On-going changes to stay ahead

By ADAM GIFFORD

Interim Technology managing director Peter James has advised staff from Wilson White, the New Zealand IT recruitment firm Interim bought in May, to assume the company is going to reinvent itself every 18 months.

"I don't know what that means, but if you don't change, if you don't get out in front every 12 to 18 months, someone else will come in and take the business from you," said Mr James on a visit to Auckland last week.

Mr James has shown a willingness to embrace change. As chief executive of Australian-listed recruitment company Computer Power Group, he went looking for an international buyer.

"To be a successful organisation, you can't be regional," he says.

While the buy-out brought rumblings about an Australian icon being lost to Americans, Mr James said the same institutional investors which dominated CPG's share registry own chunks of Interim.

"And if the world of capital is mobile, so too is the world of human capital," he said.

Interim's business culture is to treat its regional offices as semi-autonomous business units, confident they are people who know their own markets and are successful in them.

While Wilson White was a recruitment and contracting company, Interim also has a large training side which was already established here, with centres in Auckland, Wellington and now Christchurch.

Mr James said that given the skills shortage in the IT industry, finding new bodies was important.

"We are selling training not as education, but our promise is to find people jobs."

He said that in the two years it has been here, 92 per cent of Interim graduates have found jobs through the company. The learning centres run three shifts, from 7 am until 11 pm.

Training is computer-based and self-paced, so students can start at any time. The average age of students is 28, with training costing about $1000 a month and typically going for about 10 months,

On the recruitment side, Mr James says Interim does a lot in "human capital management," including training within jobs.

"It's about being a career agent rather than an employment agent. We will sit down with people and say 'Let's plan a career'."

Mr James says the furore over the Employment Relations Bill and its effect on IT contractors is similar to debates across the Tasman.

"I've heard it all before. The way people want to work and how they work is not going to be changed by government legislation. I know there is a lot of debate and employers are saying this is the end.

"As an outsider, my view is this is not likely to be anything like as draconian as people think it is."

He says 25 per cent of Australians now work in non-traditional employment models.

"Why people work is changing. People don't consider they have jobs for life any more. They work for money and lifestyle. Employees have seen employers rightsize and downsize and restructure, so they know employers have a way of looking at them."