When developing business networks, giving is as important as receiving.

When Jennifer Dalitz moved to the city from a small town in South Australia, it took her a while to realise there was more going on in the world of work than initially met the eye.

“I saw people around me getting noticed and promoted,” says the chief executive of Sphinxx, an organisation focused on advancing women as leaders. “They weren’t as senior, skilled or experienced as me. Then I realised they were finding out about opportunities through the grapevine. They were using their networks.”

Dalitz eventually realised that successful networkers didn’t simply lean on their contacts but supported their networks in return. Enrolling in an MBA, she used study as an opportunity to develop the skill herself.

“I had a real goal of networking. I have won so much business-consulting work through that network, including a $200,000 contract through a recommendation from a peer,” she says.

Dalitz believes her targeted entry into the world of networking worked for a few reasons. “You’ve got to form deep enough relationships with people so they know exactly what you do, otherwise it’s not really possible [for it to be effective],” she says. “Studying or working with someone is great, so are professional associations.”

Dalitz believes people who go to one networking event expecting immediate results are missing the point. “Networking is about relationships,” she says. “I believe you need to give before you get, so I aim to help others before I expect them to help me.

Recently, I gave two referrals to someone I wanted to work with. After the second referral I got a phone call saying, ‘Let’s have a coffee to figure out how I can help you’.”

While Dalitz sees value in social networking and finds her list of 1500-plus connections extremely useful, she says you don’t need the numbers to network well. “You just need a small mastermind group.”

As a national sales manager with IT company Interactive, Melbourne-based Charlie Sutherland agrees with Dalitz that giving back to your networks is vital. Where most people fail, he believes, is in the basic social niceties that are often forgotten in our time-poor week.

“Today’s online tools make it easier to network but old-world behaviours are still important,” he says. “To build a network you need to turn up on time, write thank yous - even if they are via email - and maintain a strong sense of social awareness. People get lazy and forget these fundamentals.”

Sutherland believes the fundamentals are important because, for him, networking is most effective when the two parties like each other.

“Of course, there has to be a mutually beneficial outcome but it works so much better when the people get along and want to work together,” he says.

“I am always being asked to align with other people but if I don’t like someone, it’ll never get off the ground. You want to build mutual trust and hold shared values and ethics, including the view that helping each other requires a genuine two-way approach.”

Like Dalitz, Sutherland has been impressed when people new to his network show they understand the value of giving. “People get so focused on what they want to achieve that when they interact with others they don’t think about how they can help instead,” he says.

“At a recent meeting one of the attendees came up afterwards and asked me who were the three top people I was trying to connect with in business at the moment. When I got back to my office he had organised introductions for me.”

The national chief executive of IT recruiter Peoplebank Australia, Peter Acheson, says the way you perceive your networks is key to this approach. The goal is to use your contacts effectively without getting anyone offside.

“Think of them as alliances: valuable as bouncing boards, allies and a source of useful information,” he says. “But don’t forget your networks are working on a volunteer basis; they’re not obliged to help and are less likely to support you if they suspect your motivation is to use them as a stepping stone.”

Dalitz says good networkers won’t blast you with newsletters and requests after one meeting and will be clear in what they are asking. Overall, she says, men are still better at professional networking than women.

“I think men understand the exchange element better than women,” she says. “They aren’t shy about leaning on each other or talking directly about their problems. I think women can learn a lot from that.”

If, like Dalitz, you don’t know where to begin, her advice is to start small. “Identify five people you want to get to know professionally and offer to do things for them,” she says. “Send them a helpful article or a list of books you think they’d find useful. Remember, it’s about helping others first.”

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.

This, combined with more service offerings would generate significant benefits for our clients, contractors and candidates.

But I think one of the real benefits of this acquisition would be the ‘joining forces’ of staff at both companies. Like Peoplebank, RHD significantly out-performed the broader recruitment market during the GFC, by being passionate about people.

Similarly, Peoplebank has prospered by providing extraordinary service levels. As we say in the Peoplebank Promise – our commitment to staff and customers, which was formally launched last year - everything we do is passionately directed at delighting customers.

One thing that I’d like you all to know is that a key part of the Peoplebank Promise is our pledge to staff that we’re committed to being responsive, creating a spirit of teamwork and working to help all our team members deliver results that are above client expectations.

Since discussions commenced with RHD about this potential acquisition, I’ve been struck by how closely RHD’s approach aligns with Peoplebank’s.

