Take the angst out of looking for staff

Pity the poor IT recruiters. Their inboxes are crammed with CVs and pleas from work seekers. But the phone reserved for calls from employers stays silent.

Or don't pity them. They've picked up fat fees in the good times, but now not only are times bad, but technology changes wrought by the bodies they have placed over the years are coming back to bite them on the bum.

Many have culled staff of their own or shut up shop completely in recent months.

As that terrible word that popped up early in internet theorising would have it, they've been disintermediated, nudged out of their valuable spot between buyer and seller.

Tony Cutting from recruiter PeopleNet in Wellington saw it coming and shifted his business to meet the change.

He created two tool sets that organisations can build into their own recruitment efforts, jobcafe.co.nz and TalentPoint.

"There is still some recruitment going on out there, but the sector has been hit by the recession, and there is also a swing by employers from agencies to DIY, which they can do cheaper.

"We saw that coming. We see our future more as a consulting and technology business, with outsource services when a client wants them," Cutting says.

As well as having built up expertise around hiring processes, "we know how to capture and build and mine a database of suitable candidates". He describes TalentPoint as "recruitment process outsourcing", allowing large corporate and government clients to manage staffing and recruitment campaigns.

That can involve putting consultants on site to work full-time on a client's needs, drawing up job descriptions and managing the interview and appointment process, while TalentPoint's back office generates the candidate base.

Six of its 16 staff are on site at the Ministry of Health, which estimates that in its first year the arrangement saved almost $1 million, bringing the cost of hiring down to about $3000 a person instead of $18,000 plus, and the time to fill a position down to 16 days instead of 30 to 40 days.

JobCafe is a similar proposition but without the necessity for consultants on site, giving candidates a chance to pitch for work in specific organisations such as Weta Workshop, the police, Fujitsu, Colmar Brunton and Big Save.

Rather than send in a CV and have it sitting on a site for all to see, candidates can specify on JobCafe which employer they want to work for.

"If you want to work for Weta but not the police, that is where your CV will go," Cutting says.

Firms pay an initial set-up cost to join JobCafe, then a monthly licence fee based on the number of its staff who will be accessing the candidate database and using the other online tools which manage the hiring process.

Cutting says JobCafe has about 8000 active and passive job-seekers on its books, after culling anyone who hadn't viewed or updated their profiles in the past two years.

He says even though the market for IT staff is now extremely weak, "that could change quickly, because the need for technology is not going away".

The softness of the market can be seen in the experiences of the Project Management Institute, whose services for members include job referral.

"Twelve months ago a firm asked us to advertise for a project manager. They would be lucky to get two or three replies in a week. Now we can email out a position and get 140 replies in two hours," says chairman Hayden Easte. That's from a mailing list of about 2000 people.

Easte says most of the recent projects have been for infrastructure work, replacing servers and networks, rather than software development.

"The general chatter is any projects which are not absolutely required have been shelved, but with hardware there comes a time when if you don't replace, you will go down," he says.

"Indications are there is a bow wave, a backlog of work piling up that existing staff are not getting to, and this will eventually break."

He says consulting rates have come down, with people willing to accept cuts of 30 per cent or more to get the work.

Recruitment industry veteran Ross Turner from Pinnacle Recruitment says many companies are finding new ways of identifying suitable candidates, rather than going through recruiting agents. "Companies are finding ways to promote staff internally," Turner says.

A lot of smaller and medium-sized companies see the apparent cost of recruitment as something they can steer away from and do themselves.

The downside of that is when they put an ad on seek.co.nz and are inundated with applications they have to deal with.

Managing that flood of candidates is a selling point for recruiters, but Turner says it's at times like these that experience and long-term relationships pay off.

Adamgifford5@gmail.com