Fred News – July 2026

July Market News with Fred 

July is nearly done folks, school holidays are over as if they never happened, and winter is in full swing.  We are settled into our fantastic new office in Grey Lynn, and have loved having clients, suppliers and candidates come in to see us for a quick hello or a chat about new work.  If you’re close by, don’t be a stranger, we’d love to see you!

So what’s happening in recruitment this month?

Let’s start with our own sense of the market which is very positive; internally July has been a thriving month of possibly the widest cross section of roles we’ve had in a while.  Temp remains up, construction roles have factored into our work, support role numbers continue to grow, and sales and marketing, and finance roles (two of our biggest verticals) continue to make up good job numbers.

A noticeable stability feels like it’s creeping back into the job market with the ‘shoulder tap’ market being a little less engaging, candidates holding firm on salary negotiations, and hiring teams continuing to make cautious well thought out hires.

New Zealand wide, our hiring outlooks and stats are always an interesting read;

Kiwis making the journey back across the ditch.

You read that right – back to NZ. For a while now, we’ve noted some rumbles that went against the commentary of kiwis leaving NZ in favour of the lucrative opportunities Australia offers.  For us at Fred, it’s predominantly the Gen-Z’s who are talking to us about the move, but it has been noted recently, how many are actually returning after relatively short stints.

So, we did some research:

Net migration into New Zealand has accelerated sharply, from 1,590 in the March 2025 quarter to 8,800 in the March 2026 quarter, with the trend building each quarter. Click here to read more

12,800 Kiwis returned home in 2025, a 14% jump on the year before, while departures to Australia barely moved, up only slightly from 40,600 to 41,100

Economists are calling this a genuine macro divergence rather than a blip

Worth flagging one caveat: the wage gap hasn’t fully closed, tradespeople can still earn considerably more per hour in Australia, and major bank economists expect the RBNZ to start lifting the OCR again from September 2026, so this reversal isn’t guaranteed to keep accelerating at the same pace. But, it’s genuinely strong data and is one of the clearest sustained shifts in trans-Tasman migration in years. Click here to read more

Wrong hires are expensive, and SEEK puts a number on it.

New SEEK research suggests hiring the wrong person costs New Zealand SMEs around $20,000 per bad hire, and with roughly one in five hires going wrong, the total annual cost to NZ SMEs is estimated at $911 million. SEEK’s NZ manager Rob Clark pointed to time-pressured managers skipping proper steps early in the process as the main driver. Click here to read more

Hiring is such a nuanced process.  The more time we spend in recruitment watching the landscape we work in change, the more we see patterns that impact longevity and hiring successfully.  At Fred we aren’t just here for your hires, there is plenty of wrap around support that we offer, even if the role is being managed within your own team.  Reach out to  us if you’d like to discuss salaries, packages, psychometric testing and skills based testing.  This advice is free, and our skills based testing is well menu’d and priced if you would like to review it.

Job ads just hit a two year high

Seek continues to report positive data on job ad numbers;

National job ad volumes were up 10.7% year on year in June, the 19th straight month of growth, and now sit at their highest point in more than two years. Click here to read more

Regional NZ is leading the charge. Southland was up 23.3% year on year, Otago up 20.6%, and Taranaki up a huge 30.4%, largely on the back of construction, trades and mining and resources demand

Applications per job ad have eased since their mid-2025 peak, which SEEK NZ country manager Rob Clark called a positive signal for jobseekers, though he noted conditions are still tough out there

Official unemployment sat at 5.3% for the March 2026 quarter, the first improvement in a while. Stats NZ releases the June quarter numbers on 5 August, which will tell us whether this SEEK momentum is showing up in the official data yet

Counter offers are creeping back, and they rarely work

Always interesting to watch this behaviour:

With replacement costs and time to fill both climbing, more NZ employers are matching or beating a competing offer rather than restarting the search, particularly for mid to senior corporate, ICT, sales and skilled trades roles. Click here to read more

Here’s the catch. An estimated 70 to 80% of candidates who accept a counter offer are gone again within 12 months, because money was rarely the only reason they were looking.

The fix isn’t always a bigger number, it’s care inside of the process that nurtures the candidate’s experience, getting from verbal offer to signed offer within 48 hours, and staying in genuine contact through the notice period.  This does more to protect a hire than any counter offer ever will – no one protects a hire like a recruiter ferreting nuts away for the long winter!

The state of healthcare hiring in New Zealand right now

If you’re trying to fill a clinical role at the moment, you’ll already know this isn’t a normal hiring market. Health NZ’s own workforce plan puts the current shortfall at around 8,000 vacancies across the system, with that gap projected to widen to as many as 25,000 healthcare professionals by 2032 if nothing changes. On the medical side specifically, the doctor shortfall sits at roughly 1,700 today and is forecast to nearly double to 3,400 within the decade.

A few things are driving it. Training is capped and slow, medical school takes six years, and the number of domestic training places has only recently started increasing (up 75 places across 2024–25, with more coming as new medical schools open). That means the recent  funding announcements won’t show up as working doctors until well into the 2030s. At the same time, the country is losing trained staff faster than it can replace them: there are now over 2,100 New Zealand-trained doctors practising in Australia, largely chasing salaries that run 20–35% higher than what’s on offer here for the same roles.

The upside for employers is that government policy has made overseas recruitment genuinely viable. Nearly every core health occupation, GPs, registered nurses, and most allied health roles all now sit in Tier 1 of the Green List, meaning eligible candidates can move straight to residence rather than working through a lengthy points-based process. For clients open to building an international pipeline, this is about as clear a runway as immigration settings have offered in years.

We’re keeping a close eye on this market through FredMed, our specialist healthcare recruitment team, and can talk through what it means for your specific hiring plans whenever it’s useful.

Lastly, a reminder that at Fred, we are one of few full service multi disciplinary agencies that work across all of NZ, with hundreds of 5 star ratings to back the trustworthy quality recruitment we do.  If you aren’t already and you’d like to chat with us, get in touch.