Refugees are an asset but do employers know where to find them?

Refugees, unlike skilled migrants, weren’t preparing for what became a forced relocation.

If you were startled by the blunt language from Canberra this week about our broken skilled migration program, take a moment to think about the how the jobs market works – or doesn’t work – for people who arrive as refugees.

They represent a far smaller group, of course, and they arrive with different backstories, but getting a job is high on their list of expectations. The difference is that the skilled migrant has potentially spent a year or more in their home country preparing for a job in Australia. In fact, with our visa system under so much strain since Covid-19, that “prep” time has often been much longer. And once through the red tape (which this week we learnt will be removed, or at least reduced, under the Albanese government’s reform of processes), the skilled migrant slots into work, albeit often with ongoing challenges.

But as Dr Betina Szkudlarek of Sydney University says: “The problem with refugees, unlike skilled migrants, is that they haven’t been preparing for the relocation. They didn’t anticipate it and haven’t planned to be in Australia. Basically, they’ve lost everything, they’ve been stripped of their lives and they are basically trying to build alliances. Employment is one of the ways to achieve that. Most skilled migrants have had a lengthy preparation period, they have the credibility networks, they understand how the labour market works, they understand the application processes, while many refugees have absolutely no idea and start from scratch.

“When you are stripped of everything, if everything is taken away from you, the one thing that many of these refugees are left with is their professional identity and they are absolutely committed to at least being able to rebuild that part of who they are, that professional self.”

It’s heartbreaking then when Australians who have never been great at understanding and recognising the CVs and qualifications of foreigners, reject them. Not much new here. How many people who came here as assisted and unassisted migrants in the decades after World War II and had held senior positions in their home countries wound up working in factories?

Crescent Foundation chief executive Talal Yassine. Picture: Hollie Adams

Decent employment can be a big hurdle, one tackled in a report released on Saturday and conducted by Dr Szkudlarek and her Newcastle University colleague Dr Jeannie Eun Su Lee for the advocacy body, the Crescent Foundation. Szkudlarek, who is an associate professor in management at the Sydney University Business School, says it’s also a costly process to get qualifications recognised. But refugees, having gone through so much, are resilient and massively determined when it comes to finding employment, she says.

The report, based on work with 35 companies already interested in hiring refugees, found a gap between intention and action: 57 per cent of companies were concerned at not having the internal resources to train or on-board refugee hires; 30 per cent believed it was too time-consuming to find refugee talent and validate their credentials, skills and expertise; while 13 per cent believed there was a mismatch between skill-set needs and the supply of refugee talent. The report found very few employers used government grants and incentives and most were unaware of existing service providers, grants and subsidies designed to assist hiring of refugees.

The last couple of years have been frustrating for Szkudlarek and the foundation’s CEO Talal Yassine because of what they say is a major demand and supply issue at a time of historically low unemployment. Yassine says: “There’s a huge labour shortage in Australia, and on the other hand I’ve got a brother flying to London to recruit doctors; (there’s) a principal flying to Singapore to find teachers, and everyone’s struggling. We’ve got a really great asset in the country, and we’re not connecting the dots.”

He wants government to do more to “make it a straight line” between the pool of refugees and jobs. “It’s not just an equity argument; it’s about what resources we have onshore that we can use and that just don’t get through our current systems,” he says.

Yassine does not think refugees miss out because they are being proactively discriminated against; rather employers don’t know where to look even as they desperately search for talent.

“It’s just about pointing them in the right direction, and then being slightly supportive,” he says. “It’s not about the clarion call of unfairness, inequity and injustice.”

Szkudlarek says we need to ensure existing support organisations work in a way that is sensitive to the situation of refugees, but also business dynamics.

The report notes the anxiety among employers about hiring refugees has been fuelled by the media and government, which are “deemed responsible for a negative narrative” by a “significant portion” of the interviewees in the study.

“They thought the media and government fuelled prejudice and misconceptions about refugees,” the report says.

It found many employers had high expectations of native English fluency and many interviewees indicated “no government support nor incentive could motivate them to consider hiring someone that did not meet their language-proficiency requirements”. However, for some highly skilled roles, where a candidate had the relevant skills and experience, the language expectations could be lowered.

But employers certainly expect candidates to come into the job with the skills required to quickly get up to speed. The report suggests there is scope for more partnerships between educational institutions and employers to develop “curricula based on role-specific skills and sector-specific language skills”.

But perhaps its most significant recommendation concerns government support for agencies that help refugees into jobs. It notes the system rewards organisations under a model that leads to increased competition among organisations which try to work with the most employable refugees whose path to jobs is most straightforward. And it suggests that a model that rewards organisations for training as well as placement could be useful in the bid to get refugees into jobs.