IT hiring slowing down

Recruiters forecast the IT jobs market will slump 12 per cent this month.

Australia’s biggest IT recruitment company Peoplebank surveys its top 50 clients on hiring plans for contract and permanent staff each month.

“The market is down 12 per cent from August to November and there is a modest decline from October to November, but it is not substantial,” Peoplebank chief executive officer Peter Acheson said.

The survey found the strongest sectors for IT hiring were resources and engineering.

“The professional services sector is also continuing to be pretty strong,” Mr Acheson said. The utilities sector was another solid hirer due to smart-grid projects in NSW and Victoria, with good activity also in telecommunications.

The survey found resources-driven states such as Western Australia continued to out-perform the rest of the country.

“In fact, it is exhibiting all the signs of an increasingly tight candidate market such as counter offers,” Mr Acheson said.

There had been a decline in demand in NSW and Victoria, the survey found. “This is consistent with the fact that we are in this two-speed economy economists talk about,” Mr Acheson said.

He said most states showed a trend towards contracting, with NSW the exception favouring permanent. Mr Acheson said across all sectors resources, engineering and IT showed positive hiring intentions.

Spark Recruitment director Luke Singleton said while hiring activity was consistent, it was far from buoyant.

“The commercial and ICT sectors are relatively active in their hiring,” he said. “Job flows were significantly down in September and remain subdued in October. Our prediction is that it will remain reserved for the remainder of the financial year.

It is most definitely the quietest it has been in the last 12 months.” Balance Recruitment managing director Paul Foster said there had been a pause in the market due to global economic concerns affecting local business confidence.

“So far most of the softening has come at the senior, strategic end of the market, but these things tend to eventually have a knock-on effect across the entire sector.”

In other data, the Peoplebank Intermedium Federal ICT Labour Hire Index, released this week, grew by 23 per cent over the first six months of the year.

“The federal government hiring in terms of contractor labour has been at the highest levels since late 2006,” Mr Acheson said. The research showed increased demand for leading-edge technology skills, including in the Microsoft suite, as well as for project managers and contractors with business intelligence skills.

The Peoplebank Intermedium Index found the government’s spending on ICT contractors had jumped from $626 million in (2008-09) to $804m in 2010-11. The average value of contracts in 2010-11 was $124,396 compared with $119,870 in 2008-09.

Mr Acheson said contractors were being lured to Canberra by attractive projects such as the major centralisation within Department of Human Services agencies.

“Federal government projects typically are not short term — they are major projects that take a number of years,” he said. “So you could be pretty confident that if you are working on one of those, that the next few years look good.”