The Australian Ag Podcast: Nigel Crawley on attracting farm workers

Agribusiness recruiter Nigel Crawley tells The Australian Ag Podcast of the extraordinary lengths farmers are going to secure workers.

Farmers are having to negotiate with potential employees on incentives such sign-on bonuses, flexible working arrangements and increased annual leave as Australia’s jobs crisis intensifies.

Leading agribusiness recruiter Nigel Crawley told The Australian Ag Podcast, out today, the incentives have been forced on employers as demand for on-farm workers hits the highest level in his 20 years in the business.

Mr Crawley said while corporate agribusinesses were looking to shore up their worker needs through graduate programs, in the short term “organisations are doing anything they can to get people interested in working for them”.

“You hear a lot of hearsay around salaries and the pressure and what people are being offered but ultimately I think people are using salaries as levers, I think they are using some flexibility about when people can work depending on the job of course – most organisations are really looking at doing whatever they can, and if that’s something different they’ll be prepared to look at it,” he said.

“We are seeing a prevalence of a sign-on bonus, which has been steadily increasing in use as a tool over the past four or five years, we are seeing companies use more incentives that are perhaps deferred as a retention tool to keep people in a job, and these are over and above being commercially viable from a base salary point of view.

“If staff are looking for extended leave, instead of your traditional four weeks, they might look at six weeks. Companies, rather than having a strict and specific policy, are more looking at individuals and what is going to keep Individual A engaged in our business – that might be completely different to the next person.”

Rimfire Resources’ Nigel Crawley.

Mr Crawley said all sectors of agriculture and agribusiness were scrambling for staff with vacancies ranging from entry-level on-farm roles through to more senior management levels.

“From an employers’ point of view, I don’t think there isn’t any one specific area of their business that is in greater demand than others and from a candidates point of view there is certainly plenty of options that have been created from that demand,” the director of Rimfire Resources said.

“If you were to look across the board, without a doubt the skilled on-farm roles … assistant management roles, farm management roles – that where the highest number of advertisements if you look at rural jobs advertised through online media are.

“And to be honest I think there’s a significant number of roles that aren’t being advertised because employers are just not seeing a response to the adverts. Demand for on-farm roles is at the highest I’ve seen in 20 years of recruitment.”