Green-Shoots in the Jobs Space? Quarter Update 2025

Green-Shoots: 2025’s most overused word

Welcome to our fourth-quarter jobs market update and final review of 2025. We know a lot of you are hanging in there after what’s been a bumpy year. Like the mythical oasis in a desert, we’ve seen our share of green-shoots over the past 12 months too. With this in mind, we hope you enjoy some well-deserved downtime across the Christmas and New Year period.

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The Sourced team will call time on this year from Friday, 19th Dec. Our offices will reopen on Monday, January 12th. Our team have a mixture of plans including overseas travel, beach/lake/pool time and some much-deserved rest.

Reviewing the year in its entirety in this report, we have included trends, supply and demand, and a general overview of the market. We hope this is useful as an update to our TechShapers report which came out in September. As always, we encourage you to contact us if you’re looking for any specific market intelligence. We’re in a great position to watch the market as it evolves and are always happy to share these insights.

General Comments

2025 has been an absolute rinse and repeat of 2024, best described as turbulent and unpredictable. While in 2024 we were talking about ‘survive until 25’, 2025 has unfortunately been much more a case of surviving 25, with ongoing disruptions as a result of unfavourable national and global economic conditions.

While there have been pockets of industry that have thrived (Travel, Product/Engineering, Manufacturing, and Geo), it has otherwise been a really tough year for a lot of businesses, with a mix of plateauing and reduced budgets, and a continuation of 2024’s restructuring and downsizing.

The Numbers paint a picture

When we look at our stats for the year, only 56% of our recruitment came out of the private sector, with the remaining coming from the public sector and charitable trusts. While this may not look noteworthy on the face of it, in 2023 this number was 74%, and in 2024 66% so we start to see clearly, after post-covid growth, a year-on-year decline in private sector growth.

When we look back we also see another interesting theme; hiring was moving away from permanent and fixed-term hires, to a more fluid model, allowing talent to be turned on and off quickly through very short contracts. In 2023, 40% of Sourced’s hiring was in the contract space, rising to 51% in 2024 and for 2025 61%. While a contractors market often acts as an indicator of economic growth and confidence, we are seeing contractors used to plug very short gaps, assignments tied to very specific outcomes, and used as a way to ensure headcount does not increase. We have fluctuated between Fixed Term and Hourly rate contracts (these % figures represent hourly rate contracts). As noted above, this is largely driven by the ability to turn on and off resources at short notice.

We are hanging on, but for what?

Adding a further comment on this, we have also seen next to no permanent headcount turnover over the past 2 years, with stability being king. While anecdotally there are a lot of people who would like to move jobs, with the amount of redundancies and restructures that have happened across the sector across 2024/2025, most are just holding tight. But for how long (comment from last update remains below)?

From mid-year onwards

As we’ve hit mid-year of 2025, we have seen green shoot after green shoot, however no real growth. There have been a growing number of permanent roles coming to market, but still far outweighed by contract and Fixed Term contract opportunities. Permanent roles have tended to be at the junior/mid to very early senior level and very much in the engine room. Senior and Management roles have been nearly non-existent, a theme we’ve seen over the past 2-3 years. Developers, Data Specialists and Project Delivery specialists have largely represented permanent headcount demand, and similarly in the contract space.

The public sector has remained a key consumer of short-term contract resources, adding extra horsepower to halting projects and keeping business improvement activities moving ahead where there is no capacity for additional long-term headcount. We have a small number of clients with large programmes of work underway who have made up the majority of our contract recruitment, and otherwise permanent headcount has been spread across clients who are working in sectors that are faring better than most.

2026 remains a lottery

As we look to 2026 we have largely giving up guessing, and just continue to ride out the bumpy economy. With an election year coming and global economic influences continuing to impact us, it’s anyone’s guess as to what 2026 looks like, but our hope, in all honesty, is some normality. Just a good old-fashioned, vanilla, BAU year.

Hot Jobs

Junior Level

Intermediate Level

We have an immediate need for an Intermediate – Senior Android Developer to work in a team covering a period of longer term illness. This is a Kotlin/Native Android development role working with experienced colleagues in a fast-paced project environment. An hourly rate is on offer with at least 6 months of work available.

Senior Level

Within Sourced Walls

It’s been a busy quarter for the Sourced team with a range of Christmas social events, Contractor catch-ups, and making the last visits of the year to our clients and recent placements.

