Think about the last person you turned down for a job. What would they say about your business? 

Even though they might have been disappointed, they may still have been impressed by the people they met. Or perhaps they’re wondering what really happened, when the interview seemed to go well but their next communication from you was a rejection letter. 

Now imagine those candidates describing their experience to someone you’d love to hire. Would they make your workplace sound like one people would actually want to join? 

Your hiring process is a preview of your workplace 

You know what it’s like to work in your business, but candidates don’t. The only glimpses they’re likely to get are the job advertisement, perhaps a recommendation from someone they know and the interactions they have with you during the recruitment process. 

Based on that alone, they’re likely to form an impression about everyday working life. On this front, an interviewer who has read their application and can explain the role properly gives a very different impression from one who arrives unprepared. Two managers offering conflicting accounts of the position could leave them wondering whose expectations they would need to meet. 

The research reinforces that candidate experience is not a nice-to-have extra. A meta analysis covering 86 samples and 48,750 participants found that positive perceptions about the selection process were associated with more favourable views of the employer, along with stronger intentions to accept an offer and recommend the organisation to others. 

Put simply, while you’re assessing candidates, they’re assessing you. So, if you want potential employees to perceive your organisation as respectful, collaborative and well organised, recruitment is an important place to demonstrate it. 

Better hiring starts with a clearer brief 

A good recruitment process begins before you advertise. Everyone involved should understand what the person will actually do, what success looks like and which capabilities they’ll need to bring to achieve it. 

That sounds straightforward, but a vacancy can expose differences you haven’t properly resolved – or perhaps even thought about – internally. Those differences matter because candidates may experience them as moving goalposts, inconsistent feedback or unclear expectations. 

For instance, one manager might want an experienced operator who can take responsibility immediately. Another might be looking for someone they can develop. Unless they agree, candidates could be assessed against different expectations or find the requirements changing as they progress. 

When you’re making these calls, be sure to distinguish what’s essential from what’s desirable, including any skills or capabilities someone could reasonably learn once they join. This helps you write a more useful job advertisement and gives candidates a clearer basis for deciding whether to apply in the first place.  

Also agree who will assess the candidates against which criteria, who makes the final decision and who keeps candidates informed. A shared brief gives your team a consistent basis for selection and helps prevent candidates becoming caught in an internal debate about what you need. 

Give candidates structure so they can show what they can do

Once you know what you’re looking for, the next question is how you’ll recognise it.  

Often employers engage candidates in unstructured conversation that leaves everyone feeling positive but gives little insight into their ability to do the job. 

A 2022 reassessment of recruitment research ranked structured interviews highest among the selection methods examined for predicting job performance. The researchers also found that the predictive power of many selection methods – including cognitive ability tests, work-sample tests and unstructured interviews – had previously been overstated.

A structured interview uses consistent core questions linked to the role’s requirements, with an agreed approach to assessing answers. You can still ask follow-up questions and let the conversation develop but the structure gives you a common basis for comparison. 

For example, if managing competing deadlines is essential, ask each candidate to describe a situation where they had to prioritise conflicting demands. Assess how they made decisions, communicated with others and handled the outcome. 

Ask interviewers to record their assessments before discussing candidates together. This gives everyone’s observations a chance to be considered before a confident or senior colleague shapes the conversation. 

A short, relevant practical task can also help potential employees demonstrate their capabilities. Explain what it assesses and how long it should take, and keep the demands proportionate to the role. 

Every stage should help answer a question about suitability. Adding more interviews or a lengthy assignment without a clear purpose creates extra work for everyone and can tell candidates something you didn’t intend to about how your business operates. 

Keep people informed even when there’s no decision yet 

A recruitment delay might be easy to explain from your side: a manager is away, interviews need rescheduling or you’re waiting for approval. From the candidate’s side, however, silence can undermine their confidence in you.  

They don’t know whether they’re still being considered, whether the role has changed or whether they should move on. That’s especially damaging if they’re also weighing another opportunity. 

