The Australian economy is doing very well, currently growing at a robust 3%. According to David Plank, Head of Australian Economics at ANZ Bank, “Business conditions, profitability and capacity utilisation are all either at or near record levels.” Business conditions have been so good, that companies are seeking to expand and build on their current teams.
45% of Australian business leaders are looking to hire more people. Job advertisements have increased by 9% from last year. And business leaders are focused on adding more talent to their team in the foreseeable future. 79% of business leaders say talent is the number one priority in their organisation. People drive innovation and progress, and business leaders recognise that.
The challenge for the people hiring the people
Although 45% of business leaders say they will hire more people, only 33% will increase their recruiting team size, and only 30% will increase their recruitment budget. What this means is that while companies are seeking to hire more people, the recruitment team will have to do it with the same resources.
What compounds the situation is that recruitment agencies, which control about 28% of recruitment teams’ budgets, are also finding it difficult to field recruiters for themselves.
According to the Recruitment and Consulting Services Association of Australia and New Zealand (RCSA), recruitment consultants are fast becoming one of Australia’s hardest positions to fill. Currently, the recruitment industry relies heavily on foreign consultants to fill Australian positions and train Australian consultants.
RCSA CEO Charles Cameron said that the Government’s direction to remove “Recruitment Consultants” from the list of Short-term Skilled Occupations would make it more difficult to bring overseas talent into the country. “Removing recruitment consultants from the Skilled Occupation List will make it even harder for recruitment firms to source the right talent, for the right business, in the right time and will undermine the capacity of Australian business to respond to new opportunities,” Mr Cameron said.
New recruiting approaches are needed
Given that recruitment teams will have to produce more with the same (or less) resources, the onus is on recruitment teams to approach the challenge more creatively. According to a recent study conducted by LinkedIn, 36% of talent acquisition managers across Australia are looking at technology such as Candidate Relationship Management systems as a game changer. But a larger 38% of recruitment leaders see that recruiting more diverse candidates will shape the recruitment industry.
Diversifying your talent pool while restricted by the current visa situation will lead to new and creative approaches, such as remote staffing.
Remote staffing as a viable option
Australian companies and recruitment firms are already hiring foreign recruiters working remotely from home, to bolster their team while taking advantage of major cost advantages (up to 75% in savings).
Remote staffing firm Kinetic Innovative Staffing has been recruiting skilled professionals such as Anne (not her real name) for Australian companies since 2013. Anne has been a recruiter since 2004, when she started working as a Recruitment Associate for a worldwide tech company in the Philippines. Afterwards, she continued her recruitment career with global IT, management, HR, banking services and consulting firms from the US, Australia and the UK.
Since March of 2017, Anne has been working for a leading HR consulting and recruitment firm in Brisbane through Kinetic. Anne works remotely from her home in the Philippines as a Recruitment Specialist and has been performing seamlessly with the firm’s local recruitment team.
Kinetic has access to a database of more than 4 million professionals in the Philippines, varying from HR recruiters, to engineers, draftsmen, web developers, software engineers, SEO specialists, among others.
If you would like to know more about remote staffing, get in touch with us at Kinetic through here.
