Looking at the list of 2023 Hi-Tech Award Winning Companies it really stood out to me that our main centres dominate the technology landscape in New Zealand. While this was always going to be the case as cities by nature draw more technology firms than smaller regional centres, I still think it's somewhat interesting that every single company that won an award was either based in Christchurch or Auckland. Where this opens a potentially interesting discussion is that on the other hand, both individual award recipients, Fraser Paine (Hi-Tech Young Achiever) and Janine Grainger (Inspiring Individual) are from Waikato and Bay of Plenty respectively. This disparity between where our top companies are choosing to base themselves and where some of our top tech talent is coming from begs the question: is there untapped potential in the regions that doesn’t come through because the majority of employers stick to the cities?
Across the board we have a skills shortage in New Zealand, by now this isn’t news but has been front of mind again since Stats NZ data for 2022 showed that in the past 12 months, annual net migration loss to Australia was the largest in almost a decade. Despite the tech sector's growth, the fact remains that we cannot compete with salaries overseas, and our high cost of living makes more grads question the sense in choosing to stay. From an employer's perspective it’s understandable, interns/juniors require time and resources to train and it is hugely competitive between firms for top talent. Small and medium businesses in particular are putting a lot of time and investment into people earlier in their careers, often only for them to leave within the first 24 months. This has been discussed and some great initiatives are happening locally in Christchurch being driven by Canterbury Tech, however there is only so much an employer can do and the fact is, our skills shortage isn’t going away anytime soon.
Looking at what other options are available, employers might want to consider looking into the possibility of increasing hiring in regional areas. I’ve been looking into the numbers, and it seems there is likely potential which isn’t being fully realised yet. Last month, NZ Tech released the Tech Sector Key Metrics 2021. At the end of this document there is a key table; breakdown of tech sector employment in NZ by region. The numbers show that our three main centres - I’m going to refer to Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch as our “main centres”, as these are the only regions which house over 10% of our population - are seriously over-represented when it comes to tech sector employment. This is because outside of these three main centres, the percentage of total tech sector employment is less than the percentage of the population that region makes up, and there is not a single exception.
To show what I’m saying I’ll use Waikato to explain what this means. According to our most recent census 9.7% of New Zealand's population lives in Waikato, but the region only employs 6.2% of the technology sector workforce. The most extreme example of this is the Gisborne region, where the percentage of tech employment in the region is 80.2% less than the percentage of the population that lives there. On the other hand, over half of our tech sector roles are in Auckland, despite the city housing 33.4% of our population, meaning that Auckland is over represented by 55.4%. It is extremely rare when looking for trends like this in data that all results are consistent and there is not a single region to break this trend.
With those statistics in mind, it seems there is good reason for firms to consider whether hiring staff in the regions might be a good long term strategy, either by opening the doors more towards remote working or establishing teams/offices in regional centres. There are plenty of reasons that make our regions desirable places to live; housing affordability, outdoor pursuits, shorter commute/drive times and the rise of remote working. So it's more likely that there is a proportionally low number of tech roles in our regions due to companies being slower to look to the regions for tech talent, rather than there being less talent coming from the regions.
With all of this said, there are some fantastic companies regionally based across NZ which have all successfully built (or are building) teams in their respective regions, firms like Loaded (Queenstown), Timely (Dunedin) and LawVu + Robotics Plus (both Bay of Plenty/Tauranga) all come to mind. To truly tackle the long-term skills shortage in this sector, we need more companies like these in the regions to inspire young people growing up in these areas to envision a career in technology.
With the consequences of climate change a now very real threat for companies and organisations, adopting a sustainable approach has become a necessity, not just a nice-to-have. While that’s good news for DETA, which has benefited from an increased market opportunity, it’s thrown up a few challenges to navigate -
namely people resources. With new projects and leads coming in thick and fast, DETA had a decision to make; turn away new clients because they didn’t have the appropriate people onboard to assist, or say yes to every opportunity and find the talent to make it happen.
DETA decided on the latter approach, so needed to scale up their engineering capacity, and do it rapidly. They chose to outsource their talent attraction to an engineering recruitment specialist, and haven’t looked back since.
After doing their due diligence, DETA made the decision to partner with Talent Hive, citing Talent Hive’s reputation for reliability and their history of delivering high-quality candidates’ as two of the key driving factors for their decision.
After consulting with DETA’s General Manager of Operations to scope out roles and define the company’s goals, Talent Hive’s Director of Engineering, Matt Love- Smith got to work tailoring their award-winning Talent Acquisition Programme to attract the most suitable talent for the roles.
Their sourcing strategy included:
By strategically sourcing and engaging only the highest calibre of passive candidates, Talent Hive accelerated time to value and achieved an impressive interview-to-offer ratio, drastically reducing the time DETA’s Hiring Manager was required to attend interviews.
"It's been a pleasure working with Talent Hive on finding technical recruits. Matt's diligence and dedication has made what we thought would be a difficult process, a seamless and stress-free one. Despite a shortage of talent, Matt has consistently secured us a high- calibre of candidates, which has set us up for success."
- Callum Streeter, GM Operations, DETA
We're here to help you thrive, so if you have a project in the pipeline or you're turning down business because you don't have the right people onboard, visit us at talenthive.nz and let us help you achieve your business goals.
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