Struggling with staff shortages?

We are in a tight labour market – which isn’t telling you anything you don’t know or that isn’t being highlighted almost daily through the media.

This pressure exists both for permanent and contract resource. I know of one large employer in retail with over 300 staff that struggles to recruit new staff. They hold their breath for the new staff they do find, hope they will last more than a week, and that’s assuming they actually front up for the first day after accepting the job. This involves significant cost without yielding a positive return.

This example is unfortunately not unique, and we know it is also a significant problem for professional services firms such as legal and accounting as they search for permanent employees.

Management Response provides Contract Executive Resource across most functional management disciplines including General Management, B2B Sales and Marketing, Operations, IT and Finance to help fill those short-term, interim, part-time or project-based gaps that businesses have. The provision of executive and senior finance resource on contract is the area of significant demand for us, driven by labour shortages and the impact the Covid pandemic has had on businesses.

Recently, a contact reached out to us to see if we had any contract financial resource available to help them. They simply couldn’t fill the permanent roles they were looking for in their head office finance team, had already engaged quite a number of contractors, and were working through a one-off, but significant, financial event that was drawing from a depleted resource pool. In this case, we did have a more than competent financial accountant amongst our Finance Associates who wasn’t fully committed to other clients and thus had the capacity to provide short-term support. The added bonus for our client was his relevant industry experience! He was also based in Auckland while their head office was in Wellington – another time this might have been a problem but not anymore. One positive of the pandemic (glass half full view) is that we are all much more au fait now with working remotely.

An observation with respect to the contract market, finance in particular, is that often the candidates tend towards the older end of the spectrum rather than the younger. Maybe the size of mortgages that younger people are now taking on makes them more likely to choose the security of a permanent role? A positive of this is that these are career contractors who come with a back catalogue of extensive experience in many companies across multiple industries, and with a passion to improve performance and increase value for the businesses they work in.

While our current focus is on the more mid to senior end of the financial contract market, the same principles apply to other functional disciplines. Given the constraints, cost, and time of trying to find good people, contractors can be considered as a real option in this tight market:

• Where you need a particular skill set – a CFO for instance – but cannot afford or don’t need a full-time resource at this level. It can be difficult to then find a CFO who only wants to work part time for you for the 10-20 hours a month you might need them.
• You need to fill a senior Finance resource gap in your business due to an extended leave arrangement or to fill a gap to get you through the very challenging and often lengthy recruitment process.
• Your business is in transition or there is a major project where you need someone with a sufficient skill and experience level for a limited period, and you either don’t have enough capacity or the right capability within your existing team to meet this extra need.