Just Gold likes to break the mould. It’s the first ever full-service consulting and creative agency that is also a social enterprise, a one-of-a-kind organisation that is a fierce advocate for diversity, multiculturalism, equality and positive change.
It was also among the first group of employers to recruit through the Jobs Victoria online hub, where co-founders Sophia Fatouros and Kyriakos Gold say they struck it lucky with three awesome new hires.
Earlier this year, two new assistant producers and a marketing co-ordinator joined the Just Gold team, thanks in part to funding from a Jobs Victoria initiative aimed at creating employment opportunities during the pandemic.
Sophia and Kyriakos are very happy with their new team members, which they say were selected from a number of top-quality applicants on the Jobs Victoria online hub.
“What we found was there was a very good talent pool,” Sophia says of the hub. “In fact, I ended up recommending it to someone recently, because of the people we came across and the applicants that we saw — I said I think you’ll find some really strong candidates on there.”
Kyriakos loved that the hub is free to use — “a big plus for small start-ups like us, in terms of managing costs” — and that it’s government-run, so he could rest easy knowing their information was safe.
“IP theft is a major issue that we have to encounter every day in many different ways, so even having a detailed job description out there that you’re not ready to publish, when you know that that’s safe, that’s a big thing for us,” he says.
“So, there’s that element of trust from being within a platform that’s run by the government, and then you have access to all these great applicants who really want to work.”
It was Kyriakos’s job to set up Just Gold as an employer on the hub and post the position descriptions.
Once you get the hang of it, he says, it’s a very simple and easy-to-use recruitment asset — and he picked up some interesting tricks along the way.
“I didn’t know at first look that you can actually ask people to respond to a question — as in, to write a short-answer,” he says. “In the end, short answers were what allowed us to get better candidates.”
Once Kyriakos had done the groundwork, Sophia got an invitation to access the hub. She describes it as “a nice experience, because I could go in and see what was going on, there were a lot of applications, and it was easy to go through them.”
Indeed, the hub “guaranteed application flow”, Kyriakos says, “so we were able to recruit quite quickly and easily, and we are happy with the applicants we got”.
True to form for Just Gold, each of the new recruits is female — two of them recent graduates, and the other a mum returning to the workforce.
Not only did Sophia and Kyriakos find these candidates the most prepared and impressive, they’re also extremely passionate about equal employment opportunities for young people and women in particular.
In fact, their docuseries The Invisible Woman is all about the “global syndrome” affecting women over 50, who find employment opportunities evaporate after this age, prompting an often-devastating search for work.
“If we want to be an agency that delivers positive systemic change, we have to start from within,” Kyriakos says.
Register to find workers on the Jobs Victoria online hub.
Jobs Victoria can help businesses find the people they need and Victorians find their way back to work. Call 1300 208 575 or visit jobs.vic.gov.au/fund.