If this acquisition is successful, I think that together, we have real potential to be the best recruitment company in Asia Pacific and beyond – and the no. 1 choice for our employees, clients and candidates.

While in the short term, I expect that it would be ‘business as usual’ for staff and clients of both organisations, I believe in the longer term, the combined entity would set a dynamic benchmark, as well as becoming the recruiter of choice for Australian and many international businesses.

It’s an exciting prospect – and I look forward to sharing news of it with you over the coming months.

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.

If successful, the acquisition will create 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.

A successful acquisition will also generate significant benefits for our existing clients, contractors and candidates, with the combined company offering a broad range of specialisations and service offerings.

Importantly for our clients, contractors and candidates it is business as usual through to October.

If the acquisition is successful, you can expect more exciting announcements to be made during late October and beyond.

The fledgling company tasked with building and operating Australia’s National Broadband Network has been no exception to this rule. NBN Co might have only been properly operating for less than a year — with chief executive Mike Quigley stepping on board as its first employee in late July 2009 — but a handful of promotions appear to have already rippled through its ranks.

Take Scott Ordner, for example. According to his publicly available LinkedIn account, the executive joined NBN Co as a project manager in January 2010 after a distinguished career with a number of other large organisations such as Sydney Water, Vodafone and Optus. Just three months later — in March 2010 — it appears Ordner had been promoted to program manager.

It’s a similar case with HR specialist David Auld who, according to his a LinkedIn profile, joined NBN Co as a HR consultant in August 2009 — which would have likely made him one of Quigley’s first hires at NBN Co. Auld has a significant corporate pedigree — for five years through the middle of this decade he was Qantas’ manager of Remuneration & Programs — and previously Jetstar’s head of People.

Just five months after the executive joined NBN Co, it appears, he was promoted to be the company’s general manager of Training, Strategy & Internal Communications.
When you start pulling together a broad picture NBN Co’s workforce — as we have been doing this week — you’ll find that Ordner & Auld appear to be quite representative of NBN Co’s evolving roster.

Both appear to be highly focused, professionals with a great deal of experience in both large organisations (often in the public sector, or former government monopolies like Telstra and Qantas) as well as startups or fast-growing companies such as Optus in the late 1990′s or early 2000′s.

Both have taken the opportunity to get in early on the ground at what is expected to become one of Australia’s largest telecommunications companies within a matter of years. And they appear to already be reaping the benefits.

There is a further characteristic common to NBN staff — they normally have a strong technical background. The most common words to appear in an NBN Co job title are ‘architect’, ‘project manager’ or ‘engineer’ — we were able to find very few marketing or administrative staff at the company.

Other examples of NBN Co staff who appear to have been quickly promoted include John Gonzalez, who appears to have joined NBN Co as a service delivery manager on a contract in November 2009 and last month won the position of manager — End User Technology and former Uecomm/Telstra staffer Glenn Woods, who joined as a systems architect in January and is now a solution architect.

Well-known industry figure Landry Fevre, who left Vodafone to work in market intelligence/commercial strategy for NBN Co in September 2009, won the NBN Co title of general manager of Media — Commercial Strategy in May 2010.

As a side note, Fevre’s former colleague at analyst firm IDC, Shing Quah, now also works at NBN Co — in business planning and development.

Peoplebank chief executive Peter Acheson said of the apparent wave of promotions inside NBN Co that it was a phenomenon common to startups — the “quick vertical movement” was one of the attractions to working inside new companies.

It was important, he said, that NBN Co make sure that as part of its hiring process that it was bringing in certain personality types that were pre-disposed to working in a startup environment — staff who were flexible, adaptable, able to embrace change and deal with fluid situations.

Such people would thrive in the startup environment and quickly move through the ranks. “It’s fairly typical of a startup and a good sign,” he said.

Many of the jobs that NBN Co currently has vacant — the list is available on its web site — are for managerial positions, such as a spot as a project director of the company’s network operations centre and national test facility — which was only announced last week as to be located in Melbourne.

But there are also many mid-level roles — for engineering, architectural, analyst positions and so on. NBN Co is planning to host some 425 staff in its Melbourne NOC when fully operational, Quigley said last week — with its existing office in Melbourne CBD to house a further 290. Hundreds more will be located in Sydney, where NBN Co has set up permanent shop with an eight-year lease on a facility in North Sydney with 3,000 square metres.

According to Acheson, it could be 18 months to 2 years before the company structure, culture and headcount started to stabiliise. “Let’s be honest, this thing’s only starting to ramp,” he said.

