Sourced Quarterly Market Update – Autumn 2022

Welcome to our belated Autumn quarterly update for 2022, where we look back at the last quarter and review how the year has shaped up so far. As you’ll no doubt be hearing, it’s been an extremely busy time with a lot of permanent recruitment happening, salaries on the rise, and a high level of staff turnover. Will we see this continue into the second part of the year, or are we at the peak of the wave?

Read on to find out.

General Comments

This year started with a bang, with a surge of new positions coming to market in response to growth and new projects coming online, followed by ongoing recruitment for turnover, which is currently at an all-time high in the Canterbury and Auckland markets. If you pause on the street to look around, it’s likely that one in three of the people nearby have moved jobs in 2022.

It’s been really interesting to watch. As a significant number of newly created positions have come to market, candidates for the first time since 2019 are beginning to move in numbers, but are demanding higher salaries, and negotiating more favourable working conditions in the process. This has created competition between employers to secure this talent, and subsequently, more and more candidates are making themselves available to ride the wave of opportunity and better pay.

This has not largely affected the contract market – if anything it has subdued it, with the majority of effort appearing to be in securing the best talent for permanent positions.

Salary increases are being seen most acutely in the Systems, Business Analyst and Development areas, with Systems Engineer rates also on the rise. In the BA space, we have seen the largest salary spikes, with on average salaries lifting by $20-25k per annum.

The Race to Meet Demand

Resourcing has presented a real challenge to meet the demands of our client’s growth, with borders up until now remaining closed. While we are continuing to look further afield to source talent, we have seen a slow down on candidates relocating into the Canterbury region, particularly from Auckland, which previously had offered a great channel of talent into the city. We are still seeing a smaller trickle of candidates from Otago towards Christchurch chasing better work opportunities; this tending to be mid-level candidates with fewer family ties seeking promotion opportunities.

Within the Auckland market, permanent recruitment again appears to be the drive and salaries also continue to rise. As we have continued to report, permanent team members are looking at work from home options, working for organisations in other centres/countries, and the idea of a traditional ‘in office’ role is becoming less and less appealing. In both centres, candidates are very active, but tend to be more selective, more demanding, and able to easily secure multiple offers allowing a ‘pick and choose’ scenario. As a result, the process is definitely in favour of the candidate.

A Cooling Market?

Staff turnover levels are at an all-time high, and clients are having to take a much more flexible approach and considering remote working, flexible work arrangements and other incentives to ensure the ability to secure talent. So, is it all doom and gloom from an employment perspective? Not necessarily.

While certainly the time to hire has probably been and gone in terms of locally available talent, the wave of demand is also showing its first signs of waning. A significant amount of recruitment has happened already, and this level of growth was never going to be sustainable all year, so we are predicting a cool-down period ahead.

Within Sourced Walls

If you’ve been in touch with us this quarter, you’ll have no doubt chatted to our latest team member Diana. Diana has replaced Victoria, our Office Manager, joining us from MBIE. Diana is already settled in and learning the ropes, and is busy getting to know our ever-growing contractor community as their primary care contact. Archie, our office canine, is a huge fan.

Unfortunately, with Red and now Orange COVID-19 restrictions we are still largely closed in the office to walk-in visitors, but have managed to host visitors recently and look forward to this becoming more of the norm in the latter months of 2022.

Who’s in Demand

Demand is high right across the spectrum, with roles covering Infrastructure, Development, Test and Professional Services. Contract opportunities have slowed, with the real focus being on new and replacement permanent recruitment. We do expect we’ve seen the peak, however, this doesn’t mean we are expecting a quiet next quarter, just a slightly less frantic one.

In the Professional Services space, we have seen significant demand and salary increases across BA, Analysis and Project work, with Programme Management, Change and PMO roles flowing through. In the Test space, Test Strategy and Automation appear to be most in-demand, however not in huge numbers, and tending to be more mid-early senior level.

Within Development, demand remains very steady in the .Net space and also for JavaScript/PHP/Python skills, both contract and permanent. Roles are tending to be operational vs leadership with more and more openness to training juniors and intermediates through, which is fantastic to see.

In the contracting space, it has largely been made up of the usual BA roles, mixed with a range of helpdesk, project management and systems engineering.