Set expectations early. Explain the stages, who candidates will meet, any assessment tasks and when they should expect to hear from you. Give them a contact for questions and make someone responsible for providing updates. 

If you miss a promised deadline, acknowledge it. A brief message explaining the delay and giving a realistic date for the next update helps candidates plan, even if you honestly can’t yet give them a decision.

Automated acknowledgements and reminders can help you stay organised. Just be sure to keep them to the initial phases. Once someone has invested time in interviews or an assessment, a personal update shows that you recognise that effort. 

Reliable communication also gives candidates a practical example of how you handle expectations when things don’t go to plan. 

A rejection doesn’t have to end the relationship 

Most candidates won’t get the job.  

That means much of your reputation as an employer will be shaped by people you turn down. 

Research published in 2025 examined rejection timing across two studies involving 264 and 259 candidates. Faster communication improved the candidates’ perceptions of fairness and satisfaction, along with candidates’ intentions to reapply and recommend the employer to others. The comparisons included rejection notifications sent after seven versus fourteen days. 

The practical lesson is to close the loop promptly once you’ve made a decision. Leaving someone waiting doesn’t soften the disappointment. 

How you communicate should also reflect how far they’ve progressed. An applicant rejected at the initial screening stage may need a straightforward notification. Someone who’s attended several interviews and completed an assessment deserves a more personal response. 

For finalists, useful feedback can explain the decision against the role’s requirements. For example, saying that the successful candidate demonstrated more experience managing a team gives someone more to work with than a vague reference to “fit”. 

That said, you will never make every candidate happy with the outcome. But you can help them leave knowing their application was considered seriously and their time was respected.  

That leaves the door open for a future opportunity, even when this one hasn’t worked out.

Treat the process as part of your recruitment strategy 

It’s easy to judge a recruitment campaign by whether you filled the vacancy. But it’s also worth asking how you reached that decision and what candidates experienced along the way. 

Did everyone involved understand the role? Did your assessments give candidates a fair opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities? Were timelines realistic, updates reliable and decisions explained respectfully? 

You can ask candidates for feedback, too – including those you didn’t hire. Their answers might just reveal problems your team couldn’t see, such as repeated questions across interviews or unclear instructions for an assessment. 

For the person who joins, the process has already begun setting expectations about working with you. They’ve seen how you prepare, communicate and make decisions. Following through on that experience once they start helps turn early confidence into an ongoing working relationship. 

And for those you turn down, a thoughtful process gives them a reason to consider you again… or recommend you to someone else. 

Want more? 

Catalina Consultants can review your recruitment approach, clarify what you need from a role, and then build a process that supports both sound hiring decisions and a positive candidate experience.  

Contact us to discuss your next hire.

When work becomes difficult, employees usually turn to their leaders. Managers are the ones who resolve conflict, support struggling staff, guide teams through change and keep performance on track.

But these responsibilities usually sit alongside their own workload, targets and pressures. So, while looking after their team’s wellbeing is increasingly part of the job, who’s looking after theirs?

For many organisations, this is a genuine blind spot. A manager who keeps delivering may appear to be coping, even when that performance depends on longer hours, extra responsibility and little time to recover.

That makes leadership burnout something organisations need to examine well before someone asks for help or decides to leave.

Because being the person everyone can rely on shouldn’t mean having nobody to turn to yourself.

How being dependable becomes an expanding workload

An employee issue needs careful handling, or a project starts falling behind. It makes sense to turn to a manager you trust: someone who knows the business, exercises good judgement and has a record of getting things done.

But that trust can also mean the same people keep taking on more.

A capable manager might be asked to cover a vacant role, mentor a new team leader and take responsibility for another change initiative – all at the same time. Each request might seem reasonable, even trivial, in isolation. Together, they can expand a role without any change to resources, deadlines or existing responsibilities.

