As closed borders intensify a skills shortage, demand for Australian mergers and acquisitions lawyers is so high that firms are offering signing bonuses for the first time in 15 years and have nearly doubled recruiting fees.
Firms are also reviewing salaries twice a year and have raised base pay by up to 15 percent as they try to avoid losing workers amid record-high demand for the industry’s services, people in the hiring process said.
“I had sign-on bonuses for nearly every deal in 2007 and this is very much like that, and actually probably more is required in this market to compete for those candidates,” said Belinda Fisher, a legal industry recruiter who has raised her fee from 18 percent to 30 percent of a placed lawyer’s salary.
The measures reflect a sense of desperation among Australian employers as a sharp increase in demand for some services — from M&A law to data analytics to hospitality — runs headlong into a workforce thinned out by two years of closed borders.
Demand for skilled technology workers, for instance, has soared as pandemic-related movement restrictions jolted the world into conducting business online. However, the shortage has been especially pronounced in Australia, where immigration remains on hold.
Job ads are 54 percent above pre-pandemic levels, but the number of job applications is down about the same amount, the employment Web site SEEK showed, just as Australia’s economy reconfigures itself to cope with supply chain blockages and a requirement to automate many aspects of trade.
People in fields seen as essential to the changed conditions — such as data management, business intelligence, cybersecurity and talent acquisition — can expect salary increases of up to 20 percent due to demand, job recruitment company Robert Half said.
“We’re finding ourselves talking to our clients about how they can retain staff, because in many ways the cost of replacement is more,” Robert Half’s Australia director Andrew Brushfield said. “If employers don’t have their back yard sorted, employees are leaving.”
Increasing pay is the main way to attract and keep staff, but flexibility in working at home was a close second, he added.
Wild Tech, a Sydney operator of cloud-based business software, is offering a A$10,000 (US$7,291) signing bonus for the first time because of the “tight labor conditions we’re experiencing,” managing director Grant Wild said. “I haven’t seen [signing bonuses] used this way, having worked 25 years in the technology space.”
Although Australia opened its borders this month to vaccinated citizens, recruiters have said that the difficulty of finding and keeping personnel might worsen next year as workers shake off some of the world’s longest COVID-19 lockdowns and look abroad.
About 2 million of Australia’s 25 million population postponed applying for or renewing a passport since early last year, but the number of applicants is now doubling every two months, an Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson said.
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