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Writer's pictureLEMON Talent

Keen professionals wait at the border as skilled roles lie vacant (Source: AFR 11/02/2022)




When Zimbabwean Benson Magunde arrived in Melbourne to take up a role as a senior associate at PwC Australia two weeks ago, it was the end of a story that began two years earlier.


“I applied for a role at PwC Australia in January 2020 and in March I got the offer,” the 31-year-old chartered accountant tells AFR Weekend. “I was all set to start, but that’s when COVID started to pick up and restrictions were put in place for international travellers.


“My offer was put on hold and it was a long wait for me in 2020 hoping the borders would open. I was offered another start date, for March 2021, but this was delayed again due to COVID. On the third go, I was lucky and have finally made my way to Australia.”


In a week when the prime minister announced that the last Fortress Australia restrictions would soon end, Magunde’s belated arrival is evidence that after two years of stasis, skilled visa holders are beginning to trickle in.


That’s good news for their employers. But a closer look at how long it is taking to get visas approved, the high global demand and continuing difficulties in filling skilled roles – especially in areas such as law, professional services and medicine – suggests Australia’s market for skilled workers will remain red-hot well into this year.


Fortress Australia restrictions for skilled visa holder arrivals into the country were relaxed in December. Although Magunde was willing to wait to come to Australia, many other professionals gave up and moved to countries that had lifted restrictions.

This means the pressure to increase pay and improve condition will continue to grow on employers as they attempt to retain and recruit staff.


Thousands of open positions

Leaders at businesses that employ professionals, including accountants, programmers and cybersecurity experts, had hoped that the relaxation of skilled-visa restrictions last year would alleviate shortages. That hope has still not been realised as delays in processing have exacerbated the problem.


Staffing is a top issue for employers throughout the economy. Australia’s jobless rate is a low 4.2 per cent. And a record 85 per cent of Australian businesses report that staff shortages are holding back their ability to operate.



A blowout in visa processing times by the Department of Home Affairs compounds the problem. The supply problems are expected to ease dramatically once the country is opened up to all double-vaccinated foreign visitors and visa holders from February 21.

Benson Magunde has taken two years to begin work at PwC because of border closures. Eamon Gallagher

The quantum of the shortfall can be illustrated by looking at the Australian operations of the big consulting firms Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC. They say they will bring in hundreds of overseas workers and expatriates this financial year, as they try to fill thousands of open positions amid the strong demand and high staff turnover.

The big four consulting firms collectively have almost 3200 active job ads on business networking site LinkedIn. The actual number of roles available is far higher, with many of the ads asking for professionals with experience in specific areas such as data and analytics to contact the companies.


In the past, the firms could rely on their secondment programs, where overseas-based staff would travel to Australia to work for a set period. But the reciprocal nature of these arrangements, and pent-up demand for Australian-based staff wanting to work in overseas offices, has meant that the net gain is only in the hundreds, despite Australia remaining a popular “destination” country.


Lemon Talent’s Paul Minton says higher wages will continue for the rest of the year.

The firms are now frantically looking for other ways to recruit and are dramatically expanding their graduate programs, opening operation centres in smaller states and entering into partnerships with universities. For example, Deloitte will hire more than 1300 graduates this year; PwC has opened an Adelaide-based skilled services office that aims to create 2000 jobs over the next five years and Accenture has developed a bachelor of digital business degree with UniSA.

Despite these moves, the ability of accountants and consultants to demand ever higher wages will continue for the rest of the year, says Paul Minton, co-founder and director of specialist recruitment business Lemon Talent.


“At the moment, we are not seeing any material changes to the talent shortage, which has been prevalent across the industry over the last two years,” Minton says.

“Firms across professional services and within industry are still looking to hire across all areas, particularly when it comes to the more niche areas in consulting such as technology, data, and analytics and risk.


“To meet demand, firms are looking at numerous options [such as acquisitions]. We think wage growth will continue for the next 12 months at a minimum.”

Minton says the pay for recently qualified accountants has increased by more than 15 per cent over the past two years.


“A recently qualified accountant, with four years’ experience, coming from Europe, can expect a salary between $100,000 to $105,000 in an industry role. Two years ago, the average salaries for the same candidate were $85,000 to $90,000,” he says.

Deloitte chief human resources officer Tina McCreery: “We have approximately 1500 positions available, which are at varying stages of the recruitment process.” Flavio Brancaleone


Deloitte’s chief human resources officer, Tina McCreery, reckons the wage pressure will continue for at least the first half of the year before normalising.

