By Sue White
Closing the gap in Indigenous employment may provide challenges for some employers, but that appears not to be the case for hotel chain AccorHotels.
"We have such a positive mind frame about how we approach the Indigenous community, and about what we know they can offer our business, that we almost take the Indigenous out of it. We see good people and we want them in our business: we're just fortunate to have a partnership with the government that funds our recruitment arm to target that specific area of the market," says the national indigenous programs manager at AccorHotels, Marc Bennie.
Ibis Budget Hotel manager Kristy Stanton is rethinking her long-term career goals after quickly finding success at work.Credit: Brook Mitchell
Bennie is referring to the company's involvement in the federal government's Employment Parity Initiative, which asks corporate Australia to commit to 3 per cent Indigenous employees, and to increase the number of overall jobs for Indigenous job seekers by 2020.
The hotel chain, which has more than 250 hotels, 33,000 rooms and 12,000 employees in the Pacific region alone, has been at this for a while. Its Indigenous employment currently sits at 3.8 per cent, and there are plans in place to generate 1000 job opportunities for Indigenous applicants by 2018.
No doubt at least some of them will be keen to replicate the success of Kristy Stanton. Last year, she was the first Indigenous staff member to be appointed a general manager role (Ibis Budget at Sydney's Olympic Park). As a female, she's also now one other statistic the company is proud of: the 40 per cent of female managers that make up the AccorHotels workforce, a figure that's not too far from its goal of gender parity in management.
Like many hotel employees, Stanton didn't start out thinking about a career in hotels. But when an Indigenous cadetship offered her a chance to experience the business while she finished her university degree, it was the start of a series of opportunities she seized on. "I was offered the role of assistant manager at Novotel Manly, which I did for two years. Then I saw the Accor Executive Leadership program, which is a two-year fast track program to more senior management: it's not guaranteed to get you there, and my goal wasn't to become a general manager, it was just to get more experience and move a bit faster through Accor," Stanton says.
Eighteen months into her two-year program, her rise to management looked set when she was offered her current role.
"I love AccorHotels and everything it's done for me. I also love the culture: everyone helps each other. The best part was getting my first general manager's role. I thought it would be a great achievement in my early 30s. I did it at 25, so I was quite proud of myself," she says.
The only problem now for Stanton, having reached her initial career goals so early, is the need to recalibrate.
"I hit my goal at 25 and hadn't thought past that! Now, I want to slowly work my way up [through management] at the different AccorHotels brands, and hopefully, one day, be a vice-president of operations in NSW or another Australian state," she says.