Direct Approach to Employers and Recruitment Networks

This is by far the best way to get a job for a new migrant. And regional areas can offer even better results, not to mention concessions with points, language and skill levels.

This direct approach takes a bit of preparation to minimise time being wasted on dead ends. It’s best if a job seeking migrant develops a way to advance their strengths and overcome their weaknesses, with common weaknesses being “can’t start tomorrow”, lack of local knowledge” and “they’re a bit different”.

We think these weaknesses can be turned into strengths, or dealt with by education, information sharing and personal contact.

The effort required to secure good employment can be significant, and the cost of finding work is not cheap either. Here is a table that sets out the types of expenses a migrant would incur if they came to Australia to look for work.

Work out your own costs by selecting the item and adding up the average costs given for each item.

NB. This table does not includes costs for family if they all arrived together. That would add around $500 to $800 per month in extra food and living costs, without schooling, health, dental etc. In this table, all costs are monthly expenses except for airfares.

Cost Benefit Worksheet
Airfare, return, Qantas/other, pick one	UK, London	$ 2,400
or	India, Mumbai	$ 1,975
or	China, Shanghai	$ 1,975
or	UAE, Dubai	$ 1,634
or	South Africa, Jo'burg	$ 2,320
or	Singapore	$ 1,200
or	Korea, Seoul	$ 2,150
Accommodation, pick one	Homestay	$  220
or	Cheap hostel	$  400
or	Motel, cheap single	$  600
or	Motel, family	$  800
Transport, pick one	Bus, train, tram, taxi	$  300
or	Car $3000	$ 3,000
including	Car operating cost	$  200
Telephone, prepay		$  160
Food		$  500
Entertainment		$  120
Computer & printer, pick one	Internet café	$  120
or	Home PC/printer	$ 1,200
Internet access, pick one	Internet café	$   30
or	Dial up	$   10
or	Broadband	$   30
Lost wages per week?

For example, taking the airfare, motel, bus/tram, internet cafe and broadband costs to add to food, phone and entertainment, the cost of finding your own work for a UK person would be around A$13,590 for a 3 month search - before allowing for wages lost in the home country!

That might add another $14,000 for 13 weeks lost income with an average UK wage, giving a total of $27,590 to come to Australia and hunt for employment.

There must be a faster, cheaper and better way to do it. And there is!

Hire A Migrant was set up to search for work for migrants, either before they arrive or as part of a visa/sponsorship application. Hire A Migrant service costs much less than this, you can save between eight and ten thousand dollars where we find employers who want to hire you.

For a family about to arrive and already have a visa, now is a good time to get started, so the interviews can happen in the first week or two of arrival, rather than only starting the search a month or two later once housing, schools and furniture are sorted out, and pushing the interviews back to month four or five.

Every month without employment carries a cost of about $4000 to $5000, without adding in the new furniture and cars.

The numbers work out well, as if you can start work just one month earlier than anticipated, you will have earned enough to easily cover our fees.

That’s the payback - one month of work gives break-even on Hire A Migrant cost.

That doesn’t include the saving in emotional costs - reduced stress in taking less time to look for work in a new country where your personal networks are not established yet, avoiding the frustrations of so many “no thanks” without getting a clear reason why, and avoiding getting dressed up to do the rounds of recruitment agents only to be told you either don’t have the right visa or your local knowledge is not strong enough (euphemism for “you’re different”).

There are ways to turn these drawbacks into advantages, by targeting a different set of employers and encouraging them to think about the opportunities in your differences and newness to the country.

For example, a Singaporean trained accountant might find work with an exporter to the Asian region, someone who needs access to knowledge about other languages, business customs, bureaucracy and banking systems. A retailer might benefit from hiring a manager who can market and present products to different ethnic groups to gain incremental sales, or an engineering service firm might appreciate the improvisation and maintenance skills that come from having to make do with a smaller set of tools.

Looking in the right area also helps! From research, many employers in regional areas are hampered by such things as:

• the local labour pool has half the number of university qualified people as the rest of the State,
• fewer than three applicants for any advertised job with none suited to the vacancy,
• frustration with poor advertising results through long term shortage of good applicants
• and other issues.

