A new service called WorkInAustralia.com is being created to connect Australia’s hospitality industry with European front-of-house candidates – before they arrive.
Right-to-work compliance software company vSure has launched a new service to connect the hospitality industry with European job candidates.
vSure carved out a strong niche in streamlining right-to-work compliance with its proprietary software engine, and counts hospitality clients like Australian Venue Co, Pacific Hunter Group, Solotel, and Applejack Hospitality among its clients.
Now the company aims to connect hospitality employers with primarily front-of-house candidates before they leave on their trip to Australia and has purchased the web domain WorkInAustralia.com with this in mind.
Using the WorkInAustralia.com service, travellers aged under 35 will be connected with a job and made “job ready” with assistance in gaining their visa, a bank account, a TFN, accommodation, a mobile phone number, and even their RSAs and RCGs before they even leave Europe.
Hospitality groups will in turn gain access to a very cost-effective pool of talent who are job ready before they even land.
“Some of the bigger companies are already trying to do this themselves, but we can aggregate these travellers on our WorkInAustralia domain and through our unrivalled network of agents on the ground,” vSure MD Matt Paff says.
The idea occurred to him, he says, after hearing about the staffing crisis affecting the vSure client base. “We kept hearing about how, with unemployment so low and with the closure of the borders, our clients were struggling to recruit for roles, and all of our clients were telling the same story.”
Serendipitously, around that time, Paff says, he met up socially with a friend Mark Wood who had opened a number of backpackers stretching from Melbourne to Cairns in the post-Olympics period in the early 2000s and whose success was largely driven by selling working holiday packages for Western Europeans.
Wood, who has since sold the business and lived for a period in The Netherlands, gained a valuable network of Western European travel agents in the process, which he is bringing along in the new venture.
Having done it tough during Covid, these European businesses are keen to start promoting working holiday packages again, Paff says, and advantageously, changes to work rights mean that working holiday makers can currently work up to 12 months at the same location, instead of just six months.
After two years of lockdowns and a war in Europe, Paff believes there is now a pent-up demand for working holidays among young people in places like the UK, The Netherlands, Sweden and Norway.
“Our Western European agents are telling us enquires about travel to Australia are up 25 per cent on pre-Covid levels. I believe that in the next 12 to 18 months we’ll see a massive influx.”