Helping Skilled Migrants Find Work in Australia.

At Hire A Migrant, we help find work for migrants by making direct approach to employers, and we we also market employers’ vacancies through our diverse network of selected migration agents around the world. If there’s a skilled worker needed to fill a vacancy, we’re confident that we can find them.

Why should anyone hire a migrant? The answer is, why not? Migrants are people with skills to offer and and needs to meet, just like anybody. In fact, being a migrant has its advantages - imagine being able to reinvent yourself and your lifestyle without having the same old family and peer group pressures!

Foreign language and knowledge of other countries and cultures can become a major asset to some employers. Regional employers face greater skills shortages with local residents moving to the cities for more opportunity and supposedly better lifestyles.

And there are plenty of migrants to go around! Just last year, 113,000 skilled migrants moved to Australia with their families. 74,200 migrants came over with skills in hand ready to work, and 39,000 already had offers of work.

There are many positive reasons for drawing from this pool and adding a migrant to your staff:

“Different skills” does not mean worse skills, and it often means better. Migrants have been assessed by accredited Australian assessors who have determined their abilities are at least equivalent to Australian skills.

“Lack of local knowledge” also means a lack of local shortcuts and bad habits, it does not mean lack of skills and abilities. “New blood” has its advantages.

Different cultures can stimulate ideas within a business and help generate innovative ideas. Intelligence is evenly distributed across people, and this plus experience in different ways of doing things can create new opportunities for a business owner.

Different people can make a work place more interesting, helping reduce absenteeism and staff turnover.. Making a business into a more interesting place to work solves many problems.

Most migrants are in it for keeps and are not wanting to let their employer down, they have more to lose than a local citizen who can rely on Centrelink payments if they walk away. Some visas allow stronger employment contracts to be created between willing parties.

Here is a link to one employer’s story, crediting migrants with the success of his business.

Key phrases from the story are:

“We couldn't have grown as we have without them. There are not enough skilled people ... to allow that.”

“All our competitors are crying and shouting that there is no skilled labour available. For us, it's a good indicator that we are taking advantage of skilled talent.”

“What we are doing is building diversity into the company.”

The expense and frustration of finding a job is often underestimated and it becomes the source of great stress to the migrant and their family. Hire A Migrant can reduce this tension and cost.

An employer’s uncertainty is also heightened through lack of cultural awareness, minimal knowledge of visa and sponsorship issues and fear of things that are different and require changes to established work practices. Hire A Migrant can educate employers about how to capitalise on these differences.

For employers, this dilemma will only get worse as the population ages and work force matures and becomes more expensive to retain. So employment prospects for migrants have never been stronger.

Australia’s unemployment level is at it’s lowest level in thirty years at 4.5%

Full-time jobs growth has soared with 300,000 added in the last 12 months. Compare this to the 300,000 added over five years to 2002, and 783,000 added in the five years to 2007 (www.abs.gov.au)

Employment is 3 per cent higher than a year ago.

The Federal Government recognises that no less than 120,000 new migrants are needed every year for 20 years in order to avoid a contraction in the size of the labour force in 2025.

Special visas have been created in the last two years to encourage skilled migration, with concessions in age, salary, experience and English abilities offering opportunity to those who might otherwise never be able to migrate.

It is clear that Australia is currently experiencing a period of strong economic growth and many employers are unable to meet their current demands or expand further without employing more skilled workers. Whilst the Australian Government has significantly increased education and training programmes, there are still skill shortages.

However, even with this situation, the hardest part of migration is still finding work!.

Hire A Migrant exists to help make Skilled migration less expensive and less frustrating for employers, migrants and migration agents.

Considering that it takes around three months to move and settle into a new location and then start to try to find work, these three months of inactivity will cost anywhere from $14,000 to $27,000 (more if the spouse has lost a salary too).

Work out your own costs by selecting items in the table below, multiply by 3 months, and add up the numbers.

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. When an Australian or employer looks at it like this, they will get an appreciation of the real commitment and investment that a migrant is prepared to make to obtain a better life in Australia.

This does not include removal costs of around $12,000, furniture and car replacement costs plus household establishment costs such as a full grocery cupboard, utility bonds, school uniforms etc.

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?

These costs are real, derived from:

• living expenses in cheap accommodation, not comfortable family homes
• an older but reliable car, 150,000 kms wear and tear, lowest insurance
• lost earnings, using professional salary for skilled job in a city
• travel costs, return airfare for one person to do job search

In comparison, Hire A Migrant’s fee is usually less than one month’s ongoing cost.

For the migrant, the ideal outcome is either to secure a job before moving, or obtain one very soon after arrival.

Hire A Migrant Pty Ltd was established to support this effort, after three years of market research and planning.

Of course not everyone needs our help - some people already have job offers or family to assist or are skilled networkers. And not everyone needs a job on arrival or soon after.

But for others who are moving to a new country where business names, industry structure and employment customs are new, the slowest way to get a job is to rely on newspaper and online job advertisements. By all means apply for these jobs, but we do not suggest that you only rely on these public sources.

Media advertisements are in fact the least effective way for anyone to find work, including Australian citizens and residents.

But if this method is being used, the best way forward is with a properly prepared and highly professional CV, to cut through the clutter of a few hundred other applications. It also pays to limit these applications to 20% of job search time, as 80% of jobs are not found in these places.

The richer employment prospects are in the “hidden” job market where vacancies are never advertised publicly.

The key is to build a network amongst the employers, sponsors and facilitators within the employer groups and State or local government sponsoring agencies and reach out through this network, finding vacancies that exist before advertisements attract 200 applicants who send in CVs that show local experience and freedom to “start Monday”.

Hire A Migrant develops a targeted process for each candidate, identifying suitable occupations, employer groups, employing businesses, locations, sponsors and media groups, and then we market each candidate directly to the most likely employers.

At Hire A Migrant, we not only specialise in occupations on the various shortages lists such as the Skilled Occupations List (SOL), Migration Occupations in Demand List (MODL) or various State Government shortage lists unique to that State, but we also pursue work opportunities for migrants whose occupations do not feature in these lists but are still seeking work in Australia.

Although we sometimes use the media to find job vacancies, our strength is in networking with employers and making direct approach into the hidden job market.

Whether the migrant needs a job interview or evidence of interest from an employer (Employability Report) we have a tailored service at affordable prices.

We work on a wholesale basis so the agent can choose to resell our work or instruct us to bill the client directly. The migration agent is always in control of the client. We are not migration agents and do not offer migration advice to migrants.

Browse our Web site for more information about Hire A Migrant.

If you have any 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.