A shareholder and part of the SilverLine team since 1986, Cumming takes over from Izabella Little at a time which she admits is highly challenging.
"The IT recruitment market has changed dramatically this year," she says. "It`s been different to what virtually all recruitment companies were predicting."
Cumming says her objective is to ensure that DiData SilverLine, which she notes has become a very large, new company since the merger with CPL, "continues to be a successful and profitable contracting and recruitment agency in a completely new recruitment market".
She explains that the market is busy, but in a very different way from what the industry expected. "The boom which most recruitment companies were expecting to come in February/March because of Y2K being over, didn`t really happen."
What did happen, however, is that e-commerce has almost overnight become pervasive. "Everything is e-commerce now," says Cumming.
Another definite change, she notes, is that the contracting market is not as busy as it was. The permanent recruitment market has been extremely busy, but in a changed way.
"What we weren`t expecting was the very quick swing from the traditional skills on contract to what is in demand now. The market for the traditional mainframe legacy system skills has been very quiet for contracting and that wasn`t expected. Most people expected that after Y2K the legacy systems would have to be supported and checked for a lot longer, but many of those people have now been released."
Supply and demand
As a result, the skills supply and demand dynamics have shifted. "There`s a shortage for certain skills and there`s a flood of other skills. We have a lot more people with traditional skills available than usual and less of e-commerce and Internet-related skills which everyone wants."
As a result, Cumming expects that re-skilling and bringing in junior people under employment equity plans will be a key aspect of recruiting this year. She adds that the market is in a changing phase, and supply and demand should even out later this year. In the process, rates should also stabilise. "With Y2K, rates spiralled out of control," she says. "People who pushed up rates last year did the industry a disservice and gave contracting a bad name with certain companies - it created a perception that all contractors were charging exorbitant rates."
E-recruitment
Cumming also points out some new market factors that have changed the dynamics of the recruitment process.
"Clients don`t tend to make decisions as quickly as they used to. There`s been slow decision-making in some companies in terms of releasing funds for big new IT projects. A lot of the large corporates have been looking very carefully at cost-cutting, which led to slower approval of projects."
The proliferation of online recruitment sites has brought quite opposing changes to the industry. "E-recruitment has made it a whole lot easier for people to send their CVs in and for us to be in touch with the applicants. So it has sped up that part of the process."
What it has also done, however, is made it too easy, comments Cumming. "The sheer volume of what comes in is amazing and we get flooded with inappropriate CVs, from people who are often completely wrong for the job they are applying for. And that volume can swamp you unless you can filter it out very quickly."
So for recruitment companies, e-recruitment is a blessing and a curse, says Cumming. "It brings you some really good skills but you`ve got to search for them through a mountain of incorrect CVs. You have to have really good screening systems in place - and for that you are reliant on people."
But this is only the beginning. Online recruitment is in a growth phase in this country and is bound to change quite a lot, she predicts. One thing is sure, though: "E-recruitment is key to us. There is no other way to go forward."
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