Attracting the Best, Part 1: The Employee Experience
Debbie Morrison • August 19, 2021

Attracting the Best, Part 1: The Employee Experience

Attracting and retaining top talent starts from the inside out. In this – the first of a two-part series about getting the best employees on board – we look first at five critical elements of your employee experience.


When recruitment is your business, as it is ours, there’s one question that’s central to every conversation we have with our clients: How can we attract the very best candidates for every position?


Our work gives us uniquely valuable insight. Speaking with people every day about changing jobs, we hear why some want to leave their current employer, or why others choose to stay. We also hear what they’re looking for in their next company and job; the things that will attract and keep them performing at their best.


This is the first in a two-part series, focusing first on the employee experience. It makes sense to approach this from the inside out: if a company can’t retain great employees, it won’t be able to recruit great employees either. This was always true, to a certain extent, but it’s even more so now. Between social media generally, and employer-rating sites (like Glassdoor) specifically, word gets around more quickly and widely than ever before. This is great for transparency, of course, but it puts more pressure on employers to make sure that the experience they offer their employees is a good one.


When considering this question, it’s tempting to jump to ‘culture’. While it’s true that corporate culture is part of the equation, it’s a bit of a red herring, for several reasons. First, because it’s subjective: what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ culture varies from employee to employee. Secondly, because culture is something that management can influence but not entirely control or create. Culture develops organically within an organisation (or within various parts of an organisation) as a result of day-to-day practices and decisions. Below are the five most controllable elements that influence culture and can create a great employee experience that attracts and retains top performing employees.


Compensation

Compensation and benefits are fundamental to the employee experience. Let’s face it, this is the main reason most employees work in the first place. Not every company can match the highest salaries in the market, and the good news is that no company needs to. Money is usually not the primary factor an employee considers when choosing to take a new job. To successfully recruit great employees, companies just have to be competitive. Above the median range for comparable positions, and offering decent benefits. These benefits can have monetary value like health coverage or a yearly training allowance, but increasingly, non-monetary benefits like flex time and the ability to work from home are equally valuable to many employees (and accessible even to organisations with limited budgets).


Communication

One hallmark of companies that attract and retain the best employees is the quality of communication throughout the organisation. Top performing employees want to know that they can speak openly about opportunities and challenges they see around them, and they want to know that they’ll be heard. Top performers also generally seek out more information about their own performance. Annual performance reviews may still be a necessary formality, but great companies and the managers in them know that ongoing dialogue is the best way to keep their best employees fully engaged.


Trust and Respect

These attributes are flip sides of the same coin. The best employees choose employers who trust them to do their work, and who show respect for them. Micromanagement is the fastest way to undermine a sense of trust; instead, great companies foster an environment in which performance is measured by clear expectations and results, and employees are trusted – and held accountable – to deliver those results. Great companies also encourage respect for results through recognition; bonuses and other perks can be part of the picture, but more often it comes down to simple acknowledgement. Whether verbally or in writing, public or one-to-one, a sincere ‘excellent work, thank you’ carries immense value for employees.


Opportunity to Perform

Getting the right people on the ‘bus’ is only half of the job. The other half is making sure those people are in the right seats. Top performing employees seek out roles where they have the chance to do their best work every day, and to get even better over time. Great companies provide them with this opportunity because they don’t just staff up to fill seats. They think more deeply about the skills and strengths of their current and prospective employees, they take advantage of opportunities to allow them to stretch the boundaries of their role and responsibilities, and in doing so they provide the opportunity for their employees to learn, grow, and develop their knowledge and abilities further.


Connection to Mission

Great employees at all levels of an organisation aren’t generally satisfied with being a ‘cog in the machine’. They want to know how their work connects to the bigger picture. Great companies, and the managers within them, make this connection clear to their people. They’re always looking for opportunities to show how each person’s daily tasks contribute to the mission and purpose of the organisation, helping to move it forward and achieve its goals.


If you’re not already doing so, it pays to keep your fingers on the pulse of employee satisfaction through well-designed surveys (the Gallup Q12, for example), and also by monitoring what people are saying about your organization – on Glassdoor, if nowhere else. Looking to sources of information like this can provide helpful direction about ways in which you can take your employee experience from good … to great.


In the second part of this series on attracting the best and brightest, I’ll focus on the element that some companies overlook entirely (creating great opportunities for companies that put focus there): the candidate experience.

