Onwards and (soon to be) upwards

This week I attended a “breakfast” event kindly hosted by SEEK. Unfortunately, I have to use inverted commas as it was a croissant and coffee affair as opposed to the feast that TradeMe Jobs puts on. Personally, I don’t eat breakfast during the week unless a job board pays for it, but I feel that if a bit of pastry satisfies you in the morning, you probably had a very strange upbringing. Or you’re French, which is essentially the same thing. This blog is not about bagging SEEK however. I like the team there, I like the product, and it was a good event. Instead, it’s a reflection on where this market is sitting right now. And although it’s not awful, it’s not great either. And a large deciding factor on our collective future is 78 years old, sells electric cars on the side, and is not adverse to grabbing women “by the p*ssy”. Tuesday’s session entitled “NZ Labour Market – today and tomorrow” was bought to us by SEEKs excellent senior economist Dr Blair Chapman. Chapman, a man who carries an unnerving resemblance to a Ghostbusters-era Rick Moranis, seems to know his stuff and rattled through the slides at a decent rate. Me, having had only a couple of hours sleep, got the gist of it reasonably quickly before retreating to a place in my head that I call “Sean’s Boom-Boom-Room”. However, for those not in attendance, let me summarise as much as I can.

Imagine a load of graphs that go up and down but generally up. Then imagine a drastic spike or depression (depending on graph) in March 2020, then a massive spike or depression as we were all allowed out to buy booze and cocaine and stupid electric cars after covid. Since that point, all the graphs continue to look the same. Basically a miserable downward trend, or at best, bouncing along the bottom like some kind of pebble with fibromyalgia. The backdrop to this is of course low interest rates and massive supply chain issues during and after covid creating rapid inflation, and then the reserve bank trying to halt this by using interest rate hikes like a Nun uses a ruler on a schoolboy's unwanted erection. As rates go up, inflation steadies, and hiring managers shut up shop like the aforementioned nun’s holiest of holes.

Then, if we continue describing the graphs which all looked the same, the trend line becomes dotted. For those not in the know when it comes to graphs, this means “this is what we think will happen”. On these slides, did these lines go shooting skywards like that unwanted erection? Unfortunately not. Instead, they crept down just that little bit more. According to the boffins, in a number of ways, the worst is yet to come. Thankfully however, the line only heads south for a few month. And in 3-6 months, providing that Trump doesn’t invade Greenland and share the spoils with Russia, we will, like a gutsy pilot in a movie plane crash, pull up from the nose dive into a gradual increase in altitude. Hoorah! If you want a better explanation of the above nonsense, you can read something from someone who is actually paid to write here.

Saying “the worse is yet to come” doesn’t actually fit my mood at the moment however. I speak to a lot of recruiters at all levels every day. Almost without exception, there is a tangible belief that the market for agency recruiters has improved of late. This is opposed to all the intangible improvements we’ve “experienced” in the last 18 months. These were as fantastical as Sean’s Boom-Boom-Room. Now, we are almost all universally busier. I’m even recruiting an internal recruitment role! It feels so…retro. And this is how it works in our game. Things don’t actually need to be better. We just need to believe that things are getting better. And once we see that line, dotted or not, heading in the right direction, we start to believe. And once we feel this, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I hope.

Anyway, thanks to SEEK for an informative event, and it was good to see a few of you there. Onwards and upwards!

^SW

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