Global consulting firm Bain & Company has identified this overloading of the most in-demand people as one of the key organisational factors contributing to burnout. Those whose expertise is most valued also tend to face the greatest demands on their time.

The real test comes when another responsibility is added. Does anything come off the manager’s plate? Do they have the authority and resources to share the work? Or are they simply expected to fit it in?

If the answer is consistently to rely on that person’s commitment and ability to take on additional work, their role may be growing beyond what anyone could reasonably sustain.

The emotional demands of looking after others

A leader’s workload isn’t measured only by the projects they oversee or the hours they spend in meetings. It also includes the emotional demands of managing people.

Supporting an employee through a tough period, resolving tension between colleagues or explaining an unpopular decision all require care and judgement. Leaders may need to listen patiently, manage their own reactions and help others feel heard, even when they’re under pressure themselves.

They can also find themselves in the middle. Senior management wants results, change and greater efficiency. Employees want clarity, support and reassurance about what those changes mean for them. The manager has to translate between the two in a way their team can work with.

This is part of leadership, but it still takes time and energy. A hard conversation may occupy half an hour in the calendar, but it also needs preparation beforehand and follow-up afterwards. Several in one day can leave little capacity for everything else.

So if a manager is responsible for supporting a large team through significant change, that responsibility needs room in their working week. Otherwise, looking after people becomes one more thing to squeeze around a day that’s already full.

Why employers shouldn’t wait for performance to slip

In December 2025, Harvard Business Impact reported that 85% of mid-level leaders in its research experienced burnout weekly. Nearly nine in 10 also felt caught between conflicting expectations from senior executives and their teams.

These are self-reported experiences rather than clinical diagnoses, but they suggest how widespread leadership burnout could be.

Bain’s research shows how the pressure builds. In one company it studied, managers spent an average of one day a week on email and other electronic communications and two days a week in meetings. That left limited time for their other responsibilities.

For employers, this means looking at the hours and resources it takes to deliver the work, not just whether it gets done. If a manager routinely catches up at night or works through leave just to meet their targets, that’s a strong warning sign that their workload may be unsustainable.

It’s not only how much leaders carry

A 2022 McKinsey survey of nearly 15,000 employees across 15 countries found that toxic workplace behaviour was the strongest predictor of burnout symptoms among the factors it examined. That’s an association rather than proof of cause, but it shows why workload alone can’t explain every case.

The survey covered employees generally, rather than leaders specifically. However, it raises questions about leaders’ working conditions too.

After all, they can face poor behaviour from both directions: from the people they report to, and from the teams they’re responsible for.

What employers can do

Reducing the risk of leadership burnout means looking at both how much leaders carry and how they’re treated. To do this in your own organisation, focus on five main areas:

Coaching, counselling and leadership development can form part of that support. But as McKinsey argues, they can’t make up for harmful working conditions. Helping leaders cope better won’t achieve much if the way work is allocated and the way people are treated stay the same.

In short…

Organisations rely on leaders to support their people and deliver results. Their approach to workplace wellbeing needs to include those leaders too.

That means examining whether managers have realistic workloads, sufficient authority and someone they can turn to when demands become unreasonable. Where problems emerge, support needs to include practical changes to the job.

The question is simple: when a leader says they’re struggling, can your organisation change what’s being asked of them?

Want more?

Catalina Consultants helps organisations strengthen leadership capability, review people management practices and build healthier workplaces.

Contact us to discuss how you can better support the people leading your teams.

For years, the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) has been a common feature of workplace sexual harassment settlements, with the idea being they can be used to protect the affected person’s privacy.

However, they’ve also come under growing scrutiny for the role they can play in silencing victim-survivors, prioritising the protection of organisational reputation, and preventing organisations from recognising patterns of harmful behaviour.

That scrutiny has intensified with new laws in Victoria restricting the use of NDAs in workplace sexual harassment matters. The changes, which came into effect on 1 July 2026, are designed to give greater control over confidentiality to the person who experienced the harassment.

