White Consulting Partners

Industry Trends – Supply Side
Overall Trends in the Permanent Recruitment Market
Our view is that overall the permanent recruitment market remains positive. Recent media has reported Australia's unemployment rate falling. Australian economists have indicated that this reflects continued strength in the permanent recruitment market, and some market researchers believe that Australia is still rising towards the peak of the employment cycle in terms of permanent hiring expectations.

Specific Recruitment Trends in the Financial Services & IT Industries
Due to ever increasing stringency in regulatory compliance and corporate governance, financial services professionals are in high demand.

Companies in the financial services sector are seeking to gain the edge over their competitors by implementing state of the art technology for the purpose of business efficiency and, consequently, a larger market share and profit margin. This has lead to a rise in demand for IT professionals due to increased investment in business transformation projects in the commercial management of large and complex IT outsourcing arrangements.

Since early 2005 there has been a surge in demand for developers with experience in .NET, Java and J2EE due to budgets for technology expenditure becoming more generous as financial institutions upgrade trading platforms, applications and transactional processes/ systems. Demand for these skill sets is particularly high in the Banking and Finance sector. Market research we have conducted concurs with our own assessment of the market; demand is highest for candidates with business analysis and re-engineering experience, as well as development exposure with supporting technologies such as Java, J2EE and .NET.

Contracting recruitment has already strengthened in these areas (as permanent candidates become harder to find) and demand is set to increase for candidates to carry out the development work, such as programmers with C++ and Java experience. Organisations are therefore focusing on retention of staff and it is consequently more difficult to attract quality candidates.

Roles that involve the reporting of IT expenditure from a portfolio perspective will continue to be of high importance. This, coupled with the current shortage of high quality IT candidates who also possess business acumen, renders the pool of desirable IT employees considerably smaller than demand. This is particularly noticeable in IT management roles within the salary range of $100,000 to $150,000.

Trends in Permanent Recruitment Supply in the Relevant Skill Areas
Availability of particular candidate skills
Generally, there is an acute shortage of technically qualified candidates who possess skills in consulting, architecture and strategy combined with the interpersonal skills to effectively communicate technology solutions in a business context.
The shortfall between positions requiring qualified candidates with this skill set and suitable applicants is evident when recruiting, among others, Solutions Architects, Enterprise Architects, IT Strategy Consultants and IT Outsourcing Managers.

Quality of Candidates
To be competitive for middle to senior management positions, IT management candidates need to possess commercial acumen and good communication skills in addition to the relevant experience and qualifications. However, the pool of IT managers who have actually made the transition from a pure technical focus is not large enough to meet client demand. This is particularly evident in roles involving service management or management of commercial IT outsourcing arrangements where the skill set for the roles requires a high level of both technical experience and commercial acumen.

Factors impacting availability and quality
Companies are seeking to derive greater value from their investment in technology and therefore systems integration is becoming of greater importance. Architects play a critical role in systems integration hence the demand for these types of IT roles is increasing.

The demand for candidates with tier one or tier two management consulting firm experience is extremely high and well exceeds supply.

The talent war for good candidates is compounded due to competition for resources and the traditionally small candidate resource pool in this area.

Conclusion
Generally, we expect the permanent jobs market to maintain at the levels seen in 2005. Employers will look to retain their high performing staff and attract new high quality employees.