The Recruitment Market

Securing a role has never been easy, and changing jobs is inherently stressful, especially when you have a family to feed and significant financial commitments like a mortgage. Back in the late 90s, when I began my career in recruitment, active candidates had a clunky, cumbersome process to gain exposure to open roles. We relied on press ads, job centres, and a small handful of difficult-to-source recruitment firms. Accessing all possibilities often turned into a serious endurance test; an employed candidate would often have to sacrifice a day’s leave just to take proactive steps toward new employment.

For agency recruiters, the battle was equally tough. Fax machines and rudimentary software were hardly optimal tools for information sharing. Résumés required handwritten edits in a folder before being passed to an admin assistant for typing and printing, followed by what could be a 20-minute queue at the fax machine (if you were lucky). Even then, the clicks and splutters provided no certainty of a successful transmission, making a follow-up call necessary just to confirm the shortlist had been received. Promoting a new role to the marketplace was a mammoth task of printing and stuffing envelopes, an activity typically procrastinated until Friday afternoon.

The entire system was truly awful compared to today, yet competition was just as heated. We stood in the fax queue, knowing a rival agent in a competitive outfit was doing the exact same thing. Were they in a smaller queue? Did their machine run faster? You most definitely earned your money back then, and the chances of outright failure were greatly increased by technological friction.

The market utterly transformed with the development of email in the early 2000s. Technology became a massive enabler, with websites and vastly improved software systems stripping hours of wasted time for both recruiters and candidates. Recruitment profits surged dramatically, and with them, the level of competition. This new speed and improved communication allowed established agencies to win more work. Sophisticated procurement practices began to lock clients in exclusively, increasing transaction volumes at eye-watering margins that seem unbelievable by today's standards. Candidates also benefited immensely from the increased competition among agencies and the industrial growth spurred by these new technologies.

The system wasn't perfect, but overall, recruitment firms added immense value to both clients and candidates, even if it was underpinned by a selfish desire for profits and commissions. In hindsight, those profits felt almost deserved. Hays Plc, for instance, invested millions in training, regularly sending consultants to London for 3-day training events. The recruiters I worked with in the late 90s at Hays Plc UK were some of the most business-savvy people I have ever met.

All this reminiscing leads to my current viewpoint on where the recruitment market stands today. In 2025, we have a ridiculous amount of technology and market accessibility. Everyone is hyper-connected across social platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, and we have the added value of AI and system automation. Factoring in speed, engagement, and overall experience, we should be at peak recruitment.

Yet, the market presents a very different reality.

As the unemployment rate climbs, paired with SKILLSOOP's forecasted interest rate rises, the economy is creating turbulent conditions for job seekers. While this circumstance certainly promotes frustration, the issues stem from a deeper problem. More than ever in my 25-year career, candidates feel helpless to take the right steps to secure a role. Why? On the surface, everything looks fine. LinkedIn screams of digital activity, presenting hundreds of open roles. Technology is abundant; a candidate can now create a résumé and launch it into the entire marketplace, domestically or even globally, before their morning coffee. Thousands of recruitment firms are competing for talent, and corporate enterprises have developed internal recruitment teams that often dwarf external agencies in FTEs and investment, leveraging CRM systems to compete directly.

With all these advancements, candidates, and indeed myself, feel that something has snapped; something is fundamentally broken. Many market changes are contributing to the deteriorating recruitment experience. Like any trend, taste, or evolution, it can exceed its peak benefit.

Think of a clock face: 12 o'clock is unfashionable, 6 o'clock is peak fashion. As we move from 12 to 6, we improve, but once we pass 6, we become so fashionable we overshoot into unfashionable territory. We are currently hitting this stage with technology. We have developed powerful tools that, when leveraged correctly, create immense value. The danger is reliance: if we rely on them for too much, we erode the very value they were meant to create. To put this into realistic context: most résumés I receive have obviously been created with AI, meaning they're jam-packed with buzzwords that convey very little meaning. On the flip side, most position descriptions are also developed using AI, saturating the market with meaningless buzzwords.

This creates a supply and demand dynamic where the underlying asset, a candidate's skills, or available market opportunity, is no longer a unique, nuanced option, but a commoditized set of useless data points. The position description and the résumé are now just vanilla derivatives of the opportunity for both parties. AI is now vetting AI, using the language of AI, followed up by internal resources who lack the subject matter depth to add necessary quality controls to the decision-making process. Combine this with work-from-home policies, which certainly add quality-of-life benefits but actively destroy team and corporation's culture. The business community has, in many cases, had the luxury of momentum growth for two decades off the back of emerging markets.