The Quiet Collapse of Australian Vegetable Farming

By John Elliott • June 26, 2025
You don’t hear about it on the nightly news. There’s no breaking story. No panic. No protests. Just rows of vegetables being pulled out of the ground with no plan to replant. Just farmers who no longer believe there’s a future for them here. Just quiet decisions — to sell, to walk away, to stop. And if you ask around the industry, they’ll tell you the same thing: It’s not just one bad season. It’s a slow death by a thousand margins. 1 in 3 growers are preparing to leaveIn September 2024, AUSVEG released a national sentiment report with a statistic that should have set off alarms in every capital city: 34% of Australian vegetable growers were considering exiting the industry in the next 12 months. Another one-third said they’d leave if offered a fair price for their farm. Source: AUSVEG Industry Sentiment Report 2024 (PDF) These aren’t abstract hypotheticals. These are real decisions, already in motion. For many, it’s not about profitability anymore, it’s about survival. This isn’t burnout. It’s entrapment. Behind the numbers are people whose entire identity is tied to a profession that no longer feeds them. Many are asset-rich but cash-poor. They own the land. But the land owns them back. Selling means walking away from decades of history. Staying means bleeding capital, month by month, in a system where working harder delivers less. Every year, input costs rise, fuel, fertiliser, compliance. But the farmgate price doesn’t move. Or worse, it drops. Retail World Magazine reports that even though national vegetable production increased 3% in 2023–24, the total farmgate value fell by $140 million. Growers produced more and earned less. That’s not a market. That’s a trap. What no one wants to say aloud The truth is this: many growers are only staying because they can’t leave. If you’re deep in debt, if your farm is tied to multi-generational ownership, if you’ve invested everything in equipment, infrastructure, or land access, walking away isn’t easy. It’s a last resort. So instead, you stay. You cut your hours. Delay maintenance. Avoid upgrades. Cancel the next round of planting. You wait for something to shift, interest rates, weather, prices and you pretend that waiting is strategy. According to the latest fruitnet.com survey, over 50% of vegetable growers say they’re financially worse off than a year ago. And nearly 40% expect conditions to deteriorate further. This isn’t about optimism or resilience. It’s about dignity and the quiet erosion of it. Supermarkets won’t save them, and they never planned to In the current model, supermarket pricing doesn’t reflect real-world farm economics. Retailers demand year-round consistency, aesthetic perfection, and lower prices. They don’t absorb rising input costs, they externalise them. They offer promotions funded not by their marketing budgets, but by the growers’ margins. Farmers take the risk. Retailers take the profit. And because the power imbalance is so deeply entrenched, there’s no real negotiation, just quiet coercion dressed up as "category planning." Let’s talk about what’s actually broken This isn’t just a market failure. It’s a policy failure. Australia’s horticulture system has been built on: Decades of deregulated wholesale markets Lack of collective bargaining power for growers Retailer consolidation that has created a virtual duopoly Export-focused incentives that bypass smaller domestic producers There’s no meaningful floor price for key produce lines. No national enforcement of fair dealing. No public database that links supermarket shelf price to farmgate return. Which means growers, like James, can be driven into loss-making supply contracts without ever seeing the true economics of their product downstream. But the real silence? It’s from consumers. Here’s what no one wants to admit: We say we care about “buying local.” We say we value the farmer’s role. We share those viral posts about strawberries going unsold or milk prices being unfair. And then we complain about a $4 lettuce. We opt for the cheapest bag of carrots. We walk past the "imperfect" produce bin. We frown at the cost of organic and click “Add to Cart” on whatever’s half price. We’re not just bystanders. We’re part of the equation. What happens when the growers go? At first, very little. Supermarkets will find substitutes. Importers will fill gaps. Large agribusinesses will expand into spaces vacated by smaller players. Prices will stay low, until they don’t. But over time, we’ll notice: Produce that travels further and lasts less. Fewer independent growers at farmer’s markets. Entire regions losing their growing identity. National food security becoming a campaign promise instead of a reality. And when the climate throws something serious at us, drought, flood, global supply shock, we’ll realise how little resilience we’ve preserved. So what do we do? We start by telling the truth. Australia is not food secure. Not if 1 in 3 growers are planning to exit. The market isn’t working. Not when prices rise at the shelf and fall at the farmgate. The solution isn’t scale. It’s fairness, visibility, and rebalancing power. That means: Mandating cost-reflective contracts between retailers and suppliers Enabling collective bargaining rights for growers Building transparent data systems linking production costs to consumer prices Introducing transition finance for smaller producers navigating reform and climate pressure And holding supermarkets publicly accountable for margin extraction But more than anything, it means recognising what we’re losing, before it's gone. Final word If you ate a vegetable today, it likely came from someone who’s considered giving up in the past year. Not because they don’t care. But because caring doesn’t pay. This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about sovereignty, over what we eat, how we grow it, and who gets to stay in the system.  Because the next time you see rows of green stretching to the horizon, you might want to ask: How many of these fields are already planning their last harvest?

Recession Is Coming for FMCG and Most Leaders Are Pretending It’s Not

By John Elliott • June 20, 2025
If you're leading an FMCG or food manufacturing business right now, you're probably still talking about growth. Your board might be chasing headcount approvals. Your marketing team’s pitching a new brand campaign. Your category team’s assuming spend will bounce. But your customer? They’ve already moved on. Quietly. Like they always do. The illusion of resilience FMCG has always felt protected, “essential” by nature. People still eat, wash, shop. It’s easy to assume downturns pass around us, not through us. But this isn’t 2020. Recessions in 2025 won’t look like lockdowns. They’ll look like volume drops that no promo can fix. Shrinking margins on products that no longer carry their premium. Quiet shelf deletions you weren’t warned about. The data’s already there. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, consumer spending is slowing in real terms , even as inflation eases. The Reserve Bank confirmed in May: household consumption remains subdued amid weak real income growth . And over 80% of Australians have cut back on discretionary food spending , according to Finder. They’re still shopping, just not like they used to. A managing director at a national food manufacturer told me recently: “We won a new product listing in April. By July, it was marked for deletion. The velocity wasn’t there, but neither was the shopper. We’d forecasted like 2022 never ended. Rookie mistake.” That one stuck with me. Because I’ve heard it before, just in different words.