“We have approximately 1500 positions available, which are at varying stages of the recruitment process: advertising, screening, interviewing and offer. The largest number of open positions are in our consulting, audit and assurance, and risk advisory businesses,” she says.


Teresa Liu, the Australia and New Zealand managing partner of multinational immigration law firm Fragomen, says clients have cited significant upward pressure on the salaries and packages being expected and offered to all their employees, local and foreign.


Visa processing delays

“This is not just in accounting or consulting, but in legal, engineering, and resources for instance. It does appear to us to be across the board. It is hard to predict if this will ease over time given what appears to be a severe shortage of skills in Australia,” Liu says.


This inflow of imported labour is also being slowed by the delays in skilled visa processing times.

It now takes up to 85 days to process 90 per cent of sponsored 482 Temporary Skill Shortage visas, up from 41 days before the pandemic began at the start of 2020. On top of this, are the continuing difficulties with organising flights into the country.

Home Affairs cites a range of factors for the delay and says the department is under an existing order to prioritise visa processing for a range of professions in which the sectors are critical to Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and where the nominee or applicant is currently in Australia.


Fragomen’s Teresa Liu: “Attracting skilled professionals into Australia ... has proven to be particularly challenging.”


That range of professions, listed in the Priority Migration Skilled Occupation list (PMSOL), includes engineers, programmers, cyber security specialists and chefs. Last June, the Morrison government more than doubled the number of priority occupations on the list after lobbying from business.


Home Affairs also says the current visa-processing delays are partly caused by incomplete or insufficiently detailed applications and the time it takes for other departments and agencies to provide clearances.


”Other circumstances that affect processing time frames include application completeness, applicant responses to requests for additional information, and the length of time required to perform necessary checks on supporting information,” a representative for the department says.



“The time it takes to receive information from external agencies, such as health, character and national security requirements are outside of the department’s control.“


Fragomen’s Liu says the delays and uncertainty around visa processing mean foreign skilled workers have, in some cases, already moved to other locations in the world where there is high demand, instead of moving to Australia to work.


“Attracting skilled professionals into Australia, as a result, has proven to be particularly challenging, made more so by the current skilled programs – [for example the] Temporary Skilled Shortage subclass 482 program – utilising different occupation lists to be eligible for a temporary visa only compared to an occupation that has a pathway to permanent residence,” she says


Roles such as data scientists, organisation and methods analysts, and advertising, sales and marketing, finance and human resources do not offer a pathway to permanent residence. “Therefore employers may find it difficult to attract those individuals into their businesses,” she says.


“In a world where other countries, such as the US and the UK, have a more simplified pathway to gain permanent residence, this is one important factor in a potential employee choosing where to move to.”


For the big consulting firms with well-oiled processes to import professionals, visa times have nonetheless slowed overseas recruiting.

EY Oceania talent director Elisa Colak says it has been a complex process to navigate international hiring over the past six months.


Elisa Colak, EY’s talent leader, says, “It has been a complex process to navigate international hiring over the last six months with challenges for candidates in sourcing flights to Australia, managing quarantine requirements and travel exemptions.


“It can also be a lengthy process for candidates to obtain the relevant information needed for visa sponsorship with delays seen in processing clearance documents for certain countries.”


She says the problem has eased since the changes to the priority occupations for skilled visas, but this has not offset the firm’s continuing shortage of staff.


“The difficulties with getting people into the country have been somewhat alleviated since the changes to the PMSOL last year and the opening of the borders for skilled workers in December. There are still some travel-related challenges in relation to uncertainty with borders, flight availability and costs,” she says.


Notwithstanding Magunde’s wait to join PwC, Catherine Walsh, the firm’s head of people and culture, says visa processing times are back to pre-COVID-19 time frames.

“However, we’re still seeing some lengthy delays due to flight cancellations and other reasons, and logistics is still more difficult than it would be in normal times.”


KPMG’s national managing partner of people and inclusion, Dorothy Hisgrove, says the firm is very hopeful to progressively return to pre-COVID levels of global movement in and out of the country.


As for Magunde, he remains glad he held out for his dream.

“At one point, I thought I would look at opportunities in other countries but I wanted to work with PwC Australia specifically,” he says. “I was also attracted to the stability of the economy and the opportunity to visit Australia’s beaches and live in Melbourne.”

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