STARTED in 2002 by staffing and recruitment veteran John Cooling, SmartWorker has grown to employ 10 employees servicing more than 100 companies in the mining and heavy industry sectors.
STARTED in 2002 by staffing and recruitment veteran John Cooling, SmartWorker has grown to employ 10 employees servicing more than 100 companies in the mining and heavy industry sectors.
Collectively, SmartWorker’s employees have more than 150 years’ experience in staffing for capital-intensive industries such as mining, utilities and transportation.
SmartWorker recently appointed Janine Henderson as WA state manager, tapping into her 22 years’ experience in sales and business development, including 18 years in a senior management role at Telstra.
For the past eight years, SmartWorker has delivered recruitment services for new projects and existing operations to many of the world’s top 10 mining companies, including Vale Australia.
Mr Cooling said he deliberately set up offices in the mining hubs of Perth and Brisbane to tap into the mining and oil and gas sectors.
“It’s all about accessibility,” Mr Cooling told WA Business News.
“If you’re going to grow and be successful, you have to be placed where the action is.”
Executive director Tony Smith bought into SmartWorker because he thought it had a sound business model. He said SmartWorker’s aim was to match top quality professional and management staff to client challenges at all levels within local, national and multinational companies.
The business works closely with clients in the mining, oil and gas, engineering and construction industries to provide people for executive and management roles, as well as industry professionals, and engineers.
An initial challenge for the recruitment firm, however, was to manage the company like a corporate enterprise as it grew from the ground up.
“Many business start-ups fail because they neglect to prepare a holistic and thorough business plan, which includes all aspects of the business,” Mr Smith said.
“We were well aware of this and took steps to ensure we were well prepared.”
A challenge was to develop and implement a strategic plan to support the projected growth of the business, and to ensure it had a sustainable model in place.
After initially focusing heavily on IT professionals, as well as the mining market, utilities, and transport, Mr Cooling realised the business’s focus was too broad.
In 2006 SmartWorker changed the groups of professionals it worked with, focusing on white-collar positions in the mining sector, and losing IT from its portfolio.
“So we pared our business model back to just mining and then looked at providing a solution to the mining industry,” Mr Cooling said.
After changing its focus, SmartWorker grew its client base and more recently expanded to recruit for the oil and gas sector.
Mr Smith said taking the time to reassess the direction of the company enabled the business to sustain growth – which was its core strategy – over the long-term.
“We were spending and investing in the company without any return to start. We were working in the business and on the business,” he said.
“We had a strong marketing focus and implemented a market plan from the outset, with a highly targeted market design using a market leverage strategy to grow the market in a planned and orderly way.
“We were able to refine our market-driver approach to come up with our current model, which has achieved 70 per cent growth over the last year, despite the impacts of the GFC on the growth of many businesses.
“We also had a strong focus on financial control, including business planning, budgeting and forecasting, which has always been a core business activity from day one.”
As the state’s resources and oil and gas sectors ramp up, SmartWorker competes directly with a host of companies that either consult, contract or recruit into the mining and heavy industry sectors.
“We compete with three classes of competition – internal recruiters, external recruiters and consulting firms,” Mr Smith said.
Internal recruiters have become a larger issue for the company, as many consultants have exited the professional side of the industry during the GFC to take roles as internal recruiters.
Mr Smith said external recruiters also represented a significant competitive force.
“Those who survived the market crash are generally robust and sustainable companies like we are,” he said,
“We believe a differentiator is the depth of industry experience of our staff. We operate with a highly specialised focus on the market our clients are in, and we are completely immersed in it, day to day, with them.”
