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Technology people IT skills shortage to drive margins and pay explosion: Peoplebank boss
Technology people IT skills shortage to drive margins and pay explosion: Peoplebank boss | IT skills shortage to drive margins and pay explosion: Peoplebank boss |
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| by Stan Beer | ||
| Friday, 01 June 2007 | ||
  
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Most popular skills tags.NET Active Directory C# Cisco Development HTML Infrastructure Management Network Oracle Project Management SAP SDLC SQL Server Support Sybase TCP/IP Unix VB.NET Web Services/SOAP XML"There is beginning to be a realization now that clients can't continue to push margins with agencies because they can't get the people now. You don't have to be Einstein to understand that if an agency has got two or three jobs and one candidate that can fill those jobs, the agency can have a say in where that person goes. If the person can go into client A which is a low margin or client B which is a better margin, you can bet your bottom dollar which way the agency is going to push the candidate." Mr Lau sees demand and the IT skills shortage continuing for some time yet. "I see IT demand continuing for another two or three years," he says. "We're not educating people at a greater rate than we're using them so the skills shortage is going to stay." As rival recruitment firms like Candle look to grow their business through diversification away from ICT, Peoplebank, one of Australia's largest specialist IT&T recruitment companies is sticking to its roots, according to Mr Lau. Peoplebank in terms of straight sales volume, sits slightly behind major technology recruiters Candle and Ambit. With around 100 staff in all the major capitals, aside from Darwin and Hobart, and about $140 million revenue, Peoplebank has built its success primarily on the back of Australia's biggest IT user sector, Government. "Canberra is our largest operation, two thirds of our revenue comes from state and federal government (sector)and we're the number two supplier to the Federal Government behind Paxus,"says Mr Lau. "We've had between 30% and 40% compound annual growth over the last three years." Going forward, where is the growth going to come from? Consolidation is the short answer, according to Mr Lau. "The recruitment sector will probably accelerate the pace of consolidation and Peoplebank will probably be a consolidator or consolidatee," Mr Lau says. So Peoplebank may be acquired? "If we don't meet our internal objectives and the board's objectives, yes that's highly likely," says Mr Lau. Is it viable going forward to remain an IT specialist recruiter? "Definitely. This business now with the larger pressure that contracting agencies are under from the client, the business now is all about scale and efficiency," says Mr Lau. "So there is an imperative to get larger."
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