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Recruitment

New Zealand Recruitment Wrap Up 2014

By December 12, 2014No Comments

I’m having to bash today’s blog out in quite a hurry I’m afraid (or maybe that’s a good thing – you decide). Apparently there’s a load of kiwi websites down this morning, and with this blog being one of them, there’s not much time to write.

Thanks to everyone who made it to our final #RicePowWow of 2014 last night. If you weren’t able to make it, or perhaps didn’t want to attend (hey, it’s cool by me, you sit there cold calling people who don’t want to hear from you while the smarter recruiters come and drink free beer with those same people), then you missed our wrap up of the 2014 highlights for #NZRec. You also missed TradeMe Jobs’ Nic Turner performing an impressively improvised duet with Mikey Brown!

Mikey and Nic

So what were your highlights or lowlights of 2014 in our recruitment sector? Here’s what we at Rice Consulting loved (or loathed):

LinkedIn hit 1 million NZ members and their propaganda machine rolled into town with a swanky production at SkyCity, an event most memorable for their repeated attempts to promote their upcoming conference in Sydney.

Lots more happened on the recruitment conference scene, a part of our industry that, until a couple of years ago, shunned New Zealand entirely. We had the ATC guys bring the Strategic Workforce Planning Conference to Wellington, and more recently “Sourcing. Social. Talent 2014” to Auckland.

Even the RCSA chose Queenstown for their annual conference, hosting what was by many accounts (unverified, and rather surprisingly) a splendid event with plenty of learnings for recruiters (who’d have thought it?)

Phillip Tusing visited us no less than three times, bringing IT18, the Sourcing Summit and of course the recent RHUB.

We had about 4 Recruitment “Special Interest Groups” from HRINZ and then, last but not least, some curiously enigmatic new society calling themselves the “Good Recruiters Collective”…. After my blog revealing their clandestine creation I suppose I got kicked out… Did this ever actually happen? I’m beginning to feel like it was all a figment of my imagination.

We witnessed some bold Augmented Reality plays made by Fletcher Building (in Herald’s February Career Guide) and taken a step further by ASB with their EGM literally leaping out of the newspaper to entreat jobseekers to apply for their vacancies.

Even our beloved Job Boards finally started to innovate again. TradeMe Jobs launched Talent Chaser just last week, while SEEK pushed out their handy new back-end ATS, and launched a new-look, new-format SEEK Awards, with a judging panel instead of spurious “candidate” votes from mates and family members of recruiters.

The World Cup, predictably enough, heralded a swathe of blogs comparing different teams in the tournament to different types of recruitment companies. Sadly England looked most like a large global recruitment brand: a team with a globally-recognised and well-resourced brand that failed to translate into anything special in terms of performances on the pitch…

We witnessed a stoush between HRINZ and the newly-formed “Chartered Human Resources Institute”. I’m unaware of where this has got to since HRINZ issued their legal threats, but some commentary at last night’s PowWow suggested that something is still afoot with this new body, but no-one’s allowed to talk about it. Which doesn’t exactly make for great blog material now does it?

And last, but by no means least, ASB’s decentralising of their TA function brought about the #HireMattPontin campaign which, rather brilliantly, saw Matt Pontin’s hashtag trending above NZGreens, Dirty Politics and Labour on the Twitter streams just days before the General Election.

Thank you to everyone who supported, followed, collaborated, supplied, criticised or moaned about Rice Consulting and virtualRPO in 2014. We feel privileged to be a part of the awesome #NZRec community. Next year’s going to be a busy one so enjoy the rest of the silly season and have a relaxing break.

We will be back with a final blog for the year next Friday, but seeing as most of New Zealand will be in party mode for most of that day and night, including us, then don’t expect too much!

Jonathan Rice

MD at New Zealand rec-to-rec firm Rice Consulting and co-founder of on-demand recruiter offering Joyn. Recruitment agitator and frustrated idealist, father of two, husband of one, and lover of all things Arsenal and crafty beer.