Hi Ken,
Telecom NZ are an accredited employer which means you should be able to apply for a WTR (work to residence aka "talent visa"). Certainly when they recruited last year via the Oct expo people were going for either WTR or PR. You need medicals, police check etc for WTR but your police checks are now much faster. In parallel I submitted by ITA with the job offer which was selected from the pool. I got my WTR and then submitted my PR application right afterwards (an additional translated police check was required which incurred elapsed time). Mine all came through very quickly - my WTR came through in two days from handing in the paperwork, and PR in 13 days after submission. Generally, you can expect a WTR (or other work) visa to be processed much faster which is why I ended up going that route, so that I could get out here faster. It de-stressed my situation, and enabled me to reuse my medicals and police check for PR whilst effectively incurring only the additional cost of the WTR at £95 or so (plus trip to London to drop off) which I thought was a fairly good trade off. I've have gone straight for PR if I could have been sure of the processing time line.
Just something to consider.
Kate