What's the future of recruitment agencies? Is the four-day working week the way forward?
Find out all the answers with HR's most dangerous podcast, Chad and Cheese.
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The Chad and Cheese podcast is back, and Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman will be tackling the latest events across Europe.
Anyone who has had their eye on the news will know that there is plenty happening on the continent, and Chad, Cheese, and Lieven Van Nieuwenhuyze are joined by Calin Stefanescu, CEO & Co-Founder at Dora (Happy Recruiter) to help make sense of the chaos.
The podcast discusses why Totaljobs is sticking it to staffing agencies, how the four-day-work-week is gaining popularity in Europe, and IKEA’s vaccine plans.
Cheesman kicks things off: “Let’s talk about Totaljobs. The UK job board staple announced in a blog post that it is now taking significant steps toward a single standard rate card that will apply to all client types with discounts driven by volume.
“This will create a level and efficient market in which customer types will no longer dictate the rate you pay. The industry is, as you can imagine, sounded off with Stephen O’Dell sharing ‘It appears that they are ending the historic discounts given to agencies compared to employers, rather than charge employers, less they’re charging agencies more.’
“This will be a strategic decision to stop favoring agencies over employers and TA [talent acquisition] departments.”
Van Nieuwenhuyze gives his thoughts on this news: “Basically what they’re doing is too little too late, and it’s something that all the others have been doing for years.
“Just to give a very practical example, Accents, one of our companies in Belgium, they have about 500 million euros revenue. They are big in Belgium, but on one of our job boards, we were using a lot of StepStone, but StepStone doesn’t want to sell for a price smaller than 120 euros per posting, which is totally ridiculous if you have 8,000 vacancies like we have.
“StepStone has been doing this for a year, because they didn’t want the big agencies like us to pollute as they call it their own databases. They’re [job boards] just charged ridiculously high amounts of money to make us leave.”
The four-day-work-week
At UNLEASH we have discussed the four-day-work-week a lot, and the podcast discussed the different perspectives on plans to introduce a shorter working week in the UK.
Cheesman explains the situation in the UK: “The four-day work week is getting a tryout in the UK. Dozens of British companies have volunteered to take part in a pilot program offering four-day work weeks for employees.
“The six-month trial will include 30 firms that have agreed to allow staff to work up to 32 hours per week without cutting their wages or benefits. Similar trials have taken place in other countries, including Spain, New Zealand, and Iceland, more scheduled to run in Canada and Australia.
“This trend is also bleeding into the US with San Francisco-based Bolt instituting a permanent four-day work week for employers last fall.”
Immediately, Van Nieuwenhuyze soothes the woes of fatalists: “It’s not the further decline of Western civilization. I think it makes sense. I mean, we were talking about automation.
“If automation enables us to get more work done in less time without losing profit for the company, then it would be kind of evil to fire some people and make the rest of work harder just to make more profits.
“So people feel they don’t have that much nitty gritty work as they used to, maybe they can get a serious job done in four days instead of five without losing profit for the company. And then it’s win, win.”
Calin Stefanescu adds: “I will say that it’s accepting the truth used to help a company about 10 years ago or more. And they were doing a productivity software and they were selling this software all over the world, even in the US.
“The software was checking what, how much time you are working. And the average that they have was like five hours per day. Basically, we work less than four days.”
However, Cheesman takes an oppositional stance to the four-day-week in an opinion that might surprise listeners.
This isn’t the only controversial issue that the episode tackles and the group also discuss vaccine mandates and how IKEA’s slashing of sick pay for the unvaccinated will impact its workers.
Of course, we’re not going to spoil the podcast, check it out for yourselves.
The Chad & Cheese Podcast is a trusted partner of UNLEASH Podcasts.
