Why recruitment queen Sarina Russo is grateful to all the bosses who sacked her

SHE’S one of Australia’s richest women, worth an estimated $100 million. But recruitment queen Sarina Russo once struggled to hold down a job.

SHE’S one of Australia’s richest women, with a net worth estimated at $100 million and a business empire that spans the globe.

But self-described recruitment queen Sarina Russo wasn’t born into wealth, and earned her success after a series of humiliating setbacks.

So crucial were her early failures to stoking her entrepreneurial spirit that Russo thanked every boss who ever sacked her in the acknowledgments section of her book, Meet Me at the Top. And there were quite a few.

From the lawyer who sacked her for coming back five minutes late from lunch, to the typing school that objected to her colourful teaching methods, Russo didn’t see eye-to-eye with her employers.

“It was really obvious that I was a dormant entrepreneur,” she told news.com.au.

With a mortgage to pay and the pressures of growing up in a traditional Sicilian family, Russo resorted to lining up new jobs with staggered start dates in order to safeguard her income.

“My retention wasn’t that good at the time and I knew if I gave myself a week, I could either determine that I didn’t like it, or my boss didn’t like it,” she said.

In the 1970s, Russo said, being a working woman was fraught with complication.

“Bosses would date their secretaries and then their wives would say ‘it’s either me or the secretary’,” she recalled.

“Then they’d fire the secretary and I’d happen to go in to the vacancy where they really didn’t want me, they wanted, you know, the secretary.”

Sarina Russo, pictured with her parents, was not cut out for secretarial work.

But when two jobs fell apart within weeks of each other, Russo ran out of options.

After being fired by the business college where she taught a typing class, she was sacked from her secretarial position at a law firm.

“In those days, they used to just call you and say ‘don’t come Monday’, and I said ‘Well would you like me to come Tuesday?’ ‘No’, they went ‘no, don’t come at all’.”

While a student revolt prompted the college to reinstate her, Russo needed more than a night job to make ends meet. So she used her $2600 in savings to open a school of her own.

“It was the students’ confidence in me and my capability of transforming their lives that kickstarted my little typing school,” she said.

“They’d marched into the Principal and said ‘unless you reinstate her, we’re not going to continue our fees’. And it was only that that gave me the confidence.”

Within a week of launching the business, Russo said, she earned more than her annual legal secretary’s salary.

“It just took off,” she said.

What began with nine students in 1979 has grown into a recruitment and training business with more than 1000 employees at hundreds of sites in Australia, the United Kingdom, India, Vietnam and China.

The Sarina Russo Group is made up of the Sarina Russo Schools Australia, Sarina Russo Job Access, Russo Recruitment, Russo Corporate Training, Sarina Investments and Russo Higher Education, a partnership with Queensland’s James Cook University.

Sarina Russo says setbacks drove her passion to succeed. Picture: Glenn Barnes

Winning the Job Access tender was a major coup for Russo, who had lost an earlier national contract under the Rudd Government in 2009.

“That was a crisis for me, where I lost $50 million worth of work,” Russo said.

But she went on to win a contract of the same value in the United Kingdom, and fought to regain her crown as “the Madonna of jobs” in Australia.

“I was determined that we were going to win it again,” Russo said.

In March last year, she did just that, signing the deal to operate Job Access sites at locations across Australia, serving 60,000 job seekers — many of them in low socio-economic areas like Mount Druitt in NSW, Logan in Queensland and Footscray in Victoria.

Russo said she considered it a gift to be able to deliver services to the disadvantaged, whom she hoped to influence and inspire.

“If there’s anything that I can teach to my students and to my job seekers is that if you believe in yourself, no one else really matters,” she said.

“One of the greatest things that I’ve always taught is it doesn’t really matter what other people think; what’s really important is what you think. It’s all about self belief.”

Russo encouraged young Australians to follow her lead and pursue the entrepreneurial path, extolling the opportunities of the digital age.

“One of the things I get really excited with job seekers is if they don't like to work with a boss like myself can kick start their own job,” she said.

“And with technology today, we have greater opportunity in the online space than we ever have. I think the disruption of business today allows the youth to become more independent and have the flexibility of not having to go to an office nine to five.

“They can work from a coffee shop, a beach ... You must give it a go, and be prepared to fail, because with failure you’ll really know your passion and have the determination to go out there and try it again.”

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Originally published as Why recruitment queen Sarina Russo is grateful to all the bosses who sacked her