British recruitment consultants working in Australia have been forced to come home to the UK.

Since the recruitment downturn began last year, hundreds of British recruiters working in Australia on ‘457 visas’ have been forced to return after losing their jobs and failing to find new sponsorships in the required time frame, according to Australian recruitment and human capital web news service shortlist.net.au.

Shortlisttold Recruiter that UK recruitment consultants make up the vast majority of the employer-sponsored work visas issued to Australian recruitment companies.

Leading Australian rec-to-recs say that in most cases they are now declining to represent recruiters who require 457 work visas to enter or remain in Australia because there is virtually no demand and the revised application process is too slow and complicated, Shortlist reports.

Turnaround Recruitment managing director Ben Richardson told Shortlistmost recruitment companies now wouldn’t look at recruiters who required visas unless they had extensive experience in the local market, a strong network and top billing history.

This contrasted with the situation 18 months ago when high demand and Australia’s streamlined visa application process meant recruitment companies were keen to look at recruiters from overseas with no local experience.

Richardson says that at the peak of the market, “probably around 30% to 40%” of the entire recruitment consulting workforce were foreign residents on 457 visas.

“A lot of those [people] have been retrenched and have had to go back already,” says Richardson.

He says his firm still got a lot of inquiries from overseas recruiters about sponsorship and potentially working here, but in most cases it declined to represent them.

“There’s a lot of recruitment companies that have now got a blanket rule that they don’t want to see people from us that need a visa, and they’ll tell us that early on in the process.”

He says even in cases where recruitment companies had vacant sponsorship spots in their workforce, they would still usually prefer a local candidate because of the “headaches” in the new visa process.