I don’t blog about Christchurch much. Odd in some ways given that it’s New Zealand’s second largest city. In fact, based on the news coverage that the Garden City receives in general, it seems hard to believe that it’s almost twice as big (by population) as Wellington. Wellington, being the seat of Government and therefore the reason half of us hate our lives currently, gets all the attention from me. And when I’m not bashing AoG or raving about Supreme Coffee, I’m boasting about the Ferrari’s we all drive up here in Auckland. Christchurch on the other hand hasn’t been mentioned since Robert Walters decided to pull pin.
The reason for this has nothing to do with my view on the place. In fact, I’ve always enjoyed my time in the city. Flat land, crisp weather, and Uber drivers who actually know the streets always makes for a pleasant few days. Look past those weird city centre gravel “car parks”, the lack of people walking around, and the casual racism, and you have yourself a fine place to raise a family. The challenge with Christchurch from a recruitment perspective, is that it’s not the “home” of anything. Auckland may have a traffic, overpriced houses, and ram raids, but we also have the most commerce. Wellington might have frumpy middle-aged women skulking around in kaftans and pounamu, but it is the place for government recruitment. Don’t kill me Cantabrians, but compared to this, the recruitment landscape in Christchurch can be somewhat parochial.
I do worry about Christchurch however.
Obviously, we’ve seen Robert Walters leave the market. This is covered in some detail here, and in many ways, your view on this tells me who you are as a person. The optimists in Christchurch will say “Awesome! That’s one less competitor. Time to snap up their clients”. The pessimists and realists will say “They left because they had no clients”. RW are not the first to leave. Hudson did. Manpower (who once had a good team down there) did. Even Hays who will survive a nuclear winter operate with a much smaller team than they once did.
This blog wasn’t prompted by the guilt of historically ignoring Christchurch however. Instead, it is based on the number of Christchurch-based recruiters who we have seen “move on” in the last two weeks. They have done this either publicly, typically with a cringe-worthy LinkedIn post which passive-aggressively doesn’t mention their boss, or we hear about it from a p*ssed-off recruiter, p*ssed-off boss, hugely relieved boss, or secretive recruitment tittle-tattle. And if they haven’t left already, we keep hearing the murmurs of offices being shut down, or leaders pledging their commitment to the city as they maintain a 12 person office for a part-time candidate manager. Just what is going on down there?
My view is that it suffers from what has already been highlighted. And the current economic climate, which unlike the actual climate, doesn’t seem to want to change, is a bridge too far for such a small market. Auckland is screwed because no businesses want to spend any money. But there are a lot of businesses. Wellington is screwed because of AoG and this hate-filled Government. But there are a lot of government agencies. This recession has been like chemotherapy; it almost kills you to kill the cancer, so you better be strong enough to be left standing. Without a massive private sector, or all those government agencies waiting in the wings to deliver the up-turn, I’m not sure how strong Christchurch can be. The rebuild is long forgotten (and yet never completed), the public sector is almost exclusively regional, and commerce is deadly slow across the whole country. The waiting game is easier when you have big business and big government somewhere on the horizon. Without this, it takes some big cajónes to invest in Christchurch right now.
I’m going to finish with a prediction. A sad one to be honest, but please remind me of it come January. I predict we will see at least three recruitment firms leave the Christchurch market before the end of the year. I hope I’m wrong, and thankfully for Christchurch, I usually am.
^SW
