The Stan Grant Indigenous Employment Award recognises excellence in Indigenous employment initiatives and programs in the workplace. This year’s award was won by Danila Dilba Health Service! In a Recruitment Marketing Magazine exclusive, we interviewed their CEO Olga Havnen and HR Manager Sulal Mathai who shared how their employer branding efforts have made an impact.
Danila Dilba Health Service is an Aboriginal community-controlled organisation providing culturally-appropriate, comprehensive primary health care and community services to Biluru (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) people in the Yilli Rreung (greater Darwin) region of the Northern Territory.
Last year, the organisation launched their career pathways project as part of their HR strategy to promote Indigenous staffing across all levels in their organisation, including leadership positions. The project has been a huge success, with Indigenous employees now comprising 50 per cent of their overall workforce and 65 per cent of their executive leadership team
As Danila Dilba’s CEO, Olga Havnen explains, “our aim is to maintain our status as an employer of choice, both to attract talented employees and increase the professionalism and capability of employees at every level of the organisation. Our vision is to ensure continuing leadership by a well-qualified, skilled Indigenous management team.”
Danila Dilba offers traineeships, leadership opportunities, mentoring for emerging leaders, and has introduced new positions for safety and community liaison officers who engage with clients in their clinics. All their new positions are opportunities to bring more Indigenous employees on board.
Danila Dilba’s Indigenous Emerging Leadership program enables their Indigenous employees to put forward expressions of interest to receive formal mentoring opportunities through external pathways. This facilitates leadership pathways for these employees and eases their transition into these positions.
They also have a program called the Australian Nurse Family Partnership Program (ANSPP), a new home visiting social support service for Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander mothers and babies.
“The program is part of eight different Australian organisations, including Danila Dilba,” said Hiring Manager Sulal Mathai. “We are the only location where all our team members are Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander women. This makes a difference because they bring cultural appropriateness and understanding when visiting homes, which is a special outcome for the program.”
To promote all these great initiatives, they conducted an employer branding project with external specialists from Employment Office. Their employer branding project was amplified through digital initiatives, such as restructuring and updating their careers website, and showcasing their employees in various roles through written and video content.
“The project helped Danila Dilba strengthen our employer brand and market our unique employee value proposition across Australia. Along with the branding project we revamped our website and careers pages which helped us attract quality applicants to join Danila Dilba in 2018 across all levels of our organisation.”
Mathai measured their return on investment through analysing key metrics, such as visits to their careers website (which increased by 60%!). They also managed to fill 80% of their advertised opportunities, which was also a significant increase for them.
“Our employer branding initiatives have been very successful in ensuring we receive our fair share of quality talent. It’s helped us in both recruitment and retention. We’ve retained a greater number of employees as we’ve opened more leadership positions.”
Conducting an employer branding through external specialists enabled Danila Dilba to see the bigger picture and connect the dots.
“This made a big difference. We used to do things in a silo, and Employment Office’s Employer Branding specialists provided a unified approach. They were able to produce feature stories of our people and their successful career pathways, and use consistent wording to showcase our organisation, increasing the quality of our recruitment process and content.”
Mathai also implemented social media campaigns to showcase their employee profile story videos.
“Now, when we advertise, we don’t need to rely on recruitment partners. We received a large number of quality responses!”
“Employer Branding Specialists took a comprehensive approach that helped us to understand and amplify our brand, and the also conducted a talent competitor analysis of what similar organisations were doing with their employer brand. This helped us to ensure we are presenting a unique employer offering that was one step ahead of other primary healthcare providers in our state. We knew what our industry was doing and we could take a step forward to brand ourselves with more strength.
Winning the 2018 AHRI Stan Grant Indigenous Employment Award
As a community-focused Indigenous organisation, Danila Dilba’s goal was to promote Indigenous employment and career pathways across their whole organisation at all levels.
“We wanted to demonstrate our high-standard for employment,” said Mathai. “We applied for AHRI’s Stan Grant Indigenous Employment Award, one of Australia’s most prestigious awards for excellence in Indigenous employment initiatives in the workplace, to see how our practices stood in comparison to the rest of Australia. Through winning the award, we’re so pleased to demonstrate how we do well in this sector!”
“In Darwin, we cater to the community. But that doesn’t mean we want to limit our practices. We want to have world-class processes and practices, and continue to enhance the reputation and credibility of our organisation. Winning the award affirmed our knowledge that our HR and business practices should be recognised and celebrated. It’s proven the success of our Indigenous employment and career pathways.”