m unpaid super, but it turns out that the guys at Hudson have a recruiter’s eye for detail. There are a few little other odds and sods owing: $12.5m to secured creditors (mainly ScotPac), $2.3m in other employee entitlements, and $27.6m to unsecured creditors. Oops! Missed that bit. How you do this to a brand like Hudson is anyone’s guess, and I’m anyone so let’s have a guess. Firstly, it’s poor management. Has to be. Bad management in good times isn’t enough however. Bad management when Federal Government spend goes from $159 million from 1,188 contracts in December 2022, to $95 million by December 2025 will absolutely f*ck you however. In Queensland it was even worse, dropping 73% from a $100m peak in 2023 to $27m in 2025. But at least these right-wing governments cut down on this wasteful government spending. Am I right my National-voting friends? What was that? Australia has a Labour government?! Stop it. You’re destroying a world view handed down to me by a racist grandfather.
So there we have it. More turmoil for big recruitment businesses. It’s kind of weird though, don’t you think? If I look at the firms we represent, things seem pretty good. Yeah, Iran has screwed us a bit, but the mood of the nation is still better than it was. I would suggest that our clients are not indicative of the whole market. Most are smaller, premium brands, who are agile, invest in technology, and treat people as individuals – not the sausage factories that the globals often become. The timing for the big boys is unfortunate however. We’re through the worst of it, and like the diarrhoea sufferer who glimpses the toilet, they’ve shat their pants just before they get to feel the cooling porcelain.
Genuine commiserations to anyone who’s on the receiving end of the above. Good recruiters at any level have a place, so hang on in there.
^SW
