After a recent experience with an illiterate ‘psycho’ technician wanting to apply for a South Australian government position, it’s worth discussing what’s happening in the Adelaide job market.
I work with two other professional writers with backgrounds in recruitment and journalism. I also write corporate speeches.
In the last seven years we’ve noted a significant rise in the number of illiterate clients and people with moderate to serious behavioural issues.
Doin’ it tough
About 50 per cent of our clients are from Adelaide’s northern and western suburbs. I started Republic to help them as the global economy and technological tide are leaving them behind.
It’s not only in Adelaide but also Port Augusta, Whyalla and Port Pirie, Western Sydney, the Illawarra, Richmond-Tweed, North West Melbourne, Ballarat and Bendigo, Ipswich and Logan in Queensland, the Sunshine Coast, Cairns, Townsville, South West Perth and North West and Northern Tasmania.
Manufacturing is a ghost of what it was in the 1960s was and there are major problems in the construction industry. Some of our clients – to paraphrase the band Cold Chisel – ‘are on the outside looking in’.
In Adelaide, age prejudice and nepotism rule but the real tragedy is the grade three level of sentence construction and arithmetic of some job applicants.
in 2024, an AI Group survey found 88% of Australian companies reported workers having low-levels of literacy and numeracy:
- 63% of companies reported poor completion of workplace documents or reports;
- 55% of companies reported time wasted and
- 49% of companies said staff were lacking confidence and unwilling to take on new work.
Most are males in the 20-30 age range, although we have helped some illiterate 50-year olds.
For many clients, supplying good quantitative and/or qualitative results, is foreign. There’s a clock-on, clock-off mentality.
The American academic Richard Sennett wrote in the 1980s and 90s, that society was fracturing and blue collar workers would turn ‘highly competitive’ to secure positions where jobs were being replaced by new technologies. It’s dog eat dog.
‘Psycho’ applicants
We recently had a ‘psycho’ client who drove with a mate to my old residence listed on Google 10 years ago, to ‘sort us out’. He took exception because we wouldn’t write a full 25 point selection criteria (about 1500 words) with 24 hours to the deadline.
We don’t write selection criteria and he didn’t know online businesses existed. He then sent twenty threatening text messages and got his friends to post one star reviews on the Google business page.
We reported him to the ACMA and the police. These people can do enormous damage in an organisation.
We had a man who wanted help to write an application to join the SA Police. We did a social media scan and found posts by numerous women calling out this guy’s behaviour. The word ‘creep’ covers it. We didn’t proceed.
Amongst some, there is a serious inability to meet deadlines (we’re a deadline business), especially public servants. If you can’t meet a deadline, the chances of landing a job or a promotion are very low.
Think of it like this: you’ve hired someone only to find they can’t write, can’t use a computer, don’t read emails, can’t work to deadlines and when you ask them to do something, they tell you to ‘f**k off’.
Bad hires lower morale as existing employees feel frustrated or demotivated by the underperformance of the new hire. They have to pick up the slack, leading to burnout and resentment. Staff leave. The legal ramifications are a nightmare.
The Adelaide job market is getting worse with major structural issues in Whyalla and Port Pirie.