2024 was been a dynamic year for accounting and finance recruitment in New Zealand. Liam Brodie, who is Practice Director for Accounting and Finance covering New Zealand and based in our Auckland office, reflects on recent changes in the market and recaps what our team at Salt Recruitment are seeing. From hiring insights to how clients and candidates navigated change, and what we expect to see in 2025.
2023 vs. 2024
How Covid-19 shaped talent
2024 was challenging for many reasons: high inflation and interest rates coupled with the ongoing effects of organisations grappling with understanding the post-COVID world led to New Zealand’s slow economic recovery. Cost-cutting and efficiency-increasing measures in the public sector impacted the Wellington market and were felt nationwide, too. Meanwhile, the economic slowdown resulted in many high-profile organisations announcing redundancies and liquidations, particularly in the construction sector, driving up unemployment and immigration rates.
To explain 2024, we first need to summarise 2023. In 2023, New Zealand faced a tight candidate market due to delayed immigration responses to COVID-19 restrictions, limited awareness among immigrants about access to New Zealand, and the appeal of other destinations like Australia and the UK for qualified professionals.
During COVID-19, many organisations took the opportunity to trim their workforces and in 2023, these organisations needed to bring in high-calibre individuals to replace those they had let go.
How economic shifts impacted talent mobility
New Zealand changed government in 2023, with a commitment to reduce public sector spending. This resulted in broad restructuring across the public sector in 2024, primarily affecting the Wellington region; however, the effects were felt across the country.
Talent mobility nationwide, and in Wellington, was impacted as long and short-term public servants found themselves in an unfamiliar ‘buyers market’. Meanwhile, Auckland saw a significant slowdown in key industries, such as construction. Companies in the construction industry filed twice the number of insolvency applications than those in any other industry. Organisations looking to be more prudent with budget expenditure took steps to reduce costs and drive efficiencies by mothballing projects and reducing headcounts. These actions, in turn, helped to create a perceived oversupply of talent in the market.
How did this impact Accounting and Finance industries?
The reality is that while accounting and finance professionals can moderately benefit from an upswing in hiring during a booming economy, the organisations they work for still need to deliver positive financial results in an unfavourable economy.
While accounting and finance professionals didn’t experience the same redundancies during 2024 as other sectors, many organisations looked to do more with less by making small-scale cost-cutting measures. We also witnessed a sharp levelling of the salary increases experienced in previous years, and a general decline in contractor rates. As the realities of supply and demand led more individuals to consider contract opportunities.
In 2024, many accounting and finance professionals chose to look overseas to secure opportunities, with Australia being the primary destination.
While New Zealand reported record migration numbers during 2023 and 2024, we also continue to experience very high immigration, especially among the 20 – 39-year-old demographic. According to Stats NZ, nearly 128,000 people left the country in the 12 months to the end of November 2024, and New Zealand’s annual net gain of 30,600 migrants was the lowest since the end of 2022.
Within accounting and finance, we are seeing key talent migrate overseas, and they are being replaced by overseas candidates with limited New Zealand experience. A market like ours, dominated by SMEs, can make it challenging for those with international experience to adapt, even after ensuring educational comparability. While the demand for talent abated in 2024, so did the talent available with New Zealand-specific experience.
During the last year, I recall receiving hundreds of applications for a single role and the ability to long-list three to five candidates with only one or two candidates progressing to the short-list stage, if lucky. In a market that is this competitive, New Zealand comparable qualifications and market-specific experience became deciding factors, which unfairly excluded some international candidates with superb experience and unique skill sets.
Understanding the value of global expertise and ensuring we have the proper infrastructure to train, coach, and enable acclimatisation to New Zealand’s working culture would ensure we maximise the benefits of international experience and build diverse workforces that reflect our customer bases.
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Evolving organisational cultures
We have begun to see a swing in the cultural momentum across New Zealand organisations of all sizes. Employers in major cities, like Auckland and Wellington, are trying to shift the WFH narrative. Many public and private organisations are encouraging employees to return to the office by reducing the number of work-from-home days. In contrast, other organisations have taken a leaf from international organisations’ books and mandated a return to the office five days a week. With the number of active opportunities in the market reduced, prospective and incumbent employees are more compliant than they may have been in 2023.
Candidates actively in the market are demonstrating flexibility; many have empathy for market conditions and are prepared to reconsider salaries or hourly rates. They know they must bear some of the load to support businesses and drive a successful outcome for both parties. Meanwhile, organisations must consider the dangers of ‘bargain hunting’ in a candidate-rich market; this approach rarely works and is a quick way to guarantee losing a valued employee once the market shifts.
What can we expect in 2025?
Economically, 2025 looks like a game of two halves; the first half of the year already looks like a replay of 2024, albeit with fewer extremes. Meanwhile, the year’s second half is expected to be more positive, with economic indicators suggesting the worst for the economy might be passing. However, as we’ve seen in the past, the labour market tends to lag behind broader economic trends, so we expect economic improvements to take time to influence organisations’ recruitment and staffing decisions – particularly across the Wellington region, where several government entities are yet to complete their planned restructures.
Technology will continue to play an ever-increasing role
Automation has already been in use for a while, supporting AP and invoice generation, and the obvious next step is applying automation to ease the manual burden of repetitive tasks in transactional finance. Early adopters have expanded their business practices to incorporate artifical intelligence (AI) into their operational toolkit, and we expect 2025 to be the year AI becomes critical to most organisations for providing real-time financial insights and predictive analysis.
AI won’t replace accountants, but it will enable them to provide more proactive, strategic advice by allowing them the capacity to analyse large volumes of historical data and identify patterns to predict future trends and outcomes.
The AI revolution: Transforming key industries in APAC; Read more about AI with Salt.
Organisations will continue to focus on cost-cutting
Organisations will likely continue to pause non-critical projects and programmes as they look to reduce CAPEX and OPEX, which will continue to suppress demand for talent in the short term, and outside of niche specialisations, salaries and contractor rates will continue to plateau.
Leaders will prioritise drawing employees back into offices
A drive to the office will focused on improving productivity and organisational culture, enhancing training and development opportunities, and to give employees a sense of belonging. With employees still wanting to continue flexibility while delivering value, employers looking to secure quality talent will need to find a balance between achieving the required outcomes to deliver financial results whilst recruiting, onboarding, and retaining talented and motivated individuals.
Where to from here? Our final thoughts on the New Zealand labour market
For the accounting and finance sector, we will continue to see both immigration and migration contributing to the talent pool. However, there is hope that New Zealand will begin to retain more of its skilled professionals, reducing the outflow of talent abroad.
There will be a gap in the market for 20 to 30 something qualified professionals until New Zealand’s economy improves and we can offer positive employment opportunities to complement our favourable work-life balance. The silver lining is that many professionals who left New Zealand will return home with excellent experience and qualifications. The questions are: When will they return? Will they bring the skills we need? And will we be open to leveraging their global expertise?
It seems a cease-fire has come to the war on talent; however, we expect this to be short-lived, and talent shortages will become a topic of conversation later in the year once organisations have a better feel for where business opportunities are and who will be able to help them maximise the opportunities.
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