We have sadly had to farewell Chris Woods, who has made the tough call to fully immerse herself in Auckland life and take up work closer to home. Chris has been part of the family since 2015 and it’s been an incredibly tough time saying goodbye. With Chris stepping back, we have recently welcomed Alia Leilani to the team. Alia started her recruitment career with Hay’s in HR recruitment, and is very quickly learning the ropes.

We have been busy hosting a number of contractor catch up and morning tea’s in these final weeks of the year, attending several client and supplier Christmas functions, the Canterbury Tech Annual Quiz (our end-of-year fave), and on writing this market update we are fast approaching our own internal Sourced Christmas Dinner. Plenty going on!

Who is in Demand?

2025 has been the year of the contractor, with 61% of our placements being short term contracts, 26% permanent and 13% Fixed Term Contract. Looking at the role splits, we aren’t surprised to see Business/Systems Analysts have led the way, making up 27% of our annual placements across permanent and contract. Trailing well back, Project, Programme Management, Data/BI and Software Development have each shared a 14% demand share, with Systems and Network Engineering trailing at 13%. With these core areas taking out the top 5 spots, again we note the distinct lack of volume in strategic roles/leadership and executive.

We were quite suprised to see Systems and Networking sitting as high as 13%, however, this has been due to a small number of deployment projects taking on multiple resources and short-term high-level engineering roles. Had we been measuring permanent appointments only, Systems and Network Engineering would not have featured.

While Data and BI only made up 14% of our placed roles for 2025 this is an area that continues to grow. Those in the Analyst space with a lean towards Data are certainly more and more in demand and should look to 2026 with confidence. Their skills seem to transfer well across larger ERP programmes, and back into more traditional BI, reporting and dashboarding, or pushing out into more generalist BA. It seems in the 2025 market at least, generalists are winning over specialists, and are most in demand where they can add additional value across a number of areas as opposed to just coming in to fill one gap.

Salary and AI

When looking at salary levels across the year, across all permanent roles, the average appointment salary across our top 5 disciplines was $126,333 which is skewed slightly by the higher salaries that Programme Managers command. If this were removed we quickly drop to $109,000 again showing that demand has been very much at that mid-career point.

Traditional Software Development/Application Support roles, which came in at 14% for the year, have been split across Development and Application support and with a slight leaning towards permanent and fixed-term appointments. While we have seen the odd role in this area being on a contract basis, generally engagements are longer. While we are hearing lots and lots of market noise around AI this has actually translated into very little recruitment, but certainly one to watch in 2026 if you believe everything you hear. For now, it’s mid-senior level Developers and App Support continuing to develop and enhance existing systems, while investment for significant transformation skill lags.

Demand in the Transformation – PM/BA/Change/Project Support – space has remained high across the year

Recruitment Activity Round-Up

Looking at the market as a whole across 2025:

• 61% of placed roles were contract, 26% were permanent and 13% Fixed Term Contract
• In a market that is ‘candidate rich’ (and where we are averaging over 140 genuine applications per advertised role), 84% of successful candidates were directly approached for the role they were placed into (ie they did not apply for the role).
• Only 9% of placed candidates had recently migrated from overseas
• 2025 has neither favoured the client nor the candidate, with there being a real mismatch in supply and demand. Despite employer confidence that there are a significant amount of candidates available, we are seeing that the skills becoming available through restructures and downsizing are not necessarily matching the areas in demand, and as a result we still have a number of highly skilled candidates on the bench trying to get back in.

Final Thoughts for the year

As mentioned in our placement statistics, the candidates who are applying for roles are not matched well with the skills we are looking for, so we’ve maintained our focus on search, talent banking and contractor engagement. With permanent roles being very low in number, many of our candidates have had to reconsider their options and look at fixed-term and contract opportunities, or, where we’ve not been able to help, consider working outside of the city. Those relocating into the city are also putting further pressure on an already competitive candidate market.

In both Auckland and Canterbury, those in roles have not been nearly as active as they were in 2022. As we mentioned previously, anecdotally, there are many who would move if economic confidence was higher, but for now they wait. The significant majority of roles recruited across the year were new positions, or resourcing projects with contractors, and where we are recruiting new permanent roles, clients are now taking a much more focussed approach, holding a possibly over-inflated sense of confidence around candidate availability and feeling they have the luxury of choice.

We will watch with interest as we head into the New Year, but until then, we would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and hope you take the time to enjoy a relaxing break with family and friends over the festive season.