How we place our employees at the heart of everything we do
Life as a recruiter is extremely purposeful and hugely rewarding. At Progressive Recruitment, we ensure that this is especially so. As a recruitment consultant, you impact people’s lives by finding them new opportunities and helping them take the next step in their career. At Progressive Recruitment, we are more than just an employer. We want our employees to enjoy coming to work and this is why we put in a lot of effort to provide you with a great place to work – with an excellent benefits package and an award-winning training and incentives program.
Working in a diverse and inclusive community
Last year, we revised our mission statement to ‘Bringing skilled people together to build the future’ to promote a sense of belonging, collective purpose and inclusion within the team. In line with this initiative, we have maintained a gender parity mindset and taken pride in the meritocratic culture we have achieved today, providing equal opportunities to all regardless of gender and background. To further support our female leaders, we have launched our global initiative program called IdentiFy to help women progress into leadership roles within the business. This program provides a support network, tools and a platform that facilitates sharing of ideas and challenges. We have also set up Hyden - a new brand designed to address diversity issues in the workplace and help eradicate diversity gaps.
To complement our multicultural hub, our employees come from various corners of the world, namely South Africa, Mauritius, Scotland, Spain, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, England, Ireland and of course, Australia. We see the benefit of having a multicultural and diverse workforce as we learn how it correlates with productivity and creativity. Our workplace diversity lifted employee morale and we found employees desiring to work more effectively and efficiently.
Being a multicultural hub in Sydney, we ensure to celebrate all cultures and faiths of our employees – an example being Kereen Rodrigo, our Government Lead Consultant, who often shares treats from Sri Lanka with the rest of the team. This fosters a sense of community and inclusion within the group as we gain a deeper understanding of the Sri Lankan culture. In addition, we have also aligned our Corporate Responsibility Program with the SOS Children’s Villages and raised funds totalling $1.8 million. Part of that amount contributed towards SOS Children Villages Philippines which is located within the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region that we operate in and is a charity that provides children with a better start in life with food, education and shelter.
Going global
With over 40 offices around the world, our employees have the opportunity to go on secondments to Progressive Recruitment offices in other locations and benefit from the experience of living in a different country. Kris Coulthard, our Project Services and Development Contracts Manager, started his journey with Progressive Recruitment in London before moving to Sydney to take up a new opportunity as a Principal Consultant a few years ago. Tim Moran, our Regional Director has also moved to Sydney from Glasgow to kick off the Australian business 10 years ago. This month, we have welcomed Daniel Batts, our Leadership and Development Specialist who left Brisbane for a new role in London and now back on Australian soil in Sydney to drive our new training and development program for our new starters.
What we offer in our incentives program
Amongst the many benefits we provide, we offer a great commission structure to our high performers on top of a competitive base salary. We also encourage our employees to bring along their friends to join our team through our generous referral program where they can earn up to $4,000 for each successful referral. We also provide an excellent incentives program that takes our employees to overseas and local destinations – all expenses paid. We have previously flown our high performers to Seoul, Las Vegas, Amsterdam, Phuket, the Whitsundays and Bali. In addition, our high performing employees compete regionally for a spot in our annual Supertrip to a destination voted by everyone in the region.
All our Progressive Recruitment offices across Asia-Pacific (APAC) also participate at our annual regional conference. Last year, we treated our employees from offices in Australia, Tokyo and Singapore to a great weekend getaway in Bali for our annual regional conference. Apart from all that is mentioned, we also provide regular club lunches which is a sumptuous treat for employees who have hit their targets for the period.
Working in a flexible environment
At Progressive Recruitment, we understand that our employees have responsibilities outside of work. This is why we are committed to create a flexible working environment which allows our employees to arrange their own work routine. For example, Julie Wood, Operations Manager at our Sydney office, works from home once a week to take care of her family. Kereen Rodrigo works on a part-time basis and chooses the days to work depending on her workload and meetings that have been organised for the week. With our state of the art technology, our employees can take their meetings with them and reach people all over the world through our video conferencing facilities and other mobile technologies such as outlook and salesforce mobile. With many of our clients based across Australia, we encourage our consultants to travel and work wherever their next client meeting may be – whether interstate or regional.
Enhanced maternity program
We have an enhanced maternity scheme and are one of the few recruitment agencies in Sydney to provide 20 weeks of basic pay to the primary carer of the new-born or child – as opposed to the 12 weeks of basic pay that most companies provide. Additionally, eligible working dads and partners (including same-sex partners) get two weeks leave paid at the national minimum wage. To help employees stay connected with Progressive Recruitment while on maternity leave, we also provide a buddy scheme and various team bonding activities. We provide the option of flexible working once this now working mum or dad returns to work with us. This can be in the form of a change in the number of hours worked, number of days worked or even working from home.
Valuing work-life balance
Whilst we promote a high performing culture, we also recognise the importance of work-life balance for the wellbeing of our employees. As such, we encourage everyone to take a 90 minute break during lunch hour to hit the gym so they can feel refreshed for the rest of the day. Many of us play a sport after work and we often show support to each other by going to each other’s games and tournaments. This month, more than 20 people in the office went to the Corporate Fighter night to support Senior Consultant, Adam Higgins’ boxing match and helped to raise funds for a special cause. Adam won his fight and proceeds were donated to the Black Dog institute. We also encourage our employees to enrol in our wellness program and take the option of either private medical insurance or a wellness benefit such as gym memberships, yoga, Pilates, counselling or remedial therapy. We want our employees to be engaged at work while maintaining a healthy work-life balance which can also help to improve on productivity and ultimately performance.
Be trained and upskilled
Last but not least, we offer an award-winning training and development program that has been recognised by the recruitment industry at the 2018 Recruitment International Awards. Last year, we rolled out Recruitment Campus which has been designed to simplify our on-boarding process. Many of our new starters come from diverse backgrounds such as health or retail so this program has eased their transition into the recruitment industry. Recruitment Campus comprises of practical learning sessions and focuses on developing all essential competencies, behaviours, communication skills and individual strengths. It creates a supportive learning environment to our consultants as well as opportunities to learn from their peers and senior management. We also support our managers through training and development programs. This month, our junior managers across the APAC region would be taking part in the CMEP training in Sydney – a training that is designed to help them explore and develop their leadership skills.
Looking to join us?
If you are looking to learn more about Progressive Recruitment and what we do, visit our Linkedin page or watch this video to find out why we love what we do. Progressive Recruitment is part of the larger SThree group.
