Competition increasing among recruiters

COMPETITION in the recruitment market is becoming more intense as the heat comes out of the resources construction boom, and employers increasingly have their pick of workers and the agencies they use for locating them.

Recruiters say there is a big gap between candidates’ expectations about the availability of positions and the actual skills being demanded from employers, who are prepared to be more selective than before.

This is occurring as the volume of candidates rises in response to strong signals in the market about job availability in Western Australia.

The general view from recruiters is that there are considerably more agencies located in WA chasing work that appears to have peaked. Some smaller recruiters say they are also competing with a greater level of online recruitment.

In the white-collar professional space, Mars Recruitment director Lorna Alstin is one recruiter to have noticed employers demanding specific skills sets, just as the volume of potential candidates is increasing.

Ms Alstin said having lots of candidates without the right skills was a cost for recruitment firms.

“We’re finding that because of the high volumes of job seekers, we have to spend a lot more time trying to cut through the volume to find the right skill sets, and more time assessing people for suitability,” Ms Alstin said.

International recruitment firm Michael Page’s regional director for WA, David George, said another challenge in the WA market was that some companies were blinkered in their approach to finding candidates.

“Often an iron ore company will only want someone with an iron background, and oil and gas companies will only want someone with experience in the oil and gas field,” he said.

“It can be frustrating but we try to educate our clients by helping them understand they don’t necessarily need someone who has done it all before; you can get a breath of fresh air into the company if you look at someone with a different background.”

The same economic conditions that have caused an influx of candidates to WA also have brought many new recruitment agencies to the state, often setting up niche agencies servicing the mining industry.

Data from the 2008 Book of Lists show that only 40 per cent of the top 20 recruitment companies had some form of presence in the resources, mining or oil and gas fields. In 2012, that figure has jumped to 55 per cent.

“It’s certainly got a lot more competitive over the past 10 years and what we see is that a lot of recruitment companies come here after hearing about the WA economy, so a lot of small players come over and set up in the good times,” Mr George said.

The number of consultants at Michael Page in WA has grown by about 80 per cent each year over the past two years, from 20 consultants in 2010 to the 65 employed today, according to the Book of Lists, making it the fourth largest in the state.

Ms Alstin said the competition among Perth recruitment companies was starting to rival that of bigger cities such as Sydney.

“We’ve found a lot of companies that are established over east have heard about Perth and expanded into the market, so it’s definitely getting more competitive,” she said.

A recent report on the recruitment industry by market research firm IBISWorld suggested online job advertising was forecast to take “between 8 per cent and 10 per cent” of market share by the next five years.

At the moment, however, both Mr George and Ms Alstin said they didn’t perceive online advertising as a threat.

Online advertising has had a disruptive impact in the rural recruitment space, however.

Kelvin Thompson owns Bunbury-based RANZA, a rural recruitment company servicing predominantly broadacre and mixed enterprise farmers in the Wheatbelt, and he describes the influence of online advertising on his business as similar to what has occurred in the retail sector.