When our Tauranga recruitment agency interviews candidates for jobs in regional New Zealand, they’re usually expecting to discuss their career wins, relevant experience and salary aspirations. But that’s not where we start.
Before anything else, we want to know what their situation is. Why are they looking at moving? What sports, facilities or clubs are integral to their happiness, and are they available in the town or city where they’re thinking of living? Are they prepared to embrace the many bonuses of life in a smaller centre, and live without the aspects of big city life they’d be leaving behind?
Candidates can be surprised by our prying. It’s not that we’re nosy; it’s that the perfect job is only the perfect job if it also a good fit with other key parts of your life, namely family and lifestyle. These questions, and the details they extract, won’t have any bearing on whether a candidate will get a job – but they might help a candidate gain clarity on whether they actually want that job. It’s about figuring out what would need to happen for this move to be successful for you.
We have seen people make the big and exciting move to Tauranga, so they can put out a longline every morning before breakfast and their children can run along the beach after school. And then they’ve had to leave because their partner couldn’t get a job and they couldn’t make ends meet on one income.
That’s why we look at the infrastructure around each candidate and work to understand what a successful move will look like for them. Your future employer might not take the time to understand that you won’t be able to play competitive rugby league to the same level as you did in Auckland or that you’re going to be disappointed to the point of reconsidering your move if you can’t buy a home in a particular suburb. But we will – because we don’t want to be putting candidates forward for jobs if we suspect they might not last.
Our employment agency wants candidates who will thrive and grow in the Bay. That requires ensuring our candidates haven’t ignored some major piece of the puzzle as they’ve been planning a move to the Bay. You’d be surprised how often people say they accepted a role and just assumed their partner would also get a job easily. Or they underestimated how much their kids would miss the grandparents. Or they were out of practice with making friends and didn’t realise how lonely those first few months, or years, would be.
Most people move to somewhere like Tauranga for the lifestyle. Some take a sideways step, many take a step back, to get into a role with one of the city’s bigger employers – the Port of Tauranga, Zespri, Ballance, the councils and DHB, Comvita, Craigs Investment Partners, and the large contracting firms such as Downer.
Most candidates are comfortable adjusting their pay expectations and career status in order to access the Bay lifestyle. Naturally, they remain hopeful of getting a decent package and retaining the seniority they enjoyed in the big cities – and sometimes we are able to achieve that.
But some of the most successful candidates we’ve seen have been those who are able to be savvy in their approach to the local job market. If competition is high with the most obvious employers, maybe you should consider the Bay’s emerging start-ups and innovative SMEs. There are many local companies enjoying extraordinary growth and they might be looking for someone with your excellent experience to grow with them. You could be a big player in the growth of an exciting export success story.
Here at recruitment company Ryan + Alexander, we ask all the big picture and personal questions first, because we want to be able to guide you into a role which is a perfect fit for you and your lifestyle. Once we get a handle on what success will look like for you, we will definitely be excited to hear that you have won various industry awards, broken all sales records or risen through the ranks with a multi-national company.
But the very first questions we ask will always be about what kind of life you want in the Bay of Plenty.