Why Can’t Regions Recruit Like Companies?
For as long as Hughes et al has existed, one question has sat behind our work: Why can’t regions recruit like big companies?
It’s a useful comparison. Large organisations recruit thousands of people every year. Regions often struggle to find a few dozen. Yet both are trying to solve the same problem: matching willing people to meaningful work.
Early in my career, I helped companies recruit 5,500 people a year and they managed tens of thousands more with clear systems, data and coordination. Meanwhile, the communities where they operated struggled to find the 20 or 50 people they needed to stay sustainable.
Eighteen years later, the contrast is even sharper. If a region hosts multiple large companies, all recruiting and managing tens of thousands of workers, why can’t the community find the handful it needs?
It’s not that it can’t be done. It’s that the systems that make it possible don’t exist at regional scale.
The Real Problem: Fragmentation
The labour market isn’t broken - it’s fragmented.
A person needs to know a job exists, understand the pathway, access training, secure transport or childcare, and get support through an interview. An employer needs to find people, assess them, induct them and move them safely to work. Training providers, recruiters, labour hire companies, accommodation providers and community services all play a role.
But in most regions, these parts don’t connect. Everyone works hard - but they work separately.
Big companies succeed because they coordinate these parts. Regions struggle because they either don’t, or they can’t.
Connected Markets Create Opportunity
When a labour market is connected, things become simple:
People can see jobs
Employers can find candidates
Training aligns with real demand
Support services coordinate around opportunity
Movement to and from work becomes easier
Just as importantly, leaders get better information:
Where workers are
What skills are missing
Which employers are active
What demand is coming
Where investment should go
Without this information, everyone is guessing.
This is why Hughes et al has long partnered with regional employment platforms and digital ecosystems. Technology isn’t the whole answer - but shared systems give regions a foundation for coordination, organisation and direction.
A region cannot build a strategy from anecdotes. It needs common definitions, shared measurement and useful data. It needs systems that time poor people can build collaborate around efficiently.
Opportunity Exists - If You Test the Market
One of the simplest lessons is this: publish the opportunity and test the market.
I once worked with a client who didn’t want to advertise senior roles in a major regional city because she didn’t believe the region could produce or attract the right people. We pushed back. Within a week the perfect candidate applied - because they needed to move to that town for family reasons.
You never know who is looking. But you do know what happens when you don’t ask.
Regions Need Coordination - Or They Can’t Compete
Governments have a choice: support the workforce to organise itself, or provide the mechanics around which the workforce can be organised.
Productive governments find the balance. Unproductive governments mismanage both.
Regions cannot recruit like companies if they are left without the tools, data, systems and coordination that companies take for granted. Free systems don’t solve big problems. But coordinated systems make regions far easier to plug into - and far more valuable to the projects around them.
Crucially when you can get coordinated systems, you can consolidate demand, build reliability into supply, and leverage the buying power of your demand, to build the capability and create the value.
When regions are organised, and projects know how to engage, inefficiency drops and opportunity grows.
That is smarter resourcing. Not just more jobs - but stronger regional capability, clearer pathways, and practical systems that support industry, community and people.
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