At the start of 2022, the Peoplecorp team put down their predictions for the coming year and shared them in our January newsletter. Wanting to hold ourselves to account, we have reviewed these predictions below with some commentary and a mark out of 10!
Flexibility
No surprises that this topic will continue to be front of mind for all employers. Flexibility is no longer a draw card or a stand-out as part of an EVP. And it is not just how flexibility is managed that will be a hot topic, but how leaders can continue to lead effectively when their people work remotely some or all of the time.
We predict there will be more HR roles working from home most (or all) of the time. We also anticipate an increase in reduced working weeks where a higher number of HR roles are done in 4 days, that were previously done in 5 (potentially without the reduction in package).
Well yes, this was an easy one to kick things off with, in that flexible working practices continue to be a big consideration for most organisations. We have certainly seen a handful of roles being done entirely remotely, but not the numbers we thought might have been possible. And we have definitely seen quite a few savvy Clients make their budget work by the candidate doing a compressed working week. 8/10
Remuneration
Salaries have jumped up significantly in the last 12 months for most HR roles. This has been for two main reasons – shortage of talent in a market when everyone is hiring and the borders have been closed, and secondly due to HR becoming increasingly more important as a function.
One part of the market that has not shifted that significantly for salaries is the graduate/entry point HR level roles. We predict that graduate salaries will increase as the year rolls on, particularly as we also anticipate more students adding HR modules to their Commerce degrees.
We really did nail this one! Graduate salaries have definitely jumped up in the past 6 to 12 months, where roles that might have previously been $60-65K package, now sitting at the $70-75K package mark at least. 10/10
Opportunities and gaps in the market
There are so many opportunities for returning Aussies/Kiwis from overseas, or international working holiday visa candidates. In such a tight candidate market, and with salaries having gone out of whack somewhat, this savvy group could really capitalise on getting into some great roles. We are already noticing more interest from candidates generally in moving back to Aus, or coming here for a professional working holiday.
Towards the end of last year we saw an increasing number of businesses focus on re-working their EVP. This is something that will certainly continue as organisations wrangle with their talent attraction and retention challenges. And in line with that, the wellbeing strategies for employers will become a bigger focus.
As you will see above, we had anticipated that 2022 would be the year where heaps of overseas returners started coming back, as well as a big influx of Working Holiday Visa types. In reality, this did not happen to the extent we thought it would. Some feedback from a number of sources in the UK in particular was that there was still a hesitancy about coming to Australia on a working holiday. The hard border closures and some of our more significant weather events (floods/fires) have had an impact for some people on how desirable a location Australia they see as Australia to be. In the last 2 months we have seen the numbers of work-holiday visa candidates increase somewhat, so will give ourselves some marks for that! 6/10
In demand roles
The premium attached to finding top notch recruiters will not slow down, and we anticipate these roles being some of the hardest to fill.
Additionally, we anticipate an increase in payroll and payroll remediation roles as a larger number of companies uncover historical wage issues.
We see a big rise in the temp market at all levels all the way up to Exec, where Clients will pull in resources for short, sharp projects.
We’re also predicting that many SME businesses will look to add senior, more strategic HR roles as the challenges of attracting and retaining talent, managing teams remotely and maintaining engagement through hybrid working become key priorities on the Executive agenda. In the same vein, small businesses will look to add an HR resource earlier in their evolution (around 50 employees) as the added workload around people and culture makes it difficult for senior management to oversee it effectively.
The demand for recruiters was busy all year but eased somewhat in the past 2 months. We definitely saw a reasonable number of Payroll and payroll remediation experts, and we have placed more temp contractors this year than in any previous year at Peoplecorp, so that market was definitely as busy as we anticipated. One area we saw a lot of demand in that we had not anticipated, was for technical ER and IR specialists. We had a huge increase in these types of role at an array of levels. 7/10
General observations
With an election looming and the likely increase in interest rates, the craziness of the market is bound to cool off at some point around the middle part of the year, but we do not anticipate this being a steep drop. This, plus of course the amount of people who will be in new roles by then, we think will see more of a market plateau for HR jobs.
We do think that salaries as a whole will start to level off somewhat as well. With the likely increase of available candidates, the heat and aggressiveness of throwing crazy money at some people for some roles, will diminish.
The “cool off” that we anticipated did happen, but not in the middle of the year. It ended up being around late October when things started to get somewhat less busy, but still with more activity happening than we thought would be the case. Salaries continue to be pretty punchy, although again, we have seen a cooling off of the crazy salary jumps that were being offered early 2022. 6.5/10
