This week saw me sticking to my policy of only eating breakfast if provided by a job board. It was TradeMe Jobs this time round, meaning an earlier (and wetter) start, but the promise of a Full English lured me from my bed at 6am. Unfortunately, this is 2025, so what was once bacon, sausage, and egg, had been downgraded to my nemesis – the croissant. In their defence, TradeMe Jobs trumped SEEK with the addition of heat and bacon, but make no mistake. The glory days of job board breakfasts are a thing of the past. Halcyon days indeed.
Yesterday, it was TradeMe Jobs stalwart Shamubeel Eaqub tasked with explaining economic theory to a bunch of recruiters with the financial literacy of dental plaque. For me, Shamubeel is the best. Not only does he have a sense of humour, but I reckon he loves to get on the sauce. He strikes me as that mate at Uni who would be on the turps until 5am and still roll in at 8am, looking a million dollars, and clutching a first class economics paper. And your girlfriend is nowhere to be seen. It is my ambition to one day share a beer with him. He keeps ignoring my Facebook pokes however.
Regular readers will know I’m not one for sharing any quality content from these things. I’m not a note taker as these people get bullied. Broadly speaking however, economically, Shamubeel holds a similar view to SEEKs Dr Blair Chapman; this recession has been worse than the GFC, we’re near the bottom, and will slowly pull up in the next three to six months. If you find it easier to understand data like this based on the tumescence of a school boy’s penis, you can read my previous blog here. What I like about Shamubeel however, is not so much his micro analysis of the job market, but more so the broader, geopolitical macro analysis he provides. Spotting trends month to month helps us decide whether to go out for dinner on Saturday. Spotting trends that last decades helps us decide if we should keep recruiting or sell up and invest in nuclear armaments (*spoiler alert* the answer is “yes“). The comment that had me talking to my wife last night, was that we have seen 80 years of mostly global stability, and we are probably entering a period of 80 years of instability. Governments will change quicker, there will be more conflict of all kinds, and politicians will need to do things, any things, as quickly as possible in order to impress an increasingly stupid, fickle, and unstable electorate. Trump, an obvious example, has created policies which harm his working class voter base, yet they love him for it as he’s “doing something“. And to think, we haven’t seen the worst of it, it’s heading this way, and we have may have 80 years of it. I’m only thankful that I’m 43 and not 23. 10 years and I’m done. Either retired or sniped by a disgruntled Consult recruiter. Just joking. They’re disgruntled, but not with me. And if it wasn’t easy enough to hate Boomers who claim that it was “just as hard for them“, only to realise that they actually had the smooth 80 years, and the kids are now left with this shower of sh*t. Just as an aside – the average house in NZ in 1970 was $15k. That’s equivalent to $135k today…
What does this mean for the recruitment industry?
Well, I see a few things happening this year that will in someway future proof firms to an increasingly volatile and hectic world. The big thing we will see is quality firms diversifying their offering. After two years of everyone being too scared to do anything, we are hearing murmurs of firms looking to expand into different areas. In the most part, this is specialist recruitment agencies adding a further specialism or specialisms. Before this year is out, we will see several firms entering new disciplines. In fact, I’ve seen two this week, with Lynx‘s Pete Stewart pushing into tech, and Stellar gearing up to go Healthcare in NZ. There will be more to come. The current driver for this is that many clients (including AoG) are wanting to rationalise their supplier list. The more that one firm can do, the more PSAs they’ll get on. However, it also spreads the risk as we move into a world where decisions on how money is spent flipflops every 3 years.
We will also see firms expand their geographical footprint. Aotearoa is still a parochial place and being “in the regions” certainly helps with local business. However, in the future, I see this a spreading the risk as successive governments go from investing in technology to encouraging yam mining in Taihape (or whatever they do out there). The current rationale for these powerplays is to make the most of a soon-to-be-growing market. I can’t help but think that they are also inadvertently (or perhaps intentionally) future proofing themselves for a world where we have to pivot our offering based on something a future Prime Minster sees on TikTok.
Anyway, it was not all doom and gloom. This year will be better than last, and those firms who are agile and open to new ways of working could have a bigger slice of the pie in an increasingly crazy world. Have a good weekend.
^SW