But, while the Victorian reforms may be significant, they also raise a much broader question for employers across Australia: when a workplace sexual harassment complaint is settled confidentially, has the organisation actually resolved the problem or simply resolved the complaint?

An NDA designed to protect an organisation from risk can sometimes have the opposite effect. It can prevent the organisation from seeing the risk at all.

 

Why NDAs became commonplace in workplace harassment matters

There are legitimate reasons why confidentiality has become a common feature of workplace sexual harassment settlements.

The last thing a person making a complaint often wants is for colleagues, future employers or others knowing the details of what happened. Confidentiality can also provide a sense of closure and allow people to move on without having to repeatedly revisit an upsetting experience.

For employers, non-disclosure agreements can help bring disputes to a definite end, reducing the risk of further litigation, protecting sensitive personal information and providing certainty about what can and can’t be said once the matter is resolved.

In that sense, confidentiality is not inherently problematic. In some cases, it may be exactly what the person affected wants. The difficulty arises when confidentiality becomes routine or when it is imposed primarily to protect the organisation rather than the individual.

Also, what reduces an organisation’s immediate legal or reputational exposure may also make it harder to understand its longer-term impact on people and cultural risks.

That’s where an NDA can shift from an instrument for protecting privacy to one that reinforces silence, while also exposing the organisation and its other employees to increased risk.

 

What Victoria has changed under its new NDA restrictions

Victoria’s new laws place significant restrictions on the use of NDAs in workplace sexual harassment matters.

The key change is that confidentiality can no longer simply be imposed by an employer as a standard condition of settlement. In most cases, the person who experienced the harassment must initiate the request for an NDA. The agreement must also reflect their genuine preference.

The reforms also introduce safeguards designed to make sure that the decision to sign an NDA is informed and voluntary. Employers can’t pressure a complainant into accepting confidentiality. The legislation also preserves that person’s ability to make certain disclosures, including to legal and health professionals and others providing support.

In effect, these reforms shift the starting point. Instead of asking whether an employer can require confidentiality, the focus is increasingly on whether confidentiality is what the person affected actually wants.

That means an NDA might still be appropriate where it protects a complainant’s privacy and gives them greater control over what happens next. But it becomes much harder to justify when its main purpose is to protect the organisation from embarrassment or scrutiny.

 

Why NDAs can create risks for employers too

Victoria might be the first Australian jurisdiction to significantly restrict the use of non disclosure agreements in workplace sexual harassment matters, but the broader shift against the use of NDAs is already national.

Since December 2022, Australian employers have operated under a positive duty to take reasonable and proportionate steps to eliminate workplace sexual harassment, sex-based harassment and related conduct as far as possible.

This is a preventative duty that requires them to think about workplace culture, risk factors, reporting mechanisms and patterns of behaviour before problems escalate. It is not enough to respond only once someone makes a complaint.

And that has important implications for the way organisations use confidentiality.

An employer may be able to settle an individual complaint and keep the details private. But if the process also prevents it from identifying repeat behaviour, understanding cultural problems or learning where its systems have failed, it is effectively resolving the dispute without addressing the risk.

It is this broader duty to prevent harassment in the first place, that all employers should consider before using NDAs.

In this regard, a complaint isn’t simply a problem to resolve. It is also a piece of risk intelligence.

 

From complaint resolution to organisational learning

That’s why one of the dangers of treating sexual harassment purely as an individual complaint is that it can obscure the bigger picture.

A complaint should not only prompt questions about what happened between the people directly involved. It should also encourage the organisation to look more broadly at the circumstances that allowed the behaviour to occur in the first place.

Was this genuinely an isolated incident? Have similar concerns been raised before, formally or informally? Are there particular teams, managers or working environments where the risk is higher? Do employees feel confident reporting inappropriate behaviour? And, importantly, does senior leadership have enough visibility over complaints to identify patterns when they emerge?