This has fostered a passive and complacent recruitment culture that will, over the next decade, result in further losses in productivity and increased cost.

As cost increases escalate, more roles will shift offshore, and this trend won't be confined to departmental levels. In the past, the productivity and team-culture benefits of a localized team prevented single offshoring. As this benefit erodes, so too will skilled white-collar roles that are simply too expensive to sustain when revenues erode due to the global credit implosion.

For instance, within SKILLSOOP, when we sought designs for new assessment collateral, the quotes from SMEs working in Australia were between $4,000 and $6,000. We ultimately secured a highly skilled professional in the Philippines for $250 USD. This cost discrepancy is going to become an even greater issue for Australian businesses pressured to reduce shared service costs. If Janet or Jeff is only in the office two days a week, there is no saving team culture.

The Economy

Credit defaults are the prelude to a looming unemployment catastrophe. The massive debt raises by big technology businesses and the rise in fraudulent fiscal reporting serve as early warning signs. We are experiencing a global crisis similar to 2008, yet the damage is poised to be ten times worse.

The subprime car market in the U.S. is collapsing as the cost of credit impacts both lenders and customers, with investors demanding huge increases in these securitizations. This event now replaces the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. En masse, global investors are fleeing the credit markets—the very vehicle that has supported fake growth for a long time. The normal scenario sees a credit market collapse after an official recession; we are experiencing a credit collapse that will lead to mass unemployment. The weight of bad debts is driving mass defaults, and what follows is of serious concern.

In 2008, fraudulent subprime mortgages destroyed the fiscal system in the U.S. and Europe. Australia was very lucky, supported by high interest rates that could be lowered and a rapidly expanding China. Today, global consumers are seeing their post-tax wages decline as monetary policy drives increased inflation and a surge in government taxes. U.S. household debt to income now stands at over 124%. Australia, if it were a meme, would be saying "hold my beer" to that statistic.

I keep reading articles predicting the Australian housing market will keep increasing, especially with the government's new 5% deposit scheme designed to entrap more young people into a debt they will struggle to service. This is the start of a default cycle that will see all assets, including Australian housing, fall in value as defaults rise. Many people only have liquidity for up to three months before household liabilities cannot be serviced any longer, and the private sector is laying off people at a rapid rate.

Since 2015, economies around the world have been built on credit expansion. In the U.S. alone, federal debt has doubled from $18 trillion to $37 trillion; consumer debt is up from $14 trillion to $21 trillion; and corporate debt is climbing from $13 trillion to $21 trillion. In Australia, the AUD has lost 50% of its value in the last decade, ensuring wages buy only 50% of what they did in 2015, which is why GDP per capita is cratering alongside real GDP growth. As the latest inflation figures in Australia present a rapid surge, the RBA will likely be unable to take steps to lower the short end of the yield curve, contrary to many forecasts. Raising interest rates should be a silver lining for long-term debt markets, as inflation is the pin that pops debt bubbles, pushing yields higher, and only with rising rates can the long end of the curve go down. Except, we have passed the point of no return.

It doesn't matter if rates rise or fall, the consumer is out of money, exposed to a fiscal punishment caused by central banks and government policy that will both extend debt servicing costs and increase our groceries. If you only have $5,000 in your bank account, does a $100 a month reduction in your mortgage payment matter when your groceries are rising at 20% and your energy bill is approaching $6,000 per month just to stay cool? The U.S. and the Trump administration are pitching a MAGA line, claiming America's economy will be the envy of the world, with AI/Data Centers as the underpinning asset class to make this a reality. The truth is that AI assets are CapEx heavy and require updating before any ROI. The entire thesis is a reality backed by debt, and it is going to come crashing down along with the 7 major players keeping the S&P afloat.

Of course, Trump and his cabinet know this, which is why they are pushing for Stablecoins, a new cryptocurrency pegged to Treasuries and the dollar, two asset classes already collapsing. The logic is ridiculously silly, harking back to France in 1789 when the government created the assignats, government bonds pegged to the value of French land and issued as paper currency. The government confiscated church property to be sold to the public, and assignats were the vehicle to execute this initiative. As you can guess, the French government ended up printing far more assignats than the value of the land they confiscated. Stablecoins will be the same Ponzi scheme; the times are different, but the tricks are the same.