By Peter Acheson, CEO, Peoplebank
July 20th 2010

As you probably know, Peoplebank yesterday lodged a scheme of arrangement offer with the ASX to acquire Ross Human Directions (RHD).

If successful, we would become Australia’s largest white collar recruitment company with revenues of over $800m, 600 employees and offices across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Combining Peoplebank’s IT specialisation with RHD’s strengths in financial services, accounting, legal, HR and other sectors would mean that we can operate across a broader market.

Date: July 19th 2010

On July 19th 2010 Peoplebank lodged a scheme of arrangement offer with the ASX to acquire major Australian recruitment company Ross Human Directions (RHD).

RHD shareholders will vote on the scheme of arrangement on the 14th October 2010, to be successful 75% of RHD shareholders must approve the acquisition.

Date: 16th of June 2010

Peoplebank has signed an agreement with Daxtra Technologies to use the UK company’s world-leading software for automating the analysis of job applicants’ information and skillsets. Based on initial experiences, Peoplebank estimates that the platform will speed its analytic processes by around 80%, giving the recruiter faster speed-to-market and reducing its teams’ administrative loads.

Daxtra’s CandidateCapture platform automatically create and update candidate database records, by undertaking semantic analysis that extracts meaningful information on key parameters such as qualifications, years and recency of experience.  CandidateCapture fully automates the processing of resumes, as they arrive, and promises accuracy above 90% in its analysis – a level that approaches human accuracy standards.

The latest edition of the Peoplebank Intermedium Federal Labour Hire Index can be downloaded by clicking here

The third Peoplebank Intermedium Federal ICT Labour Hire Index shows the continuation over 2009 and into 2010 of a long-term downward trend in the Government’s reliance on ICT contractors. Peoplebank observes that, responding to this contraction, ICT contractors are relocating to the booming Sydney and Melbourne markets – with consequences including that the first signs of a looming skills shortage are emerging.

The Labour Hire Index, which measures the average cost of an average unit of labour hire paid by the Federal Government to ICT contractors stood at 1,175 points in December 2009. This was just 15 points below the December 2008 level, but a fall of almost 50 percent against the Index peak of 2,251 points in August 2006.