Catalina Consultants has just been certified as a Great Place to Work for the third consecutive year, with 90% of our employees saying this is a great place to work, compared to 60% at a typical Australian company.

But the result we learned the most from wasn’t this year’s score. It was the year our results went backwards.

That’s because, instead of explaining it away, we decided to take a hard look at why and how we could fix it.

Here’s what we did, and what we think businesses of every size can take from our experience.

A flying start and then a dip… 

When we first went through the Great Place to Work certification process in 2024, we came out swinging. Overall scores were overwhelmingly positive across virtually every category.

It felt validating. We’d worked hard to build a collaborative and supportive culture and the survey suggested our people genuinely experienced it that way.

Which made year two more confronting.

Because, when we repeated the survey in 2025, our scores came back lower. Not dramatically – we were still certified and well above average – but still noticeably enough to give us pause. 

The easy thing would have been to explain them away, which is what a lot of businesses do with feedback they don’t want to hear. 

When scores dip, managers often scramble to work out why. Then someone points out that the sample size was small or that it was a tough period or that the questions weren’t quite right – and that becomes the narrative that everyone begins to adopt. 

Before you know it, the results get filed away and nothing changes.

The more courageous – and ultimately more beneficial – path is to take on the feedback people have taken the time to give you.

That’s why we decided to put last year’s result under the microscope and see how we could turn it into a positive for our people and our business.

What we actually did with the 2025 results

Rather than look at the results at a high level, we went deep, examining the areas where we’d scored lower in granular detail. Then we convened a focus group.

A small team went through the results item by item and identified around 22 distinct actions they thought would turn things around. And, most importantly, over the next year we put them all into play before taking the survey again.

The result was that our score moved back into the 90s once again.

Two things that made the biggest difference

While there may have been 22 recommendations all up, we noticed most of the changes fundamentally  came down to addressing two key things within the business. 

1. Rethinking flexibility

Since COVID, flexibility has become one of the most important issues to many workers, with surveys revealing as many as three-quarters of employees want to work away from their office some or all of the time.

Our workplace was no different, and the 2025 questionnaire surveys showed there was a strong preference among many of our people for an arrangement that allowed for two-days-from-home, three-days-in-office arrangement – the same model that had become common across many professional services firms.

But when we took that request to the focus group, a more nuanced picture emerged. For an HR consulting firm, working from a client site is central to the job. Two days away from the office didn’t just mean two days at home, it also often meant two days’ less availability to our clients. 

And that was fundamentally in tension with our commitment to providing clients with the very best service available.

So instead of simply adopting a blanket remote work policy, we asked a different question: what does flexibility actually mean to people here?

When we analysed it, we found the answer was that flexibility meant different things to different people. For some, flexibility meant location. For others, it meant control over start and finish times, school pickup arrangements, appointments, or having greater autonomy over how work fit into life. 

We also found that some level of flexibility was already partly built into how we worked. 

Catalina employees have a core commitment of 38 hours a week, but how and when those hours are worked has significant latitude.

We’ve long offered flexible start and finish times (from 7:30am through to a 6pm finish) plus a weekly flex arrangement that allowed people to build up hours and take a shorter day at some stage during the week. 

But the main issue was that people didn’t feel comfortable taking advantage of it. So, what we added was visibility, creating a dedicated Teams channel where people actively communicated how they were flexing their hours.

This normalised the use of flexibility that was already available, rather than leaving it to individuals to figure out on their own.

And, as a result, our flexibility scores went up significantly.

2. Explaining the money

The second major change was about financial transparency – specifically, helping people within the business understand its incentive structure.

Catalina has had a bonus and KPI plan in place for several years and the mechanics of it aren’t complicated. But in practice, not many people were hitting it. 

When we got into the detail, however, we found that this wasn’t because the targets were unreachable, it was because the connection between individual effort and business outcome hadn’t been made clear.

So we took the time to provide education to all employees around how we make money as a business. This led into how each person’s contribution fitted into the overall picture. It then became relatively straightforward to see how you could earn a bonus, and why you would work towards one – if that’s what motivated you.

This prompted a significant shift in the way people worked. In the following period, the number of people who reached their KPIs and achieved a bonus went up by more than 300%. 

Other team members were honest that they preferred to focus on their work without tracking against commercial targets, and that was fine too. But the people who wanted to engage with it found they now could, and that it made sense both to where the business was headed and their own career goals.

