Five Years of Peopleconnexion PNG: What We’ve Learned
Next month, we?re celebrating a very special milestone at Peopleconnexion PNG… Peopleconnexion PNG is turning five!
As a company, we’ve grown so much in this time. We’ve built our team and client base from scratch, and now we service some of the country’s leading organisations.
We’ve gone from knocking on doors to request a meeting to presenting at conferences in front of PNG’s most well-regarded CEOs.
We’ve transitioned from specialising in permanent recruitment to offering a full-service suite:
- Permanent recruitment
- Contract recruitment
- Contingent assignments
- Retained assignments
- Payroll management
- Expatriate recruitment and visa support
- Learning and development workshops
- HR services (remuneration advice, assessment centres, psychometric testing)
Most importantly, we’ve built up our valuable networks and long-term relationships, writing success stories with hundreds of candidates, clients and countless organisations.
It has been a whirlwind of change with challenges and triumphs, all made possible by our incredibly hard-working team and our long-term relationships with our candidates, our clients and our contractors.
If you know our team well, you?ll know that we love stats and let the numbers speak for themselves:
To take a deep dive into our journey over the past five years, we sat down with our Regional Manager ? PNG & Asia Pacific Fraser Hawkins to chat about where PXP has been, how PNG has changed, and potential for the future:
PX: What a whirlwind ? five years of Peopleconnexion PNG! In your mind, what have been the biggest changes we’ve seen in Papua New Guinea over those five years?
When we made our first trip over to PNG in June 2014, we were really working with a blank canvas. People told us we were crazy went we first started the agency, asking:
?Why now? Why now that the burst of oil and gas activity is winding down??
Since that time, PNG has grown and changed so much ? and so have we.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the SP games kicking off, the APEC Summit and soon ? we?ll see projects like Papua LNG and PNG LNG. We’ve seen the face of Port Moresby change so drastically. There’s new hotels, food and beverage outlets, entirely new districts across POM and so much development in the pipeline.
PX: What have been the lessons we’ve learnt in that time?
If there’s anything we’ve learnt through trial and error, it’s to expect the unexpected. PNG is always changing so quickly, and this is why it’s important for us to be able to identify what attributes will succeed in an environment like that.
It’s not just about what’s best on paper. A great candidate will have a culture fit in their new organisation and in their city, their town, or if they?re an expat ? PNG as a whole. For those expats, it’s so important that they understand how to pass on knowledge so that their expertise stays in country when they leave.
Being able to identify that kind of person, and the kind of leader that knows how to build others up and contribute to the development of their organisation and community as a whole.. it takes time.
This is where we have really grown as an agency and where we offer value.
We?re heavily invested in staff development and have a team that understand how to find, engage and build up those kinds of professionals, supported by the systems to boot.
We have long-term tenure in our team ? for example, take our Country Manager Stephen Mead. He has been with us since so early on and has been absolutely crucial in getting our team where we are today.
PX: Looking into the crystal ball, what do you think the next five years could hold?
On a nation-wide level, it’s still hard to predict. Off the back of projects Papua LNG and the PNG LNG expansion, of course we want to see everyone benefit from a strong effect on GDP, extra employment and hopefully more equal wealth development that supports and builds a middle class.
PNG really is a hidden gem on some levels and that’s incredibly exciting. It may not be a perfect comparison, but when you look at places like Singapore that said ?hang on, we’ve got the strategic location? and then committed to developing quickly ? it gives you an idea of where PNG could go. Again, not exactly the same situation but PNG does have the location, the resources, the potential for tourism and the ability to diversify that are very promising.
For our business, we?ll continue doing what we do best and building our teams in Port Moresby and on the Gold Coast to support our growth.
To help with that growth trajectory, the plan is to bring our staff across to Australia for training and to continue running our regular training sessions to keep us sharp. This kind of approach to staff development isn’t only important for us, it’s such an important part of nation-building as a whole.
We are still working with clients that we saw from that first trip we made in 2014. We have really seen the value in the long-term approach we take to relationships and know that’s what sets us apart. Looking forward, we?ll be continuing that approach and finding new ways to support the organisations and candidates we work with.
We?re looking forward to where the next five years takes us!
If you’re searching for a partner in recruitment, payroll or training ? we would love to discuss how we could support your organisation.
Please get in touch via www.peopleconnexion.com/png
Peopleconnexion PNG: Recruitment, Training, Payroll Management & HR Services
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