Oppo managing director Morgan Halim said more people applied for the entry level roles, than the ones with more specialist requirements.
Photo: RNZ
Oppo managing director Morgan Halim would usually consider 500 a high number of applicants for a job ad.
So when a current advertisement ticked over 2500 applications – and counting – he was shocked.
“It’s quite surprising, actually. We have multiple ads running and this particular one has far exceeded our expectations.”
The job is a customer service role based in central Auckland. It requires someone with demonstrated experience in customer service and says it is advantageous for the applicant to have experience in a call centre.
“We brought back our call centre that used to be in Malaysia back to New Zealand. We made some changes about two years ago and we’ve found in this role there’s pretty good interest every time we advertise.”
He said more people applied for the entry level roles, such as this one, than the ones with more specialist requirements. Oppo is also advertising for a content creator.
Halim said he would work with a human resources partner to do the vetting on the thousands of applicants, and then the process would be worked through between three people. “It’s usually the HR person, the manager and myself. What we do is we work as a team and understand location-wise where they’re from, that’s important because we work in the CBD and we want to make sure they’re comfortable to come in and out from the business.
“Also experience, what we’re looking fo, we can usually narrow the options down quite quickly.”
He said only 44 percent of applicants for this role were from New Zealand.
“It’s still a lot of numbers, 44 percent is about a thousand and something but it at least cuts it in half, basically.”
He said it was good to know that so many people wanted to work for Oppo, which currently has a team of 27.
Infometrics chief executive Brad Olsen said there were still high numbers of applicants being recorded across all job listings.
“As of November 2025, which is the latest data we’ve got, relative to November 2019, which is sort of a fairly good pre-pandemic figure, we have seen a 243 percent increase in the number of applicants per job ad on the Seek site, at least.
“There is a substantial increase coming through, and it’s going to take a lot for that number to come back to anywhere near normal. It’s going to take both a large increase in the number of jobs being listed, noting that we’re still about 25 percent down on pre-pandemic levels in terms of job numbers, but also, clearly, there’s a heck of a lot of competition out there, given the unemployment rate is high as well.”
He said the number of applications per filled job seemed to have stabilised in the past six months but at very high levels.
“Looking through the monthly figures, there’s no indication that it’s necessarily getting any worse, but, equally, nothing to show it’s getting any better immediately, either.”
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