Reed Group's new Sydney office has grown to 20 consultants

Reed Group's new Sydney office has grown to 20 consultants four months after its opening and will be a beachhead for further expansion for the company in Australia and Asia.

Reed's country manager for Australia, Steve Plant, said the company had deliberately kept its arrival in Australia low-key.

We've taken a quiet approach, because we are a large organisation (and) if we made a big entry we'd end up getting a lot of business and not being able to fill it.

Plant said the company saw Australia as its springboard into the Asian market, and had plans to open in Singapore or Hong Kong in the near future.

For now, Reed in Sydney was focusing on the accounting, technology, banking and finance, and communications sectors.

The local, skills-short market was similar to that of the UK, Plant told Shortlist.

Obviously there's a candidate shortage here but we're not finding it as hard as you might expect. We've got good networks.

Reed has more than 300 offices and 3,000 staff in the UK and Ireland, but has never opened an office outside those areas until this year.

Plant said a deliberate expansion had begun this year, with launches in Europe and the Middle East as well as Australia.

The group was planning to increase its Australian presence by launching a Melbourne office early next year, which would also provide healthcare recruitment.

Reed is one of the few recruitment companies in the world that has been able to successfully build a job website which is widely used by other recruitment companies.

Part of the huge success of Reed.co.uk, which has twice as many job listings as any other UK job site, is that it doesn't charge a fee for vacancy postings.

Plant said the company had no immediate plans to launch an Australian version of the site.