Boost confidence

LINK Recruitment Brisbane managing director Kristen Mangelsdorf says the increase in temporary hires has been small but the trend shows that confidence is slowly being put into action.
“Companies are thinking that maybe they cut too deep before and now they want to beat the downturn – they need to lead from the front and lead by example,” says Mangelsdorf.
But she says wage freezes are constraining hiring managers from acting on their long-term strategies, which presents a lot of opportunities for SMEs to prosper.

“Hiring managers from big companies thinking in the long term know what they should do but they are restricted by hiring freezes – no one wants to get caught out being optimistic and making the wrong decisions too quickly,” she says.
“It depends on the industry but SMEs at the moment can really take advantage of the candidate market and source recruits they might not have been able to in the past – they could definitely be the shining light in the employment market.
“When people have been downsized by big corporates a lot of the candidate market is hesitant to go back into those companies.”

For the past four or five years there was a deep skills shortage in white collar professional roles in accounting, legal and engineering – 12 months ago you’d be lucky to get one person apply for a role, but now there can be 200 to 300 people applying for one position. But Mangelsdorf thinks this will change and when the market picks up the skills shortage could be worse, so companies need to keep an eye out for the skills they need.

Link Recruitment’s recent ‘White Paper: War for Talent or Battle for Survival’ was based on a survey of 450 Australian businesses which found 72 per cent of respondents agree that the economic downturn offers one of the best opportunities to recruit top talent in over a decade.

But 70 per cent say their organisation is not planning to recruit permanent or temporary staff in 2009.