The bleak mood among Melbourne recruiters is lifting thanks to an arrest in the number of redundancies and a tentative upturn in the architectural jobs market, a specialist recruitment agency has said.

Leigh Monro, senior consultant at specialist property recruitment consultancy Kingfisher, told Architecture & Design that Victoria’s jobs market is changing. The mood is “lightening”, with a number of well-run medium-sized practices looking to take advantage of the glut of candidates to make strategic placements.

“The market’s almost two-paced,” Monro said. “The oddity of the situation is that it’s mostly the bigger practices, particularly those that are reliant on developers or commercially-based projects, that have been worst hit [by the financial downturn].” In contrast, many small-to-medium sized practices are “doing quite well”, he said.

Many smaller firms’ growth had been stifled in previous years by the larger practices, which were snapping up the best job candidates as well as the most lucrative projects.

But being unable to ‘boom’ has meant that these smaller firms now don’t need to ‘bust’, Monro said.

Medium-sized practices seem to be coming out of the global downturn relatively unscathed, he said. “They were in a position over the past two years where they couldn’t grow, they were being sucked out of the market by the bigger players, so they didn’t gear up when times were good and consequently aren’t gearing down now,” he said.

The picture in Sydney is not quite so rosy, Jamie Keay, senior consultant at specialist architecture and interior design recruiters Bloomfield Tremayne, said. However, in this market the medium-sized firms are faring best.

“Sydney has taken a bit of a hit; it has been quite quiet,” Keay said. “Any firms doing large-scale commercial work are unfortunately struggling, both here and in places like Dubai, and that’s been pretty negative.”

But Keay is finding that medium-sized groups that have picked up work are starting to recruit “quite heavily” and are on the hunt for senior staff.

“The most positive trend in the industry is that the redundancies seem to have stopped,” Keay told Architecture & Design.

There has also been an enormous shift by recruiting firms towards hiring staff on a contract basis, Keay said, with barely any firms offering permanent positions even if work off the back of the government’s stimulus package means they have pipeline projects guaranteed for the next 12 months.

Gemma Battenbough

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