I'll know it when I see it
Debbie Morrison • June 29, 2021

I'll know it when I see it

Have you said this to yourself from time to time, maybe when you’ve been house-hunting, or car shopping, or looking for a new shade of paint for a room redecoration? That’s fair; sometimes you just need to sit in the driver’s seat, or see the colour on the wall before you really know.


But what about when you’ve been in the market to hire someone new?


People in hiring positions use the word ‘fit’ a lot. We tend to use it to describe how we think someone would be a good or bad addition to a team, or the company as a whole. It also usually refers to something other than the technical qualifications, or the tangible experience, that a candidate brings to the table. Something a bit more nebulous, difficult to put our finger on. In fact, in many cases, it leans towards intuition. Something that we’ll know, when we see it.


To be sure, intuition does play a role in hiring. We all base decisions in part on gut feel; sometimes we’re right, sometimes less so. To minimize instances of the latter, it pays to give thought – before going to market – what constitutes a good fit for the position in question, and what preferences and attributes a person might have if they are a good fit. If you can articulate these elements, you’ll be able to give clearer direction to people helping you hire (meaning more interviews with better candidates) and you’ll give your ‘gut’ more and better information to help you in your decisions.


Here are three of the most important considerations to guide you, each building on the last.


Structure


Some organisations operate with a very high level of process. Hierarchies are rigid, and multi-layered. Decisions are made in a strict and consistent manner, each one documented thoroughly. Employees have clear and detailed instructions, and are expected to follow them to the letter. Other companies run more loosely, with employees trusted to make the right decisions and do the right thing. Management structures are flatter, if they exist at all. There’s more experimentation, more decisions made on the fly. Neither of these is inherently better or worse; companies evolve their own way of being over time, based on what works best for them. Each of these offers a very different experience for employees, though, and demands different things from them. The better you understand where on this sphere you are, the better able you’ll be to hire people who work best at your level of structure and process.


Dependence


Closely related to structure is the level of dependence or independence employees have from management and supervision. In some positions, employees may go days or even weeks without a conversation of any kind with a supervisor; it’s expected that they know their job and that they’ll do it. In these positions, employee performance is measured more by results than by process. In other positions, an employee may have ongoing communication throughout every work day with their supervisor. That manager may closely monitor the work being done, and provide constant direction and feedback to the employee. This dynamic can be very different from one position to another within the same organization, so the right fit may change from one hire to the next. Hiring an employee into one kind of position who works best in the opposite could – and often does – lead to poor performance and an early departure.


Culture


Beyond the relationship between an employee and their direct supervisor is the culture of the organisation overall. While structure and process are contributors to this, a culture goes beyond those mechanics. Some workplaces are as quiet as a library; employees have their heads down at their work, phone conversations are hushed, and any meetings are held behind closed doors. The work itself is more individual in nature, and at the end of the day employees go home, not socializing – in groups, at least – outside work. Other workplaces have a culture that’s far more social. New sales or other accomplishments are celebrated loudly by ringing bells or blowing air horns. Work may be more collaborative, all hands on deck. Conversations about work, and life in general, happen at the water cooler and just about everywhere else. Employees routinely get together after work for casual drinks, or for more organized Events-with-a-capital-E on weekends. While it’s possible for a quieter, more introverted employee to do good work in an extraverted organization (and vice versa), employees will be happier – and stay longer – in an organisation that aligns with their own personality and preferences.


When you know how these attributes show up in your organisation, you can put that information to work for you in every hire. This knowledge allows you to design great questions to ask each candidate, and their answers will give you a better understanding of how well they’d fit in to the position you’re hiring for. More data, less intuition.


Reflecting on how these aspects manifest in your organisation will make things clearer for the recruiters you work with, provide better questions to ask in interviews, and ultimately help you – and your gut – make better decisions when it comes to making the hire.


Want to know more? Get in touch and let's talk.

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.