Beyond the incentive plan, we also worked hard to provide the team with more visibility into what the business spends money on and why, including training budgets, offsite programs, wellbeing initiatives. Understanding that these were conscious investments rather than unexplained expenditures made a difference to how people felt about the organisation’s priorities.

What your business can learn from our experience 

The reality is that, while earning recognition might make you feel great, the true value  of any engagement survey – whether it’s Great Place to Work, something you’ve designed internally or something that you ask us to provide – is almost entirely determined by what you do with it afterwards.

In other words, never take a survey if you’re not prepared to accept the feedback within it. If you’re just after a sticker or a stamp to put on your website, don’t bother. The whole point is to hear what your people actually think.

And, if you do score well, that’s valuable too. Understanding your strengths is invaluable when it comes to things like recruitment, retention, and branding. It gives you something verifiable to say about what your business is known for, and what your people actually experience working there.

The other dimension, which is increasingly important in 2026, is psychosocial safety. Workplace psychological safety obligations have become considerably more onerous in recent years. A good engagement survey provides one of the most direct, evidence-based ways to verify that your people feel safe and supported at work. So, in that sense, it’s like doing due diligence on your workplace practices.

Should your business get certified?

Just as it was two years ago, the short answer is yes – so long as clear eyes about what you’re signing up for.

Certification through Great Place to Work provides an externally validated benchmark. It carries weight with candidates, clients and the broader market in ways that self-reported culture claims simply don’t. And it gives you a consistent measurement tool that allows you to track genuine progress over time, including when things go backwards.

If you’d like something more tailored to your business, our outsourced HR team can design and run an engagement survey process that fits your size, industry and goals. 

But always remember that undertaking a survey or gaining certification is only the start. The businesses that get the most from it are the ones that treat any results as information to act on.

That’s what we did here at Catalina. Twenty-two actions, one focus group, and a 300% increase in people hitting their KPIs… 

The results didn’t just speak for themselves, they gave us something worth saying. 

Want more?

Interested in running an engagement survey for your business or exploring what Great Place to Work certification could mean for your organisation? Talk to the Catalina team today.

You can also read our original article on how we first became Great Place to Work certified, or visit the Great Place to Work website for more on the certification process.

In 2026, graduate hiring is in trouble, and the numbers aren’t subtle about it. 

Australian graduate job postings had already fallen 24% in 2024 compared to the year before, and were tracking a further 16% lower in early 2025. By December 2025, just 9% of Australian SMEs were actively hiring graduates, down from 19% two months earlier. 

But the trend isn’t confined to our shores: globally, entry-level hiring has fallen an estimated 29% since January 2024.

In short, many businesses are no longer hiring recent graduates at all. 

On one hand, it’s understandable employers have become frustrated by graduate work-readiness (more than half now say graduates don’t meet expectations on self-awareness). They’re also concerned about their resilience and written communication, you’d be excused for thinking that there was little point bucking the trend.

And yet, despite all of this, there’s still a strong case for hiring graduates. Here’s why. 

What the best employers are doing when it comes to hiring grads in 2026

Despite the widespread cuts, 91% of large employers globally are still recruiting graduates, even if many of them are trimming at the margins. In Australia, the companies most serious about long-term performance have never wavered from their policies about hiring lots of graduates. 

As smaller businesses cut back, year after year, through boom and contraction alike, the world’s largest organisations run structured graduate programs. In doing so, they invest in onboarding, mentoring and rotation and, above all, they compete hard with one another for the best candidates.

These aren’t naive operators ignoring the numbers and sticking to what they’ve always done. They’re the most analytically sophisticated employers in the country who’ve taken the view that the pipeline matters too much to interrupt.

There’s a reason for this too: experienced hires don’t appear from nowhere. The senior consultant you need in four years is the graduate you hire today. The organisations that understand this think about their talent pipeline the way good businesses think about any long-term investment, i.e. not quarter to quarter, but across a cycle.

So what the current pullback mostly reflects isn’t a rational reassessment of graduate value. It’s short-term budget pressure producing long-term consequences that won’t become visible for years. 

And, by the time they do, it will be too late to do much about them. That’s because the cost of cutting graduate recruitment gets deferred.

The pipeline doesn’t send you a warning email

When employers froze graduate intake during the GFC, the consequences weren’t immediate. Initially. budgets looked better and headcount was leaner, but when the recovery came the mid-level talent that should have been there ready to move the business forward simply wasn’t. 

A Hudson survey of more than 600 Australian and New Zealand employers taken in the aftermath of the GFC found that 84% regretted making too many redundancies during the crisis. Because, while the cuts had looked rational at the time, the consequences arrived later, quietly, in the form of capability gaps and recovery plans that took longer and cost more than anticipated.