None of this requires anyone to disregard a complainant’s privacy. Organisations can protect sensitive personal information while still learning from what happened.

 

What you should be doing now as an employer

For employers, Victoria’s changes to the rules around the use of NDAs should offer a good reason to review how workplace sexual harassment complaints are handled within the organisation.

To do this, begin by looking at whether confidentiality clauses are being used routinely or only when there’s a clear reason for them. Consider who’s proposing confidentiality, how broad the clause is, and whether it genuinely reflects what the person affected wants.

You should also make sure that settling an individual complaint doesn’t prevent the organisation from learning from what happened. Complaints should feed into broader risk management, including identifying recurring behaviour, cultural problems, weaknesses in reporting processes and areas where managers may need more support or training.

It’s also important to consider what information is reaching senior leadership. For example, individual identities and sensitive details may need to remain confidential, but you still need enough visibility over trends and patterns to understand where risks are emerging.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, avoid treating settlement as the end of the complaint process.

Because while resolving a complaint is important, so too is understanding why it happened, what it says about the workplace, and what needs to change to reduce the risk of it happening again.

 

Conclusion

Victoria’s new laws may have brought renewed attention to the use of NDAs, but the broader issue extends well beyond one state.

Across Australia, employers are already expected to take a preventative approach to workplace sexual harassment. That means looking beyond the resolution of individual complaints and considering what those complaints reveal about culture, systems and risk.

Confidentiality can still have an important role to play, particularly where it is genuinely what the person affected wants. But it should not become a mechanism for making uncomfortable problems disappear.

Because while an NDA may bring a dispute to an end, it cannot by itself prevent the next one.

 

Want more?

Managing workplace complaints effectively means looking beyond the immediate incident to understand the people, cultural and organisational risks behind it.

Catalina Consultants helps organisations build healthier workplaces, strengthen leadership capability and manage complex people issues.

Contact us to find out more.

Australia’s government-funded Paid Parental Leave scheme now provides eligible families with up to 26 weeks of pay.

For children born or adopted on or after 1 July 2026, Parental Leave Pay increased from 120 to 130 days. Of those 130 days, 20 – or four working weeks – are generally reserved for the non-primary carer/partner.

On paper, this may seem like a relatively simple expansion of an existing entitlement. In practice, however, it represents something more significant: another deliberate step towards treating the care of a new child as a responsibility to be shared, rather than work that falls primarily to one parent (most often the mother).

But reserving leave for partners doesn’t guarantee they’ll feel comfortable taking it.

 

Instead, for many fathers and other non-birth parents, the decision will still be shaped by workplace expectations rather than any statutory entitlement.

They may fear that taking an extended period away from work will make them appear less committed, disrupt an important project or affect their future opportunities. Similarly, many employers formally support parental leave but continue to treat a partner taking more than a week or two as unusual.

That means the success of the 2026 changes will depend partly on what happens inside individual workplaces. Employers have an opportunity to turn a statutory entitlement into a normal and expected part of working life: and to encourage a more balanced caregiving dynamic that continues long after parental leave ends.

What changed in Australia’s Paid Parental Leave scheme in 2026?

The expansion that took effect from 1 July 2026 is the final stage of a gradual increase in government-funded Parental Leave Pay from 18 to 26 weeks.

For children born or adopted from that date:

The payments can also be taken flexibly within two years of the child’s birth or adoption. This means families don’t necessarily have to divide the entitlement into one uninterrupted block taken by one parent and then the other.

Government Parental Leave Pay is separate from any employer-funded paid parental leave. It’s also different from the unpaid parental leave available to eligible employees under the National Employment Standards.

Depending on their circumstances and workplace policies, parents may be able to combine these different forms of leave.

Having leave available doesn’t mean it will be taken

The four-week reserved portion is intended to give partners a clearer opportunity – and incentive – to spend meaningful time caring for their child. In doing so, it removes one important obstacle to sharing parental leave: those days can no longer simply be absorbed into the birth parent’s entitlement.

