With a tightening job market, New Zealand is the land of opportunity for jobseekers and recruiters

This article initially appeared in the August 2018 edition of Recruitment International magazine.

In recruitment, we transform businesses and we transform people’s lives making the work we do important on many levels and with a tightening job market and enormous growth happening in the regions of New Zealand, this makes right now a great time to be looking for work in our Pacific Island nation. It also follows that it’s also a time when skilled recruitment and staffing professionals are in high demand.

New Zealand Immigration  points out that we were “less affected by the global financial crisis than many countries and employment has been gathering steam over the past five years.” It adds that the employment market is expected to remain robust with the government forecasting average growth in the job market to sit at around 2.9 per cent annually over the next five years.

This is further backed up by the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment’s latest quarterly report on the New Zealand labour market, released in February, which says labour demand “remains robust” and “is expected to remain solid over the next three years, driven by construction, business services, health and education”.

“The labour market is tightening, with spare capacity drying up, and business finding it harder to get workers with the right skills, even with the strong growth in labour supply,” the report states.

The report also states that 49 per cent of businesses surveyed for the quarterly report struggle to find skilled labour and 31 per cent had trouble finding unskilled labour, noting “these difficulties have been steadily increasingly since 2009”.

“[In the December quarter], employment kept pace with population growth, and New Zealand’s employment rate (the proportion of the population who are employed) remained at an all-time high of 67.8 per cent,” the report continued.

This is high by international standards with only Sweden and Switzerland employing a higher percentage of their working-age populations.

This is great news for New Zealand, but only if it is done so in a way that ensures workers are being treated with dignity, equality and fairness.

New Zealand has an ageing workforce which is both wanting and able to work longer while at the same time we are seeing a high percentage in youth not in the workforce. This is something we need to address as a country and includes a need to ensure our youth are given the opportunities for vocational training to help get them into the workforce while balancing this with the opportunity to learn from the experience of older employees.

New Zealand Immigration said the sectors experiencing both long and short-term shortages are agriculture and forestry, construction, engineering, health and social services, recreation, hospitality, tourism, science and trades. A comprehensive list can be found here.

I have been in recruitment since 2001 and in that time I have witnessed a great deal of change to the industry. We are more professional, more connected with clients and candidates across a diverse range of platforms - notably social media - and have evolved along with the expectations of those we work with and for. While there are plenty of opportunities for jobseekers in key areas, this unfortunately can also bring with it opportunities for dodgy operators and I believe this is another area we need to focus on as an industry. These people, apart from tarnishing the reputation of recruitment and staffing professionals, also wreak enormous damage on the welfare of their clients and candidates.

In my new role as Manager of Membership & Partnerships Manager for RCSA in New Zealand, supporting our industry through the tightening job market while ensuring the rights of workers are maintained, will be central focus of the work we will do.

The truth is that as a sector, with scale, we can do more. RCSA has its own Code of Conduct which all members are expected to abide by.

The more participants of our sector who are members of the RCSA and bound by the code, the more we can be a force which both says and demonstrates that worker exploitation is unacceptable, always!

To achieve this, we need professional recruiters who agree to be bound by the Code of Conduct and who are committed to upholding our high standards for membership.

I liken this to the Maori proverb: Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi engari he toa takimano (My strength is not that of an individual but that of the collective).

It also means that we have an obligation as an industry body to ensure our members are being well represented and know their concerns are our concerns.

I would encourage members of the recruitment and staffing sector to not sit on the sidelines and lament about what changes they would like to see.

And collectively, let us make it a priority to support those of all ages wanting to work in New Zealand while stamping out cowboys in our industry who respect neither the people or the sector and represent the values we hold in helping others to achieve their dreams.

Photo by Dan Freeman on Unsplash