Datacom on the hunt for hundreds more staff

New Zealand’s largest IT services provider, Datacom, has hired 220 staff since January as firms continue to accelerate their digitisation plans amid the pandemic.

However the Auckland-based company would hire another 250 tomorrow, but is up against “the size of the talent pool”, says its New Zealand managing director Justin Gray.

The vacant roles at Datacom veer towards the more skilled, but include everything from entry-level skills up to senior leadership positions. The likes of call centre jobs are not part of the mix.

Some firms, having shed workers during the March and April lockdown panic, have now found that they tightened their belts too tightly and are now trying to rehire staff in a much tighter labour market.

Datacom, simply because it’s one of the largest homegrown players, has felt the squeeze most keenly.

The IT services firm employs close to 7000 staff — about 3000 of whom are in NZ.

It is 60 per cent owned by the rich-list Holdsworth family, and 40 per cent by the NZ Super Fund.

Gray is focusing on the positive, however, pitching the pandemic as an opportunity to rebuild local training. He says that at any one time, his company hosts up to 50 interns with its direct training efforts.

But he also highlights his company’s partnerships with three organisations which aim to draw more people into the technology industry.

One is Take2, also supported by the Tindall Foundation, Spark and others, which has the slogan “Breaking the cycle of crime through tech” — which it seeks to achieve by offering prisoners 12 months of intensive training in software coding, and broader communication skills.

The new non-profit’s primary aim is to rehabilitate offenders by giving them the wherewithal to find meaningful work after their release, and offering them support services for at least two months.

Datacom is also working with TupuToa, which is trying to get more Ma¯ori and Pasifika people into senior positions in corporate NZ, starting with internship and cadetship programmes that help companies diversify their workforces. And in the case of tech companies — which have low percentages of Ma¯ori and Pasifika staff overall — that also equates to an opportunity to enlarge their talent pool.

Similarly, Gray’s firm is working with Te Wa¯nanga o Raukawa, which offers online courses for Ma¯ori who want to upskill and enter the tech workforce.

But while he’s a booster for these programmes, and efforts to boost technology’s profile in secondary and tertiary education, Gray says it will take years to foster new tech talent locally.

And he sees another Covid trend — people living in one hemisphere, but working for a company in another — as “just not sustainable from a wellbeing point of view”.

So the meantime, the Government should let more tech workers in, he says.

With no tech worker visa, NZTech, which has been working with MBIE on solutions, recently recommended IT companies try to get staff into NZ under the Other Critical Worker programme, which applies to roles that pay over $106,000 per year and can’t be filled locally.

Gray says Datacom has applied, but the number of staff it’s been able to get in through the programme is “in the tens” when it needs hundreds, and the tech sector is thousands short.

Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi told the Weekend Herald that no special tech worker visa was required because tech workers could qualify under existing Visa exemption programmes.

Faafoi said that since Covid restrictions were introduced, 150 tech sector workers had been let in under border exemptions as of May 31.