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Australia – Acorn sets up shop in the UK to source workers for Australia

17 September 2014

Last month, Western Australian recruitment firm Acorn Recruitment opened a new office in the UK to attract in-demand tradespeople, directly, reports The Kalgoorlie Miner.

Roger Edwards, Managing Director of Acorn Recruitment, said that establishing a UK office will enable Acorn to find skilled workers for the resources industry: “I thought I’d go there and I’ll find a way of being proactive and getting the people there to start with.”

“I found out the last mine in Cornwall shut down and two months ago they made 380 people redundant, so that was part of my purposes to go there, to find pre-trained and skill-trained miners. This gives them a little bit of a shove and says ‘we’re here, we’re looking for you’,” he explained.

Opening the UK office in August, Mr Edwards said the reaction by British tradespeople in the first week had been encouraging: “Once I started advertising, I realised it was going to be huge. In the first week I had 17 replies from tradespeople because they were going through a bad spell of being made redundant.”

Mr Edwards said Acorn Recruitment had tried to source local Australian workers in the first instance but could not keep up with demand: “Our first priority is local people because it just solves everything … they’re here, they’re skilled. But we can’t get enough of them. Boilermakers are in great demand, underground fitters we find a problem with.”

Mr Edwards said of the 17 UK applicants he received in the first week, 14 had been deemed eligible to come to Australia. However, he added that it would be between six and nine months of migration processes before they would be eligible to come to Australia.

Mr Edwards said there may be potential for Acorn to cast the net of recruitment further afield to include Ireland and Scotland.

This announcement will most likely not be received well by Australian jobseekers, who, despite a surprising lift in new jobs during August 2014, have been experiencing a persistently tight labour market.