Great resignation, company purpose popped

Ian Narev is a maths man and his numbers show the feverish restlessness of talent causing much angst across the marketing, media, tech, agency and consulting sectors is a full-blown bubble. 

Although marketing has among the best corporate credentials for being close to the public mind and mood, the industry does have a tendency to project its own experience onto the broader population. In the much touted, Covid-induced Great Resignation, Narev told CMOs at a recent Value Creators Forum dinner that it doesn’t exist. 

“If we look at the data, there is no evidence of the great resignation – none. And I was very sceptical of it from day one. We're not saying in certain specialist areas that a lot of it's not happening, but it’s not across the population.”

Narev said Seek was “a reasonably good proxy for the market” – the jobs marketplace has 11 million unique visitors a month in Australia and they're visiting an average of three times each month. Narev said Australians were applying for jobs at broadly the same rate they were applying in 2019.

“The denominator number of jobs is up massively,” he said. “And so the applications per job is way down, just as a matter of maths. There are parts of the market which are very hot, where the rates of resignation have exploded, but over a full population and age demographic, it’s not there. A lot of this is a skilled demographic and undoubtedly, it is an age thing. We were talking about this before. Your average 22, 23-year old, no matter what her or his level of skill, is thinking, what am I going to do in the next year? They’re not really thinking how might it look on their CV.” 

Beyond the younger set, Narev said that for a large swathe of Australian workers Covid had certainly triggered a rethink about their job – but most were still thinking twice about switching jobs. “This corroborates with the qualitative data at least where there’s been a whole lot of people saying ‘I know the policies of my current company, I'm just going to be a little bit cautious’.”

Equally, the scramble by firms to meet the expectations of candidates in some professional classes who are demanding loftier company purpose, culture and diversity and inclusion policies appears to be a luxury of the elites, not the mainstream. Salaries and job security still reign for the majority. “Those expectations are still not true for the vast body of people looking for jobs,” he said. ”Not everyone thinks that way and, in some cases, has the luxury to think that way. It’s not the majority of everyday workers.”

The forces of corporate purpose and culture versus job security and compensation could intersect, however – the move by Woolworths to “build little Woolies” inside special needs  schools to prepare students for real-world work skills was singled out as a benchmark initiative that worked for the elites' desire for purpose and the mainstream workers need for skills and jobs. As the discussion went on the night, Woolworth’s CEO Brad Banducci was briefed on a plan to build just one such facility but fast-tracked it to 15. “That's leadership,” said one VCF attendee. “That's saying, 'this is a great idea because we will bring more people into the workforce and for people to experience that a job is attainable and is accessible'. It helps the family, it helps the kids, it helps everybody. I think that bit is also missing – the courage – because we have a community in the corporate world full of mitigating risk. Courage is what's missing.”

Trust and no user data sharing the future

Another Narev view that runs contrary to mainstream industry consensus was Seek’s position on user data sharing and privacy. Seek doesn’t carry ads beyond job vacancies and a lockdown policy on sharing user data was sacrosanct. “I'm guarding this with my life,” he told CMOs, who ironically often have oversight in their companies for buying outside consumer datasets to match and refine their customer and prospect targeting.

“This is one of the few places as a candidate where there is such a thing as a free lunch in the sense of what we know about you, you control [that] completely,” Narev said. “It is not used for any purpose other than helping you find a job. So if tomorrow you [use] other platforms and say, ‘I'm going to look at jobs in Melbourne’, lo and behold, you've got an ad from Cutler & Co. At Seek – never. That’s the bet we're making, which has already proved interesting with the demise of Facebook's specific job functionality. This is getting more and more important to the customer and over the next three, four, five, or ten years, people will realise there is a cost," added Narev.

“In our case, no ads is sacrosanct. You can not get a business case up at Seek that involves the use of customer data for anything other than what they control for what they want to do. As a result of that, we believe we'll get better data and as a result of better data, we'll make better recommendations. And all of a sudden the flywheel spins.” 

Seeks taps AI and ontologists for job matching breakthrough   

Narev is keeping it simple at Seek. Kind of. On the one hand he told CMOs “the only way” the company will commercialise the consumer-candidate side of the business is by tailoring the customer experience to deliver the best match between the job seeker and the job. “That's it,” he said. “There's no grandiose plans at all. We will be saying to people ‘if you want to proactively expose your data that you control to an employer, you are going to help them find you without you having to see the [job] ad.” Sounds simple. But on the other hand, Narev says Seek is using AI and a bunch of ontologists – specialist relational data scientists – to unearth “adjacent experiences” in careers and capabilities that employers and candidates may never have thought possible. 

He cited a personal example of being greeted by an Air New Zealand lounge concierge after Covid “like a long lost friend”. Narev discovered that his friendly airline employee had been laid off through Covid and had served as the concierge at a major hospital orchestrating those coming through the front door sick and even dying. "What an obvious match, right?," he observed. It was precisely the approach Seek had sought to deliver its obsession for matching the right candidates with the right job and doing it better than competitors locally and globally. “So you can see the information problem and the opportunity.” Hence between his ontologists and internal AI team, Narev thinks Seek has the levers for its next-stage competitive advantage.

“With all the ideas that we've got, in five years I want people to say two things: If I'm a candidate, I've got my best shot of getting the best job for me at Seek; and if I'm hiring, I've got the best shot of getting the best person for me at Seek. If we can keep being better than anyone else at that – and at the moment I think in most areas we're pulling that off – we’ll be ok. If we lose that we're going to be in trouble.”

Seek and ye shall find. Therein endeth the latest Value Creators Forum lesson.