Meanwhile, US employers who cut graduate hiring by 22% in 2009 later told the National Association of Colleges and Employers they wouldn’t do it again, because reducing graduate recruitment during the downturn had created a measurable disadvantage when the economy eventually recovered. 

The same principles applied to training junior staff. When the GFC hit, training budgets were among the first things cut and economists have since argued that this systematic underinvestment in developing employees was partially responsible for the talent shortages that followed. 

Put simply, of you don’t hire graduates in year one, by year three or four, you won’t have the junior-to-mid talent you need to service growth, deliver on projects or backfill senior roles vacated by people moving up or moving on. 

You then have to go to market for experienced hires, and you pay a significant premium for people who are, in many cases, doing the job your unhired graduates would have been doing by now.

This isn’t a new pattern. Research into the wave of training and development programme cuts in the 1980s found the same dynamic playing out over a longer timeframe: no immediate impact, then a skills drought a decade later, as the generation that wasn’t developed failed to materialise in mid-level roles. 

The wrong conclusion from the right data

Of course, none of this helps overcome the very genuine work-readiness concerns many employers have today. These are genuine observations from experienced hiring managers across a wide range of industries.

But there’s a logical leap happening between the evidence and the response, and it’s worth naming.

Graduates needing development is not a new phenomenon. It is, and has always been, the entire premise of a graduate programme. The question has never been whether graduates arrive ready because they don’t, and nobody seriously expected them to. The question is whether the investment in bringing them up to speed pays off. 

And on that question, the evidence consistently says it does.

What’s changed is not that graduates are less valuable. It’s that the post-pandemic cohort of students – who completed significant portions of their education in lockdown – tended to receive less work experience, less face-to-face feedback and less exposure to professional environments. This means they often need more deliberate onboarding than their predecessors.

The appropriate response isn’t to stop hiring, but to provide more structured support. After all, the work-readiness gap doesn’t close itself, it closes when employers invest in closing it. And organisations that understand this are turning a market-wide concern into a hiring advantage. 

Which brings us to what they’re actually doing differently… 

The organisations that keep hiring are pulling ahead

When graduate hiring contracts across a market – just as it’s doing now – the employers who maintain structured programmes actually improve their position against competitors. 

They’re recruiting from a larger pool of candidates competing for fewer spots and paying less of a premium to do so. They’re also shaping those hires around their own culture and way of working at precisely the moment when their competitors have stepped back.

The Big Four professional services firms understand this arithmetic instinctively. So do Commonwealth Bank, Macquarie, Canva and the major government departments. They run structured graduate programs not out of a sense of social obligation but because they’ve done the maths on what it costs to buy experienced talent on the open market versus growing it internally and the internal number wins, consistently and by a significant margin.

The cost of hiring an experienced employee in Australia has more than doubled since 2020, now averaging nearly $24,000 per hire. And that’s before salary premiums for mid-level experience are factored in. Growing that talent internally, from graduate level, is demonstrably cheaper. 

But the same logic extends well beyond large organisations. 

Any business that competes for mid-level talent (which is most businesses) is affected by the same pipeline dynamics. The experienced hire you need in three years doesn’t materialise from nowhere. They come, in most cases, from a graduate program somewhere. If that program is yours, you’ve shaped them. If it isn’t, you’re bidding against everyone else for a finite pool of people who were shaped by someone else’s priorities.

There’s also a timing argument that doesn’t get made often enough. A contracting graduate market is one of the few moments when the balance of power in early-career recruitment genuinely shifts toward the employer. Application volumes are up – the ISE data shows employers receiving record numbers of applications despite fewer roles. The candidates are there while the competition for them, from other employers, is reduced. 

Running a serious graduate program right now, when others aren’t, is about as close to a buyer’s market as this space ever gets.

What a good structured graduate program looks like (if you’re not in the Big Four)

A structured graduate programme doesn’t require a dedicated team, a branded cohort experience or a rotation schedule. For most Australian businesses, it needs just four things.

 

The difference between graduate hiring that works and graduate hiring that doesn’t is rarely about the quality of the graduates. It’s almost always about the presence or absence of those four things.

The organisations pulling ahead right now are those running intentional programs in a market where application volumes are at record highs and competition for graduate talent among employers has softened. 

After all, the window to do this well (and cheaply) is  open right now. But it won’t stay open for long.

Want more?

Thinking about building a graduate hiring strategy that works for your business? Talk to our team of HR experts.