We would like to thank our contractors who participated in this year’s Contractor Satisfaction Survey.

There were a total of 1,741 responses this year, which is a fantastic result.

Peoplebank uses the information collected from this survey, to evaluate our services and to gauge the level of satisfaction amongst our contractors.

The results and feedback from this survey, will be used to shape and improve the current services that we provide.

Key highlights from the 2010 survey include:

• Our contractor’s rate their overall satisfaction with Peoplebank as 8.4/10
• Overall satisfaction with Account Management (including: ethics, professionalism, understanding needs and accessibility) was 8.3/10
• Contractors rate their overall satisfaction with our payroll services (including: paid accurately and on time) as 8.5/10.
• 84% of our contractors would consider using Peoplebank for future assignments

All contractors who completed this year’s survey went in the running to win the major national prize of $2,000 in Coles Myer gift vouchers and their state prize, which was a $200 Coles Myer gift voucher. We would congratulate all of our happy winners below.

ECONOMIC jitters, the mining industry tax, a change of political leaders and a looming federal election unsettled the jobs market last month.
Despite these factors, the start of a new financial year has boosted IT employment prospects, according to recruitment experts.

Peoplebank chief executive Peter Acheson said the overall outlook was positive for IT hiring this financial year.

“This is because of the number of IT projects such as the banking core systems upgrades, insurance company upgrades, the smart grid projects in the utilities sector and strong activity in the telecom sector with the VHA (Vodafone-Hutchison merger) and National Broadband Network.”

He said the employment sector was off by about 2 per cent last month against May, which was usually the strongest month in the year.

“The feeling we are getting is that there may be a slight pause in the robust hiring we experienced in March, April and May,” he said. “However, the overall outlook for the year is strong.”
Key roles were project directors, project managers, business analysts, testers, developers (across the board), as well as web-based technologies.

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.

With the implementation process now complete, Daxtra’s CandidateCapture program works ‘in the background’ on Peoplebank’s existing systems, integrating with the recruiter’s CRM database and admin platforms, and without the requirement for additional user training.

Using the platform, business processes around analysing applicants’ resumes and matching candidates with relevant jobs – processes that once took hours – can now be completed in minutes. This frees Peoplebank’s recruiters to focus on value-added services, as well responding more quickly to client briefs.

Peoplebank’s CEO, Peter Acheson anticipates that the new platform will also allow it to continue to grow its database of IT workers – already one of the region’s largest – without slowing its recruitment processes.

“Our customers judge Peoplebank on outcomes – that is, our speed to market, the calibre of candidates we put forward and the levels of professional support we provide.”

“We’re implementing the Daxtra platform to boost those outcomes, with greater speed to market – via faster analysis of job applicants’ skills and more rapid matching of available candidates to jobs – which is of particular importance when placing contract IT workers.

“Moreover, this platform frees our account managers to focus on providing our higher-end professional services, such as career advice and strategic HR planning, to customers and candidates. The end result, we believe, will be to sharpen Peoplebank’s competitive edge in the Australian IT recruitment marketplace,” Acheson added.

Peoplebank is Daxtra’s first Australian customer for its platform, which is used globally by more than 200 recruiters.

Stephen Blackmore, BDM from Daxtra said, “Daxtra has been developing its platform and global customer base for more than a decade. Just two months ago, however, we launched a number of significant upgrades, including adding Chinese and Japanese language support to the numerous list of European languages that the platform already covers, as well as further strengthening the parsing engine.”

“Peoplebank is our first direct Australian customer to take full advantage of this upgraded platform in conjunction with our newest CRM Partner, Bullhorn. We look forward to CandidateCapture helping the recruiter gain competitive advantage in the Australian marketplace,” he said.

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.

Plummeting contractor numbers spark contractor exodus

The Index reveals that the number of contractors engaged by Government has dropped by between 20 – 25% in the past 12 months. This – combined with the impact of the global financial crisis in the first part of the year – exerted downward pressure on rates over 2009.

Peoplebank notes that a consequence of the declining market was contractor mobility: with the number of skilled ICT contractors moving to Canberra dropping to almost zero over 2009. Over the past 12 months, there has also been a significant increase in ICT contractors leaving Canberra, most notably for NSW and VIC where major ICT projects, especially in the banking and finance sector, are generating more contracts, with greater scope and/or higher overall value.

This migration contrasts with market conditions in 2006/2007, when up to one in four positions in Canberra were being filled by candidates from Sydney and Melbourne. At that time, contractor rates were substantially higher in the ACT which meant weekly commuting was a viable option.

