Ross bucks the recruitment market trend

By Stan Beer
Tuesday, 05 August 2008 16:00

Recruitment

While the most recent figures show that the IT jobs market has been surprisingly resilient in the face of a softening economy, listed IT recruiters have still been severely punished by the market. However, one recruiter stands out from the rest in terms of its relatively benign treatment on the local bourse.

Ross Human Directions, founded by Julia Ross in 1988 and publicly listed in 2000, has by no means escaped the wrath of investors. It is after all a small cap stock and small caps have been, to put it mildly, out of favour since the beginning of year.

The share price of Ross is about 40% off its high from one year ago. However, this could be viewed as an achievement compared to other recruiters playing in the IT space which are typically down more than 55%, regardless of their financial performance.

The recently appointed president of the Ross and Julia Ross divisions for Australia and New Zealand, Sheryle Moon, believes that the company's resilience with investors in the face of adverse market conditions is largely because of its diversity.

"We are the only listed recruitment company which has a complete full service offering across the business," Ms Moon says.

"We've got the Julia Ross brand in the low-end professional, clerical, secretarial space. Then we've got the Ross recruitment brand, which is in the IT and specialist professional space. And then we've got the Ross non-recruitment brands, including IT and HR consulting practices. We've also got managed services, which is a complete recruitment process outsourcing group. In addition, we've got business process outsourcing which is quite independent of recruitment.

"If you look at that spread then, depending on how the economy moves, we have a breadth of opportunities that most of our competitors don't have."

IT recruitment has grown within the Ross organisation to the point where it is now almost 20% of the business, with the vast majority being in the contracting space.

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