A busy employer may also not have the time to sit down with consultants and develop new job descriptions, nor might they have the $10,000 to $20,000 or so available to cover the recruitment consultant’s fees.

Working with recruitment agents is also not the best way forward. For a top-end-of-town recruiter, they might earn $50,000 placing a person onto a $200,000 year salary package for a corporate manager. Now it becomes clear why recruiters often don’t like to work with migrants who may settle for lower salaries and cannot start work for a few months (the recruiter usually gets paid at that time).

Hire A Migrant suggests that migrants spend about 20% of time with recruiters and applying for advertised jobs, the balance of 80% of time should be spent in direct approach to employers - because 80% of jobs are not advertised.

All of these points are real contributors to Australia’s worsening skills shortage.

Direct approach taps into those jobs that are given:

• to staff who had left earlier
• to suppliers or customers who want to change sides
• to friends and family of existing staff members who were told about the vacancy
• to the owners of old CVs from the previous recruiting effort
• to people who knock on the employers door before the job is advertised.

Remember the content from the Job Hunting page?

• An average of 4% of all jobs are always available.
• Only 20% of jobs are advertised in newspapers or handled by placement companies.
• On average, 80% of people use ads as their primary job source in a 10 to 20% market.
• The number of resumes received by an employer as a result of the ad is commonly 20 to 1000.
• Resumes usually come in 48 to 96 hours after the ad; the third day is usually the peak day.
  Only 2 to 5 out of every 100 resumes received survive. This means that 95 to 98 out of every 100 are initially screened out.

And this:

Percentage of Total Job Seekers Using the Method	Method	Effect Rate
66.0%	Applied directly to employer	47.7%
45.9%	Private employment agency	23.9%
50.8%	Asked friends about jobs where they work	22.1%
6.0%	Knocking on the Right Doors	22.2%
28.4%	Asked relatives about jobs where they work	19.3%
1.6%	Placed ad in local newspaper	12.9%
41.8%	Asked friends about jobs elsewhere	11.9%
27.3%	Answered local newspaper ads	7.4%

We have highlighted the information that shows the effectiveness of going straight to the employer or showing some individual initiative such as personal advertising. Some of these figures show that most people are not using the most effective means for job search.

At Hire A Migrant, we have compiled several databases, some of which are listed here:

1. employers who have advertised recently,
2. businesses that feature in industries that have known skills shortages,
3. employers in regional areas (for regional sponsorship),
4. post codes that make up regional areas (again for regional sponsorships),
5. names of businesses that have been used to illustrate recruitment difficulties in the many newspaper articles on this topic
6. employers who have earlier hired our skilled clients after direct approach
7. businesses within the personal networks of key staff (for instance Tony Foster mentors several CEOs in large organisations
8. and other critical lists.

All of these are factored in to the job search strategy uniquely developed for each client.

We then make direct approach to the employers to discuss present and future recruitment needs.

We also benefit from quality contacts made during the many employer education seminars being held in regional and metropolitan Australia, informing employers of the different visa choices, giving reasons why they should consider overseas born workers and understanding their recruitment schedules.

Not all of our resources and systems have been listed on these pages, for commercial reasons. We only intend to show you the general mechanisms, and not the critical detail of our core strengths in service delivery.

We aim to deliver a consistently high success rate with our work ethic, but there are no guarantees that even with our substantial databases, rich contacts and competent marketing skills this will be enough to find vacancies for some individuals.

Where possible we will identify the weaker cases early and either smarten up our strategies or refuse to take the client on. Where we miss out during job search, clients have the option of renewing their contract perhaps with a much different search profile or less restrictive choices about location and job type.

If you have any more questions or would like to speak with a Hire A Migrant representative regarding our services, please e-mail us at info-AT-hireamigrant.com or call us at +61 3 9583 4826 (work hours only please, Australia is 10 hours ahead of the UK, 15 ahead of USA East Coast, 5-6 hours ahead of India and China). 

This site is not intended for use by either migrants or sponsors who are directly in the act of sponsoring a future employe. It is a condition of use of this site that all users acknowledge that they are not seeking migration advice for themselves as migrant or to act as sponsor of a future worker. For full legal entitlement and disclaimer for use please click here (c) Hire A Migrant Pty Ltd ACN 124 164 138 unless otherwise attributed.