New budgets good for Qld job hunters

By Michael Lund

Queensland employers that have had a hold on recruitment over the past financial year will now have the freedom to take on new staff according to recruitment firm Hays.

“Companies that were previously restricted by budgets will hire permanent staff this quarter,” says Queensland director Darren Buchanan.

“Along with growing confidence and rising sales, the new financial year brings with it new budgets and allowances for headcount.”

He says many employers are already adding temporary staff to their teams which he expects will lead to more permanent positions becoming available in August and September.

Mr Buchanan says employers are still using “temporary-to-permanent” hiring to give them a chance to check out a candidate before offering a permanent  role but the strong resources sector is driving recruitment with signs that industry has returned to the pre-global financial crisis level.

Demand is strong in Queensland for technical candidates, in particular mine engineers, mine surveyors and geologists. Mining and flood construction recovery work is driving demand for engineers.

In finance there is demand for people to analyse trends and growth as the economy moves forward, says the Hays report. But there is also demand too in the insolvency area.

Support industries are on the lookout for new people, especially those who can multi-task in office environments.

On the flip side, new managing director of the Australasian arm of Korn/Ferry International recruitment firm Katie Lahey says hiring in Queensland is a mixed bag.

Speaking during a visit to Brisbane, the former head of the Business Council of Australia told CareerOne: “We do have a very strong resources sector but then other parts of the economy are quite modest or quite slow. The retail sector in particular is quite slow.”

Unemployment was also quite mixed across the state and she says more needs to be done to encourage people to move from relative black spots to areas where there is a shortage of skilled people.

“If you look at Cairns, which is suffering from a drop in tourism and the high Australian dollar, there is higher unemployment there than if you go to Gladstone where they are disparately short of people.”

Ms Lahey says both state and federal governments should be doing more to offer incentives to help people move to where the jobs demand is greater.

She wants more interstate movement too and says there is still a need to look overseas for some recruitment, both for migrants and to encourage expatriate Australians to return home.

Unemployment rates across Queensland

1 Cairns 8.6 per cent
2 Townsville 4.1 per cent
3 Mount Isa 5.9 per cent
4 Rockhampton 6.4 per cent
5 Gladstone 5.2 per cent
6 Bundaberg 7.3 per cent
7 Sunshine Coast 6.1 per cent
8 Brisbane 4.6 per cent
9 Ipswich 4.8 per cent
10 Toowoomba 3.8 per cent
11 Gold Coast 6.1 per cent  

Michael Lund is the Editor of CareerOne for The Courier-Mail