September Recruitment Update by Carl Vellenoweth
Nowadays, the recruitment market has a somewhat tarnished reputation along with other services within this sector. A good parallel example are the system integrators with their “Land and expand” mentality, recruiters are known to “spray and lay” with minimal market focus or qualification process, significantly slowing down a job search and consuming more time when hiring.
EnRisk is a 100% pure CTRM recruitment partner, offering the global job market the ability to access the best available jobs and resources at any given time. Having worked in this sector as a user and headhunter for over 10 years. I’ve combined a number of tools and methodologies to minimalize time and maximizing results when searching for your next job or hiring your next project team.
As part of my monthly recruitment blog, I will be offering a spy hole to current and future hiring trends across the entire CTRM job market.
Market landscape
As we see the banks fleeing the commodities business due to regulations and as a result of being short of capital, we’ve seen commodity traders getting more involved in the extraction, shipping and refining of raw materials to create a more diverse recruiting landscape. There’s also a few new kids on the block as far as users are involved, such as consumers looking to bolster and grow trading capabilities, softs and ags traders exploring the idea to build or buy new CTRM solutions, and spin offs from the exiting banking community. Each offers their own challenges and the search criteria for CTRM skills are ever changing.
E/CTRM
Overall, we see the CTRM job market up 25%. The biggest movers are OpenLink (including SRA and Findur) up by 22%, Allegro up 30% followed by a steady increase for EKA, ITAS and Brady as more “off-the-shelf” solutions are preferred for companies with shallow pockets or running a “best in breed” infrastructure. There is also a higher demand this year for skills working on custom builds, predominantly around data capture, financial reporting, analytics and logistics. Since the ION takeover at TriplePoint we have seen a significant slump of around 30% for Triple Point but we expect this number to improve as ION restructures it. The Aligne market is also down over 20% but we expect a claw back due to a new wins over the last 6 months.
Credit Risk
As credit risk functions within the commodities sector are increasingly struggling to manage counterparty risk and cash flow forecasting there has been an increased need for talent to solve some of these issues faced predominantly by large utilities as they explore various credit risk systems such a Openlink’s Cube offering and a number of others available on the market. Good credit risk systems professional are positioned well to land lucrative freelance opportunities.
Emerging markets
Africa and the Middle East have entered the CTRM market with some force over the last 24 months and are challenged more than most when hiring specific E/CTRM skills, due to the lack of local skills available that most of the global consultancies seem to be faced with similar resourcing difficulties. This also opens up more opportunity for experience freelancers to experience a new challenge that will no-doubt do no harm to your portfolio or CV.
Permanent jobs
Consultancies and system integrators have the biggest appetite for permanent resources as they continue to grow more CTRM capabilities across the globe leveraging their business into commodities. The newer players in the market have more flexible criteria when hiring new talent and more established players offering an exit route to the vendor market as they battle with non-competes and other sensitivities.
Contract / freelance jobs
Over the last 24 months the freelance market has taken a huge hit, with more consultancies winning projects and utilising their permanent resource and large CTRM implementations coming to a close, contracting has dried up and taken a 40% dip since 2012. With the introduction of more off-the shelf solutions and a half-baked standard content offering, we are yet to see how this affects the job market. Things are looking to improve with vendors winning more work this year than over the previous 24 months resulting in an increased demand for SME’s and Business Analysts; especially those who are able to bridge between IT and Business, and comfortable managing offshore support and development teams.
One bit of advice to freelancers is look well in advance as we are finding slots are being filled up to 3 months prior to starting new projects. A good way to stay abreast of new freelance opportunities is to register to our VBM (Virtual Bench Management) solution, offering clients visibility on resource profiles on the market.
Future hiring demands
With the implementation of REMIT and Mifid 2 regulation, specialists should expect to be in high demand, as will TMS (Treasury Management System) or TRS (Treasury Risk Systems) professionals as vendors work invest in their product development and market offering as more commodity clients integrate their treasury and risk functions.
As users consider a system changes and upgrades we predict a further demand for system specialists, particularly with Endur, RightAngle and Allegro delivery skills. Again, SME’s seem to be positioned best as companies turn to them to review and improve their current systems.
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