But legislation can only go so far. Whether non-birth parents take the leave available to them will also depend on whether their workplace genuinely expects and supports them to do so.

The barriers in this regard generally break down into two key areas:

These concerns may never be stated openly. However, employees notice who takes parental leave, how managers respond and whether senior people genuinely disconnect while they’re away. An organisation can describe itself as family-friendly while its managers continue to assume that mothers will take lengthy periods of leave and fathers will return to work after a week or two, or still be available for calls.

There are, however, some encouraging signs that these expectations are beginning to change.

According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, men now account for 20% of employees taking primary or universally available employer-funded parental leave – an increase of three percentage points in a year.

Against this, however, almost half of employers still distinguish between “primary” and “secondary” carers in their parental leave policies.

These labels can reinforce the very division the expanded government scheme is intended to challenge by making unequal caregiving the assumed starting point.

The four weeks reserved under the government scheme send a different message: partners aren’t merely there to provide short-term support to the birth parent. They’re parents and caregivers in their own right.

The habits formed during parental leave can last for years

Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows that women continue to perform more unpaid work than men, averaging four hours and 53 minutes a day compared with three hours and 52 minutes for men. And, while encouraging partners to take meaningful periods of parental leave will not eliminate that imbalance by itself, it can help establish shared responsibility from the outset.

After all, how parents divide leave following a child’s birth often influences how they divide care long after both have returned to work.

When one parent spends considerably more time providing care from the beginning, they’re more likely to become the person who knows the child’s routines, manages appointments, communicates with childcare and notices when something needs to be done. This means they tend to become the household’s default caregiver, even if it happens gradually and unconsciously.

The same pattern can then shape whose work gets interrupted when a child is sick, childcare is unavailable or an appointment falls during business hours. Even where both parents are employed, the mother is more likely to be the one expected to rearrange their day or take leave.

This can have consequences that go well beyond the occasional day away from work. Repeated interruptions can affect the projects an employee accepts, their availability for meetings and travel and their employer’s willingness to consider them for advancement.

Over time, an unequal division of care at home can contribute to unequal opportunities and earnings at work.

What employers can do to support shared care

Employers obviously can’t determine exactly how individual families divide their caring responsibilities. They can, however, create a workplace in which taking parental and carer’s leave is treated as a normal part of working life for every parent.

This begins with workplace parental leave policy.

Where possible, you should replace “primary” and “secondary” carer categories with gender-neutral parental leave that gives both parents meaningful time away from work. You should also explain how employer-funded leave interacts with the government scheme, rather than leaving employees to navigate the different entitlements themselves.

Line managers and HR teams have a particularly vital role to play. Conversations about parental leave shouldn’t assume that a non-birth parent plans to take only a week or two. Instead, proactively discuss the options available, ask employees what arrangement they’re considering and plan appropriate cover (without subtly signalling that an extended absence would be inconvenient).

If possible, you should also give your employees some visible examples of the policy in effect. When senior fathers and other non-birth parents take substantial periods of leave, genuinely disconnect and return without a career penalty, they demonstrate that the organisation’s support extends beyond the wording of its policy.

That support should continue after parental leave ends by normalising fathers and other non-birth parents using paid personal/carer’s leave when a child is sick or childcare arrangements unexpectedly fall through. Employees should not be questioned more closely, treated as unusually helpful partners or made to feel that caring for their own child is primarily somebody else’s responsibility.

Other practical steps include:

In short…

This year’s changes provide a timely reason to review both your parental leave policies and everyday practices.

The goal shouldn’t simply be making sure employees know that four weeks have been reserved for partners, but creating a workplace in which those employees can use their entitlement without feeling that they’re placing their careers at risk.

Want more?

Catalina Consultants can help you review and update your parental leave policies, communicate entitlements clearly and equip managers to support shared care in practice.

Get in touch with our HR consultants to discuss your workplace.