Longer term decline takes shape in 2008 - 2009

Over the longer term, the Index reveals a sharp decline in demand for ICT contractors from July 2008 to April 2009, despite a spike in the Index at July 2009 (coinciding with seasonal contract renewals and moves by some departments to lock in key ICT contractors).

Forecast for increased demand

While the Government reports (on which the Index is based) are not yet complete for the first three months of 2010, preliminary findings show the Index plummeting from January 2010. This is likely to be a result of Government departments continuing to take stock of their ICT contractor levels, in order to comply with Government mandates.

Despite this, the forecast for the Federal ICT labour market is for a strong increase in demand. The combined influence of several initiatives is likely to be a marked increase in demand for ICT contractors.

Already, Peoplebank – as Australia’s largest supplier of ICT skills – is noting a shortage in key skills, especially J2EE, Java, Sharepoint, .NET, project management and business analysis.

Hourly rates for these roles have commenced rising. For instance, rates for senior .NET developers have risen from $90/hr in November 2009, to around $110/hr in April 2010. Rates for senior business analysts rose from to $90 in November 2009 to $95 in April 2010.

Peoplebank anticipates that the combination of a net increase in demand, combined with a reduced contractor pool, will place further upward pressure on rates. In fact, the recruiter anticipates that eventually, rates will exceed those paid in the previous peak, in 2006/2007.

Jeff Knowles, Acting CEO of Peoplebank commented that market conditions in Canberra are in a state of flux: with the current, long term trend of reduced demand for contractors likely to end, too late for contractors who are leaving the ACT for the high-growth Sydney and Melbourne markets.

“It’s a volatile market: where the downward trend of recent years is likely to be replaced, quite rapidly, by an upward trend in both demand and rates,” Mr Knowles said.

“Based on projects already slated, as well as the likely implications of initiatives such as the Defence white paper as well as the Government’s recent ‘Ahead of the Game’ strategy, Peoplebank forecasts that there will be a significant rise in demand for ICT skills in the medium to longer term,” Mr Knowles said.

“As we are experiencing a net migration of contractors away from Canberra, there is a substantial risk that there will be too few skilled ICT contractors available to meet the Government’s needs.

“This will intensify the upward pressure on contract rates – with the result that departments will face higher costs or risk being unable to secure the ICT skills they need to achieve their business goals,” Mr Knowles concluded.

WESTERN Australia is leading a national surge in IT job salaries as the employment market opens up in the recovery from the global financial crisis.

More than 40 per cent of IT job categories in Perth have received a salary or contract rate rise in the first quarter of this year due to the rebound in the WA resources sector , a survey has found.

The study of salaries paid in more than 50 IT job categories in Australia’s six largest capital cities during the first three months of 2010 showed pay pressure emerging in all states.

The Perth market was beginning to experience a skills shortage in key areas from IT managers to program managers, engineers, application development managers and others. The increased demand was coming from the resources sector and the broader spectrum of financial services, manufacturing and other sectors that support it, the study found.

Peoplebank Australia’s salary data for the first quarter of this year, released today, found east-coast states had seen pay rises in fewer categories and more in contract than permanent.

Peoplebank acting chief executive Jeff Knowles said there had been an increase in the number of roles available as businesses continued to invest in new IT capabilities. “We expect increased demand right across the country in the coming months,” he said.

“People who over the last 18 months to two years may have stayed where they are for security reasons are seeing there is less need to do that.”

The number of roles Peoplebank has on its books in Victoria grew by 100 per cent in the past three months. Although permanent salaries stayed flat, contract rates increased by about 5 per cent since November 2009.

In NSW, vacancies jumped by 30 per cent for permanent opportunities and 20 per cent for contract jobs. Permanent salaries, in general, remained stable, but contract rates rose by 3-5 per cent since November.

In the ACT, Peoplebank was seeking contract workers for key roles from other states to supplement the talent base.

Meanwhile, the number of IT roles in Queensland improved with about a 30 per cent increase from April 2009. South Australia also saw a significant month-on-month lift in permanent and contracting roles.

The in-demand skill sets included Java, .NET and ERP, the survey showed.

Mr Knowles said the skills shortage would be more evident in the next quarter leading to some volatility, especially for contract workers with expertise in banking projects and with skills in business analysis, project management and Web 2.0. Pay rates, especially for contractors, would climb, tempting permanent workers into contracting, he said.