The seven-year itch might feel real for some, but as First People Recruitment Solutions celebrates our 7th birthday today, we feel as strong and united as ever. Our professional partnership as directors continues to grow from strength to strength, as does the ground-breaking recruitment agency we’re proud to lead.
To celebrate our 7th birthday, we’d like to share some insights into how the business began, how it’s grown, the challenges we’ve faced, as well as what the future looks like for our clients and candidates.
In the Beginning
Our professional relationship began as colleagues at a mining company with over 1000 employees. We both left around the same time to begin our businesses, but we maintained a strong friendship, in addition to a commercial arrangement between our new entities.
As both companies were in the HR and recruitment space, we started talking about recruitment specifically for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This coincided with the government’s active push to encourage corporates to increase their percentage of such employees as part of their ‘Closing the Gap’ initiative. It was a natural fit for us as Shane is a proud Bundjalung man and Bryan’s wife a proud Wiradjuri woman.
When we started, there was no other organisation focused on professional recruitment for First Nations people. We saw it as an ideal opportunity to help such candidates begin a new career, or take the chance to step up, and make a difference not just personally but for their families and communities as well.
Seven years later, we’re still here working with some amazing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander talent, as well as companies who recognise their value.
Some of Our Proudest Moments
It’s quite difficult to summarise seven years of hard work into a few milestones. For brevity’s sake, here are four:
- Our focus on quality candidates
Over the past seven years, we’ve placed around 4000 candidates into new roles. Predominantly contractors into professional roles with the APS – Commonwealth Government in which we are proud that we have competed against multinational agencies on a level playing field by virtue of the fact we sit on similar panels.
And in these seven years, we’ve had a very minimal requirement to replace a candidate – our best estimation is around half a per cent. There are not too many organisations that can boast that type of record.
The reason for this is simple – we have a specific and culturally appropriate process to find quality candidates. Almost 50% of our staff identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, and we also don’t have a structured style of pre-screening candidates.
Instead, our approach is all about getting to know the person first, rather than jumping straight to the technical questions about their suitability for the role. It’s based on a yarning style, one our ancestors have used for tens of thousands of years when they first meet. We ask things like, “where are you from?”, “who’s your mob?”, so we can understand who they are first instead of treating their careers as a transaction because that is not how we see it.
It’s amazing what this process does, as the candidates come in fairly tense, but as we chat, you see them visibly relax in front of your eyes. It’s the best way we’ve found to then lead into their skills and capabilities and how they fit the role, and it’s a process we’re both very proud of.
- Our focus on finding the right clients
We made a conscious decision early on that we wouldn’t work with just any client. While our business is for profit, it’s also for purpose so we were adamant that our clients aligned with our company values.
We’ve stayed true to ourselves on that. Some potential clients actually get a little taken aback when we turn it around and interview them! But it’s garnered us respect as they understand we need that value alignment, as well as a desire to build relationships and trust. It’s how our elders have done it for tens of thousands of years, so why fix something that isn’t broken?
- Major client relationships
There is nothing like being thrown in the deep end in your early days, and to test us from the very beginning we were asked to recruit 35 roles with a government department. Well, we did, and it was the confidence boost we needed to show that we could succeed in this space.
We’ve also had major contracts with DFAT, placed candidates in CEO roles at the Torres Strait Regional Authority and The Indigenous Literary Foundation, plus a Woolworths GM for Indigenous Engagement and Strategy.
- Our brand ambassador, Tallisha Harden
One of our most recent milestones was the privilege of appointing Tallisha Harden – NRLW superstar, speech pathologist and proud Torres Strait Islander woman – as our first ever brand ambassador.
She’s an inspiration not just to us but to thousands of others in our community for the work she does both on and off the field, especially with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids. She’s also taking the time out of her busy schedule to directly mentor some of our staff in the near future.
We’re very proud of the part we can play to support her, ensuring there’s parity for women in sport so they can both do what they love, and also earn enough to provide for their families and livelihoods.
Busting Perceptions and Dealing With Failure
Whether it’s conscious or unconscious, we’ve definitely come up against the perception that, as an Aboriginal-owned business, we might not have the necessary capability or capacity. Alongside that, we’ve experienced being pigeonholed in the assumption that we can only recruit Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Busting those perceptions comes down to delivering. We now compete against multinational recruitment agencies and that’s a testament to the fact that we’ve been able to continually deliver and meet or exceed our client and candidate expectations.
But with that comes one of our biggest resolutions – that failure is not an option because it can have greater ramifications. We must succeed as an Aboriginal business because we want to make it possible for the next generation owning and running their own businesses. It’s actually a very common fear amongst first-generation Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander business owners.
On that note, while it’s business as usual here at First People Recruitment Solutions on our birthday and beyond, we’ve also got some very exciting new initiatives we’re working on that will hopefully release in the next few months. So watch this space!
