Is it time to look to sponsorship?
To grow and succeed, businesses need the very best talent. Yet attracting top candidates to join your team in Australia may not be straightforward.
The ideal solution for new employees are of course Australian citizens or permanent residents of Australia who can remain indefinitely in the country without work restrictions.
Often, however, there just isn’t a big enough pool of candidates in Australia with the right skills and experience - so the solution is to look further afield.
Searching for alternative ways to recruit comes with its own challenges. If your business is like many of our clients at RHL Australasia, your need for star players is time-critical and product-launch-critical. You may be working on creative solutions to world problems. You may be the first company to be developing a specific technology. The fact is, businesses in the innovation and design sector simply can’t afford to wait around while the right candidates present themselves.
The answer may be to bring a skilled person into Australia to work for you, and to sponsor that individual as part of their Temporary Skill Shortage Visa (subclass 482).
Sponsorship means you can take advantage of a huge pool of exceptional staff from overseas. At RHL, we have extensive contacts in the UK, in particular. Famous for producing world-class creative and technical experts, the UK has thriving industrial, product and mechanical design sectors and top universities feeding the talent pipeline.
Navigating the sponsorship process
Although going down the route of overseas sponsorship can be a game-changer in terms of getting fantastic people on board, it’s not straightforward and it’s not without financial cost.
Strict immigration rules means that the Australian government (and Department of Home Affairs) put hurdles in your way. After all, they want your business to employ someone who’s either an Australian citizen or a permanent resident - and will make you justify why you’re not hiring locally.
Here are the steps you’ll need to take:
1 Become an approved business sponsor
The first step towards overseas sponsorship is to register as an approved business sponsor. You’ll need to provide certain evidence, and it can be an involved process that might not be logistically possible for every small business.
2 Nominate the position
Your business then needs to nominate the position it’s recruiting for. Australia needs to fill many technical skills shortages - industrial design roles in design and engineering are among those. As the Home Affairs website states, ‘with limited exceptions, the job you sponsor the overseas worker to do must be on the Skilled Occupations List.’
3 Advertise the position
The next step is for your business to prove it’s looked for an Australian citizen or permanent resident with the skills and experience needed for the job. That means advertising the position you need to fill for 12 weeks in at least three different publications available in Australia (and as this includes online publications, LinkedIn can be one of these three).
If your job advert doesn’t receive a high volume of response, it’ll be relatively straightforward to deal with applications and justify why those candidates aren’t suitable for your role. But if it does, this will be a longer and more involved process.
4 Pay the Nomination Contribution Training Charge
The Australian government recently introduced a Nomination Training Contribution Charge (NTCC) for employers who sponsor overseas workers, to contribute to the skills development of workers in Australia.
For temporary work visas, businesses with an annual turnover of below $10 million pay $1,200 per year, per worker (for those with above $10 million, the charge is $1,800 per year, per worker).
5 The employee applies for the visa
When your nomination application has been approved by the Department of Home Affairs, the foreign worker you’d like to recruit needs to complete a visa application (bearing in mind there are various requirements that they must meet personally).
At RHL we can recommend the services of a registered Visa Agent who will support candidates through the visa process, and show them how they’ve accrued enough points to justify meeting the criteria for the relevant visa.
Battling the talent shortage
The process of sponsoring a skilled worker to come to Australia may seem cumbersome and drawn out, but it really can be worth it for the chance to get exceptional staff on board.
After all, a global talent shortage calls for creative workarounds - and powering up the best teams for future success in Australia is no exception.
More information
Find out more about sponsoring workers from overseas on the Department of Home Affairs website.
Contact Paul for a chat about how overseas sponsorship can help you find the right people for your team:
+61 (0)4 5656 5555 or email paul@rhl.com.au