Government collaboration with Frog Recruitment

Host (Shannon Barlow): Hi there, Peter. Lovely to have you on the show today. Good afternoon. How are you going?

Guest Speaker (Peter Crestani): Not too bad. Now, we saw from the results there that it is actually looking quite good for Wellington, but maybe it feels a little bit different on the ground. And, you know, we're nearly through, having gone through that first quarter of 2024. I'm sure the results might be a little bit different when they come out. What's your feeling of the market in Wellington right now, particularly in that government space?

Shannon Barlow: Yeah, it's really challenging at the moment. I think we're still to see the flow on effects of the reductions in the government sector. A lot of the government agencies are now working through their plans of what they're going to do to achieve the six and a half to seven and a half percent reductions in costs. And I think that will flow into the second and third quarters of this year. So those figures look pretty good, but I think they're going to change quite significantly in the near future.

Peter Crestani: Yeah, and now, of course, you've had many years of experience. I won't say how many, but many years of experience working within this space, and I'm sure you've seen the ups and downs within the industry as well. What do these changes mean for, say, hiring managers within the public sector, as well as job seekers or employees in that space?

Shannon Barlow: Yeah, well, I think it's quite challenging. The first thing for hiring managers is deciding on what's going to happen, have the plan and then executing. And that's emotionally quite challenging when you're dealing with people's lives. So I think make sure that if you're a hiring manager and you have to make those changes, look after yourself as well as your team. Really important. The flow on effects will be for as a hiring manager on that side of things will be that for some roles there's still going to be skill shortages so technical roles which are very specific in nature with a small talent pool they're still going to be difficult to recruit for on the other side of it for more general roles there's probably going to be quite a flow of candidates I've heard of some roles that have been advertised in the project space where they're getting couple of hundred applications.

Peter Crestani: And then the challenge for the hiring organizations is managing that flow. So using a recruiter can be really helpful in that space even it sounds counterintuitive but we're really good at appropriately refining who you're going to see so we manage that process really well we're experienced at doing it yet some hiring managers I was dealing with one earlier in the week and he's got CVs from about two or three weeks ago that he still hasn't looked at and you know, it's not a good look for the employer brand. It's not good for the candidate. And as a hiring manager, you could be missing out on someone really good that could be great for your team. So that's one aspect to it. On the other side, the specialization so if it is a technical role or a role which is has a small skill set you're still going to need to be going out and it's going to be proactive recruiting for those roles.

Shannon Barlow: Yeah, I've seen this before. There's a lot of noise and flapping at the beginning of this. It'll calm down and we just, you work through it a lot of pressure on contractors to. I was talking to a chat this morning and he's got contractors that work for him they move progressing them or having conversations really about moving from hourly contract roles to fixed term or permanent some people will do that and some won't so there's going to be challenges with that so it is a very up and down market but it will come right six months' time, it'll calm down and we'll be at a more stable supply and demand component of the market. So a little bit of danger, well, danger, not really danger, it's flux to go through so far. Yeah, little teething problems. And where can you and the team so highly experienced within, within this space, particularly supporting government agencies and with policy? So where can we fit into things and really be able to provide that value through these through these challenging times?

Peter Crestani: Yeah, well, it would be around our network. So the vast majority of our placements come from people we know or someone that we know. So in our networks are very extensive. So while you might have lots of candidates, it's how do you make those decisions about who's good, who's not? So we can help that with, as an organization, Frog has had a number of accolades over the last few years in particular around candidate care. So managing your candidates, because in the medium term, things are going to change. So if you treat people badly or not appropriately, you don't get back to them, that really impacts on your organization's brand. So you need to still be protective and be timely in the way you work. The other thing you say for some roles, if there's a contract role, we can help on the payroll side of things. We're only all of government payroll. for recruitment and the other, we are on the all of government contracts, so making sure that you're dealing with people that know what they're doing in the government space, I think is really important. um and the specializations and those steps particularly in policy and project and analysis kind of role so having said that we've got a variety of roles at the moment i think the market might be changing a little bit well this week it seems to be better so what happens next week i had the question someone yesterday oh so you know it might be a little bit better what's going to happen in the future I don't know. Timing will be what the timing will be. So I think we just all need to keep our powder dry and work through and be calm and level-headed about it because it will change.

Shannon Barlow: It's an interesting point you made before. So for a lot of employers or organizations where they're starting to see an increase in applications, for a start, I'm sure they're thinking, oh, this is great, it's starting to swing and there's finally a lot more to choose from and we can do this ourselves. But of course, there's a range of other challenges that that presents as well. you know, being able to still work efficiently and effectively while suddenly trying to, you know, put on a recruiter hat when that's not your normal job and to wade through those responses can create its own challenges as well.

Peter Crestani: Yeah, and you can miss some of the, so you've got a whole lot of candidates and you could be quite prescriptive in your criteria, but often in recruitment it's the intuition from experience that you go, oh, this person might not look quite right, but you talk to them and go, oh, actually, it's like an onion. You peel another layer, and then there's another layer, and you go, oh, gee, that would be great. And it would be very easy in some circumstances to actually just go, no, they're not right. So I think dealing with experienced people, I think, is really important. It's the science versus the art part of recruitment. And the art part, you need time to learn. You need to learn the craft of it in dealing with people.

Shannon Barlow: Fantastic. Well, as you can see, your details are on the screen there below. So if you are interested or even just need to kind of chew the fat and to be able to talk about the changes within the market and come up with a plan to be able to, I guess, anticipate some of those changes coming, feel free to get in touch with Peter and the wonderful team in Wellington.