Canberra's labour market is experiencing a significant shift as public service redundancies, consulting cutbacks and the first real wave of automation-driven job hunting collide, with recruiters warning of a crowded field for only a narrow band of specialist roles.
CBR Recruitment managing director Adam Kowalski said it was an interesting time in the Canberra job market, with clear changes in how agencies are hiring.
Mr Kowalski said agencies that had previously relied on large numbers of contract staff with more generic skills were now tending to bring in smaller numbers of people with more specialised skills.
In 2026, a number of public servants have been offered voluntary redundancies as agencies respond to staffing caps, savings targets and new budgets.
Departments have been told to cut back on their reliance on external labour and absorb more work in-house, even as they wind down programs or restructure teams to meet new priorities.
Mr Kowalski said that it had previously been difficult to drum up enough suitable candidates for some public service jobs, but recent bulk recruitment processes had attracted many more applications than in the past.
In one recruitment process for the climate change department, his firm helped shortlist about 1400 applicants for a handful of positions.
At the same time, less work and lower-value contracts were flowing to big consultancies, with more of that work absorbed directly inside departments or handed to smaller niche firms.
The federal government ordered agencies to monitor consultancy contracts more closely and justify the use of external advisers, after a series of reviews and scandals exposed blowouts in spending.
From July 2026, an adjustment to the Commonwealth Procurement Rules has meant that agencies would need to report all new consultancy contracts valued at and above $2 million to the finance department.
Mr Kowalski said agencies were still drawing on whole-of-government people panels to bring in specialist contractors, and that there was a reasonable number of requests for contractors coming through those arrangements, even as the contest for permanent roles intensified.
He said the number of applications for advertised roles was now much higher than he had traditionally seen, and that this had changed the contest for jobs in Canberra.
Canberra-based recruiter Meg Salter said she was seeing the same pattern play out from the candidate side, with an "increasingly crowded talent market in certain parts of the government space, policy, program [and] corporate roles, particularly here in Canberra".
She said the service was increasingly made up of experienced generalists, even as agencies continued to face a shortage in critical skills, leaving both groups competing for a limited number of roles that matched their backgrounds.
"Consultancy cutbacks, redundancies and the AI transition are all landing at once. How we manage that convergence will define the next decade of the public service," Mrs Salter said.
"There will be a flooded market in Canberra, flooded with a lot of very, very talented people, but not necessarily talented in the critical capabilities that the APS is looking for."
