Hello! I’m Ben George. A little bit about me: I’ll be guiding you through your Friday TWITs this month, I’m a seasoned professional with nearly 20 years in Recruitment and Talent Acquisition roles currently working at Thales, and at the start of February 2024 I began working part-time.
In Australia, nearly 31% of the workforce do so on part-time arrangements. In a May 2023 report, ‘Employment Patterns and Trends for Families with Children ’ it stated that in 2021, 36% of families have one parent work full-time while the other takes on fewer hours (though mothers take the share of reduced hours)
With my firstborn starting school and my partner taking on a significant role, I faced a new challenge: balancing work and family. After thoughtful discussions and personal reflections, I realised part-time work was the solution.
Taking this idea to my leadership at Thales was daunting. In a field where availability is vital, proposing a part-time role seemed risky. I had concluded that working 0.6 FTE in 4 days would provide the flexibility I needed whilst also being available four days a week. I was ready to convince how this would work. I was quickly told, “I believe we can make this work”.
Though my transition to part-time is still very recent, I’ve learned a lot. Initially, I thought I could still keep producing the results if I could get a handle on my work. I needed to realise that I needed to let go of roles and expect others to pick up on work. In Talent Acquisition, we manage a lot of information – role briefs, updates, and insights on how individual Hiring Managers work. We want to deliver for them, and that’s why we are in this profession.
As organisations continue to make their workforce fair and accessible for everyone, more part-time opportunities are becoming available. I want to share more learnings from this experience in my month as ATC TWIT Editor in March. If you are like me and are thinking, “I want to go part-time, but Talent Acquisition is too demanding for me to reduce hours,” with the proper support, you can do it!
I couldn’t achieve my part-time arrangement without the ability to work from home for a period. The fact that many organisations are expecting people to return to the office for the majority of the time will restrict people who have proved that job flexibility has helped them strike a good balance.
This was the big news this week, when the WGEA published the gender pay gaps of companies of 100+ employees. If you have questions interpreting published data from WGEA on individual company gender pay gaps, there are some significant facts here.
AI. Everybody’s talking about it, but are we using it effectively? The New Future of Work 2023 report from Microsoft showed that a majority of participants reported productivity gains from using AI tools (specifically Microsoft’s Copilot tool). This is definitely an evolving topic to keep an eye on as we collectively work to understand the best use of AI in Talent & Recruitment applications.
What do you do when you realise you have an almost 100% male workforce? A Kimberly-Clark’s toilet paper mill near Mount Gambier in South Australia realised they had this very problem and took steps to encourage more women into their workforce, and experienced some unintended benefits to their workplace culture in the process. An interesting read!
