Jobs Market Update for the IT industry - Spring 2023

General Market Update:

Welcome to our Spring 2023 Jobs Market update as we head into the final few months of a year that seems to have just evaporated. Hopefully, you’ve had a chance to get out and enjoy the longer evenings and some of the sunshine we’ve been enjoying around the rain and wind storms!

Skip to: * Hot Jobs * What’s happening at Sourced * Skills in demand right now * Overview *

Q3 on the whole has been a period of a lot of market chatter around market conditions, that haven’t necessarily translated to reality. There still seems to be a really strong held belief that the market is flat, there it’s an employer’s market and that jobs are hard to come by. While we aren’t experiencing the optimism/challenging candidate market of 2023, our own reality has been a market that has continued at pace, simply with a shift in focus.

As we talked about in the Winter update, it is currently a very buoyant contractor’s market as more candidates in permanent roles stay put, and permanent hiring decisions are deferred until the new financial year. It feels like there has been a slight pause, wait and see around the election and recession, and employers can no longer wait so project work is again kicking off in earnest, but using contingent labour to fill essential gaps.

In the last quarter update, we were talking about salaries having stabilised following last year’s upward trajectory and this has very much remained the case. We have not experienced a decline, nor do we anticipate any significant dip, and if anything we have probably seen the new ‘normal’ with any changes being in an upward direction over the next couple of years.

For permanent and contracting roles, international talent pools continue to be a vital resource for Sourced, with more candidates coming in from offshore on a mix of working holiday visas, open work visas, and partnership work visas, and able to hit the ground running. We seem to be seeing a slowdown of ex-pats coming home from overseas and/or relocating from the North Island to Canterbury, which we had seen in quite significant volume through the first half of the year, with most candidates now coming in for the first time, or for a limited period of time on working holiday visas.

We must acknowledge that we have seen a number of candidates coming into the market this quarter by way of company restructuring, rightsizing and redundancy, but these are tending to be picked up quickly, not always into like-for-like roles, but being looked at for short term contracting opportunities that will take them through the remainder of the year and then looking to permanent positions for 2024.

Hot Jobs

Market Update for the IT scene

Junior Level

Level 1/2 Service Desk Analyst. We have two great openings for Level 1/2 Service Desk Analysts, one supporting a large New Zealand brand name business on an internal service desk, the other working for a growing MSP offering hands-on technician opportunities as well as phone and email-based support. Great roles with thriving companies. $65k

Intermediate Level

Technical Support Specialist/Desktop Support – New Zealand high-profile brand name. Exceptional culture, great learning opportunities and a broad role across user technology support, networking and involvement with M365 projects. A great stepping stone off the helpdesk and on the way to Infrastructure Engineering. $70k

Senior Level

BA Practice Manager – Auckland. Again, a high-profile New Zealand brand name, we’re looking for a seasoned Business Analyst capable of building capability and best practices within a growing team. This role has a strong focus on mentoring and professional growth of a team of business analysts as well as establishing a solid, framework approach to Business Analysis across the business. Permanent role, based in central Auckland. $165k

Within Sourced Walls

Following on from our announcement as finalists in this year’s 2023 RCSA New Zealand Awards in the Client Service category, we were absolutely stoked to be named Sourcr Australia/New Zealand Agency of the Year 2023 (IT/Telecommunications), New Zealand Best Agency (IT/Telecommunications), and for our Principal Consultant Chris Woods – ANZ Recruiter of the Year (IT/Telecommunications), NZ Best Recruiter 2023 (Digital) and NZ Best Recruiter 2023 (IT/Telecommunications).

Unlike other awards in the industry, which might require a fee or use judges, the Sourcr Awards algorithm is solely based on the best measurement of success – verified feedback from our clients and candidates, so thank you. We literally could not have achieved this without you.

We were once again Sponsors at this year’s Canterbury Tech Summit, and had a great day hosting an exhibition stand, with a Shuffleboard competition which proved extremely popular!! If you were there, we hope you stopped for a game or three, and ultimately our competition led to a highly contested three-way tie, followed by a shoot-out – a very exciting watch! We will no doubt be back for another round next year.

Andrea and Michelle have been visiting the University of Canterbury this quarter, talking to graduating students about work readiness, and using online tools to bolster their profile and put their best foot forward as they take their first steps into the employment market. It’s amazing the things we know that we assume everybody else does, only to work out they really don’t! It’s been highly rewarding being able to share knowledge tools, tips and tricks to really elevate these students’ chances of employment success.

We are days away from welcoming our Recruitment Consultant Olivia back, who has spent the past 6 weeks on a whirlwind trip around Europe. We’ve been keeping up with her Instagram feeds, and fair to say it was very hard watching as we sat in rain storms watching her summer videos!

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Who is in Demand?

As covered above, this quarter has again clearly favoured contractors, with many BA, Change, Training and Technical Writer roles coming to market. These Project Delivery skills are also/still highly sought after in the Fixed-term contract space, where clients prefer fixed-term, longer-term engagements to cover large programmes/implementations.

Development roles have been comparatively quiet over the past quarter, with a slow increase in demand for Test resources.

Infrastructure roles at the Level 1-3 level have again come to the fore, which we had seen earlier in the year and appear to be in line with growing businesses, greater demand for technical support services and moves into Cloud environments. Contracting rates at the Senior/Infrastructure level have been compelling, with Architectural roles coming through in higher volume than we have seen this year.

Market Update General Round-Up

As we counted last quarter, contract recruitment continues to dominate, while permanent recruitment ticks away in the background. Anybody in the Professional Services space right now should feel confident that an opportunity is just around the corner. Contract rates remain competitive, and salaries are now at a level we would expect will hold.

Clients continue to work on business improvement activities which continues to drive recruitment.

There seems to be a well-held belief that as we now hit the last couple of months of the year, recruitment will slow to a stop, but this simply isn’t true. Clients will continue to recruit now until early November for roles starting this year, and will then start to focus on new starts for January. This means that our business really does remain busy right up until the last working day of the year (and often later), as we look to tidy as much up as we can before the holidays.

If you’re currently between roles and feeling nervous that time is running short, please be assured, it really isn’t!