Now Hiring: Must Be Located on the Same Continent

Recruitment in disability support is a fascinating little adventure. By “fascinating little adventure”, I mean that every time I open Indeed I genuinely have no idea whether I'm about to find our next amazing team member or discover an entirely new interpretation of the words availability and suitably qualified.

We've been recruiting again at FIG Supports, both because our team is growing and because disability support has this wonderful habit of requiring exactly the staff member you don't currently have available. People get sick. People go on holidays. People's availability changes. Clients need different hours. One week everything fits together beautifully and I briefly believe I've finally cracked the code. The following week three people are unavailable and somehow I am back on the roster wondering how the fuck this happened again.

The obvious solution is to hire more people.

You'd think.

I've been doing this long enough now to know that finding someone who actually fits is less like recruitment and more like trying to line up a collection of planets that have absolutely no interest in being in the same solar system.

There are people with plenty of availability but no qualifications. There are qualified people whose ongoing availability turns out to be every second Tuesday between 11:17am and lunch. There are people looking for 30 or 40 hours when the role advertised very clearly says six. There are people who apply for a role requiring disability support experience without having worked in disability support. There are applicants who look fantastic until you discover they're several hundred kilometres away.

Then occasionally you get the magical combination of qualification, experience and availability and think, THIS IS IT.

It is very rarely it.

Part of the problem is that we're probably making life harder for ourselves, because FIG does have standards around who we employ.

Not every disability support role or provider requires workers to hold a formal disability or individual support qualification. At FIG, we choose to.

That's not because I think a certificate magically makes someone a brilliant support worker. It absolutely doesn't. I've met people with qualifications who I wouldn't trust to look after a pot plant, and I've met naturally caring people who would probably be wonderful in the sector with the right training.

But our team walks into people's homes. They support people with disabilities, health conditions, communication difficulties and varying support needs. They're expected to understand things like dignity, choice and control, professional boundaries, duty of care, documentation, privacy, risk, independence and person-centred practice. Sometimes they're working alone and need to recognise when something isn't right and know what to do next.

Being a nice person matters enormously.

But being nice isn't a qualification.

So yes, we ask for one.

We also don't recruit support workers simply to fill empty boxes on a roster. The person in that box matters just as much as the shift itself.

One of the biggest things we look for is whether someone understands that support doesn't mean doing everything for someone. If a participant can make their own sandwich, the goal isn't necessarily to make them a faster, prettier sandwich because you're being helpful. Sometimes your job is to stand there while they make the wonkiest sandwich you've ever seen, because it's their sandwich and maintaining that independence matters far more than whether the cheese reaches all four corners.

That kind of support requires judgement. It requires patience. It requires understanding the person in front of you rather than treating disability support like a list of household chores.

It also means that a perfectly competent support worker might not be the right match for every participant. Personalities matter. Communication matters. Boundaries matter. Some participants need someone chatty. Some absolutely do not. Some need prompting and encouragement. Some need a worker who knows when to shut up and give them space.

So when someone tells me, “There are heaps of people looking for work,” I have to resist the urge to laugh slightly maniacally.

Yes.

There are.

Finding the right ones at the exact moment you need them is another matter entirely.

Which brings me to this week's recruitment efforts.

I logged into Indeed and discovered two applications that had apparently been sitting there for six days without me noticing them.

Excellent! Two new possibilities.

Applicant number one had relevant qualifications, said he had full availability with no work restrictions, had a brand-new car and was only hoping to build toward around eight hours a week.

I nearly fell off my chair.

Eight regular hours with broad availability for additional shifts? That's actually incredibly useful in our world. Someone who doesn't need a huge permanent roster but can pick up additional work when another team member is sick or away is basically recruitment catnip to me.

Then I looked more closely.

Albury.

Except his résumé also contained a Fawkner address.

Neither is Swan Hill.

Still, okay. People relocate. There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation. I hadn't completely lost hope.

Then I opened applicant number two.

This woman had absolutely nailed my screening questions.

Authorised to work in Australia? Yes.

Working with Children Check? Yes.

Police Check? Yes.

NDIS Worker Screening? Yes.

Full driver's licence and a reliable vehicle with comprehensive insurance? Yes.

Current availability Monday through Sunday?

Any time.

Ideal hours?

Twenty.

Currently employed by another disability or aged-care provider?

No.

For one glorious moment, I thought the recruitment gods had finally looked down upon me and said, Bec has suffered enough.

I opened the résumé.

Nigeria.

Not previously lived in Nigeria.

Not recently moved to Australia from Nigeria.

Currently. In. Nigeria.

Nigerian address. Nigerian phone number. Current employment in Nigeria.

I sat staring at my computer for a while, contemplating whether “Any time” technically still counted as accurate if we ignored the international flight required before each shift.

I will give her this: she certainly hadn't exaggerated the distance she was willing to commute.

And that, really, is recruitment at FIG.

We're not looking for perfect people. We're not looking for people who all think, speak or work exactly like me — frankly, the business probably couldn't survive more than one of me anyway.

We're looking for people who genuinely understand support work, have the training to back it up, are reliable, have availability that actually matches our participants' needs and, most importantly, are the kind of people we'd feel comfortable sending into someone's home wearing the FIG name.

That makes recruitment slower. It makes the employment pool smaller. It occasionally makes me want to put my head through my laptop.

But I'm okay with that.

I'd rather have an uncovered shift that I have to solve than lower the standard simply so I can say the roster is full. These aren't just shifts we're filling. They're people's lives, homes, routines and independence, and I think the people doing that work should actually know what they're doing.

So yes, FIG Supports is still recruiting.

We're looking for qualified disability support workers with good availability, strong professional boundaries, a person-centred approach and an understanding that sometimes the best support you can provide is knowing when not to do something for somebody.

A sense of humour would probably help.

And following this week's applications, I am considering one small addition to our essential criteria:

Must be located on the same continent.

Apparently, you really do have to specify everything. 😂