Kate Ross: The challenge facing recruiters

Opinion

When speaking to businesses we get more or less the same response from all of them when it comes to the changes within the economy.

The general consensus is that the wheels fell off the wagon overnight in October last year.

All of a sudden New Zealand had a knee-jerk reaction to what was happening around the world and the fact we also had an election going on didn't help.

What was stopped first? Recruitment.

Head counts and company wide recruitment freezes were instant, regardless of the size of the company. Businesses started looking quickly and harshly at every overhead.

Cutting back on salaries and on people, generally the biggest expense within a business, became the focus.

For recruitment agencies, it was a hard reality to wake up one day to find that 70 per cent of clients were "on hold until further notice."

We are now in March 2009 and only in the last few weeks have we seen cautious movement forward.

Typically within recruitment, the first quarter of the year is extremely busy; candidates with New Year's resolutions to get their career on track, managers getting new projects off the ground and the natural cycle of people moving on from jobs and being replaced generates a healthy buzz and opportunities within all sectors.

In contrast, this year, clients are laying off staff instead of taking them on, candidates are sitting tight, relieved to have a job to go to and recruitment agencies are flooded with candidates who cannot find work, in many cases post-redundancy.

This gives consultants a different focus – candidates who are panicking and becoming desperate require attention and care.

Having large volumes of candidates available for work in the market brings new challenges. For so long, we have struggled to compile shortlists of even two suitable candidates for roles we have been recruiting.

Currently, an advertisement placed online seeking to attract candidates for a standard role can receive anything up to 150 applications overnight.

This builds up over a week and generates a considerable addition to the average hiring manager's workload. So at the end of trawling through all those applications, do you find ten star candidates all perfectly suited for the role and vying to join your team? Not necessarily, I'm afraid.

There is undoubtedly a huge volume of candidates available in the marketplace at the moment but general negativity around job searches means that the candidates who are searching for work are inclined to apply for everything advertised, rather than being particular and specific in their search.

National and international response has grown and it has made the job of the recruiter a lot more intensive.

On the plus side, candidates are willing to relocate, often through necessity, as smaller towns and specific industries suffer. Gen Y has returned to tertiary education to further develop skills and training and the brain drain is reversing itself as expats flee the UK to head for home.

With head counts on and with nothing being done to counteract natural attrition, companies are spreading work internally. In most cases, employees, perhaps happy to still have a job, are shouldering increasing workloads - managers should be aware this leads to problems in the long term.

An easy remedy for this is to utilise temporary or contract staff – an extra pair of hands without adding another permanent salary to the payroll.

Widely differing opinions mean it is impossible for anyone to predict when the market will turn and begin to look really positive for the majority of businesses again.

In the meantime, it is important that all employers remember to look after their staff. They are your greatest asset - at any time.

* Kate Ross is director of Kinetic Recruitment as well as upcoming part time job website The Outfit and the Return2work programme, in partnership with Sarah Paykel.