Despite being 3 per cent of the population, Aboriginals only compose 1.7 per cent of the workforce. How can businesses get better at employing Indigenous workers?

“To work alongside people from your community, there is a connection which is sometimes hard to describe. We support each other and make sure we look after each other. There is a bond, a mutual respect.” Chris Heelan, National Indigenous Manager at Australia Post, is talking about working at Australia Post and employing Indigenous workers, where he says he has always felt valued – and that his cultural heritage has been accepted.

“I suspect not all people would be aware of my Aboriginality, but that’s fine and it just allows me another opportunity to share who I am with colleagues and to show how proud I am to be a Noongar from south western Australia.”

Australia Post was a finalist in the 2015 AHRI Employment Awards in the area of Indigenous employment, and that’s partly because “every job at Australia Post could be a job for an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person,” says Heelan. “We’re not about special treatment or special measures, we’re about creating genuine opportunities for all.”

Currently, Australia Post has 661 Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander employees nationwide, representing approximately two per cent of the workforce.

“Our goal is to achieve 2.5 per cent by July 2017, which will bring the company’s Indigenous workforce close to the percentage of Indigenous people within the wider population.

“We want our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workforce to be representative of the community. It’s a stretch, but we’re confident of achieving this target.”

But Australia Post is an exception rather than the rule. Like the statistics around Indigenous health outcomes, the figures around Indigenous employment make for sober reading. According to the ABS in 2011, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 15-64 are more than three times as likely to be unemployed as non-Indigenous people. It’s an imbalance that many organisations would like to help change but aren’t sure how to proceed.

“We know that employers want to do targeted recruitment strategies, but don’t want to breach racial discrimination laws,” says Mick Gooda, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC).

In response, the AHRC, in association with the Business Council of Australia, last year launched free guidelines to help businesses think about employing Indigenous workers in accordance with the law.

For Gooda, special measures are an important element in what he calls ‘substantive equality’, which he defines as, “treating people differently in order to give people access to the same opportunity.”

Some organisations have risen to the challenge. One mining company discovered that some Aboriginal applicants were failing a stringent fitness test for one class of jobs. Undeterred, they encouraged the applicants to attend a fitness gym (and paid for their membership), and when the positions were advertised again, the same applicants passed.

The key to successfully employing Indigenous workers is always engaging with the local community, says Gooda. Argyle Diamonds, operating in the East Kimberley, are a good example, reaching an agreement with the traditional owners to achieve a 40 per cent local Aboriginal employment quota, from commencement of the underground mine in 2008 until closure.

Community engagement is central to Qantas’s Indigenous employment strategies, says Jenny Delves, head of people services at Qantas. “Since 2009, we’ve run an Indigenous schools-based program, aimed at Year 11 and 12. Students combine their studies with working part-time, in areas such as cabin crew, check-in, ramp work, catering, or back office.” Some 200 students have passed through the schools program, and the numbers are growing year on year. Employing Indigenous workers is an essential part of the company’s brand, and at Horn Island in the Torres Strait, the entire workforce at the airport is made up of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

“It’s easy to convince business leaders that they should employ Indigenous Australians,” says Michael Combs, founder and CEO of Indigenous internship organisation CareerTrackers. “The challenge is to align those opportunities with the aspirations of Aboriginal people.”

Combs, an African-American from Colorado in the US, came to Melbourne in 2005 to work for Hewlett-Packard. While there, he was surprised to see the lack of Aboriginal staff. Based on his personal experiences in the US as an intern with the INROADS program, he resolved to establish a similar organisation to create more Indigenous internship opportunities.

At the time, there were government programs to encourage employing Indigenous work – and both RioTinto and BHP Billiton had schemes in place – but no one was doing this from the point of view of the students or the communities.

Combs feels that government programs are inevitably linked to election cycles. “Changing policies constantly impact the process of building relationships; essentially they have to start again.” But he is optimistic. “Organisations are recognising increasingly that Indigenous employees are an untapped resource,” he says. “The resilience that our graduates have outstrips most non-Indigenous graduates, which is something that companies can’t teach.”

Earlier this year, CareerTrackers launched an initiative naming 12 companies that have made 10-year commitments to supporting their work. Qantas is one of those and will provide a minimum of 250 Indigenous university internships over 10 years and 100 Indigenous internships in areas such as finance, engineering and flight operations, over three years.

“These commitments show the communities we are working with that CareerTrackers has long-term support, and that employment opportunities will exist for the next generation of Indigenous young people. CareerTrackers starts with the idea of reconciliation, but then “goes on to prove that this is about talent, not about lowering the bar,” says Combs.

The program helps participants identify what they want to do and then builds on their strengths. It then approaches a company with a person – not the idea of a person. From small beginnings, CareerTrackers has grown to support 943 participants across a wide range of Australian businesses.

Making the business case for employing Indigenous workers

As for the future, there are still huge hurdles to overcome around employing Indigenous workers. Poor levels of education, health standards and the remote locations where many Indigenous people live are the largest. Other problems, such as the negative role of employer practices and policies, racial discrimination and cultural tensions are also a barrier to progress. What firms like Argyle Diamonds, Qantas and Australia Post have shown, says Gooda, is that these problems aren’t insurmountable, given the will.

“Just finding Aboriginal people in order to meet a target is detrimental to the whole process if you’re not getting people who can be developed into good workers,” he says.

Motivation has to be rooted in understanding the business case for employing Indigenous workers.

“We don’t want employers doing it simply because they love Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, but because they add value to the company. More than $30bn was spent on services to the Indigenous community. Employing Indigenous workers sends the right message and helps you get those contracts.

“What I’m seeing is companies that give a fair dinkum are building the infrastructure to make that leap forward – and measuring the performance of their senior and middle manager on how they’re going on these strategies. If that happens, then you will see the incremental change that will produce the outcomes everyone is looking for.”

Michael Combs is a keynote speaker at AHRI’s 2016 Inclusion and Diversity Conference. To see event details and register, click here.  

This article is an edited version. The full article was first published in the April 2016 issue of HRMonthly magazine as ‘Our Mob’. AHRI members receive HRMonthly 11 times per year as part of their membership. To find out more about AHRI membership, click here.