Brandon Batchelor

As an Indigenous Careers Talent Sourcing Partner within the Indigenous Community Experience (ICX) Squad at CommBank, my role is deeply rooted in creating meaningful career pathways for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I am responsible for:

• Providing culturally safe and tailored SME support to First Nations candidates throughout the recruitment process, ensuring candidates are prepared to thrive through the process.
• Sourcing and nurturing Indigenous talent, both for advertised roles and through proactive community engagement.
• Driving the experienced hires strategy to help achieve the Group’s parity aspiration of 3% Indigenous employees by 2026.
• Collaborating with internal and external stakeholders to ensure a compelling employee experience for First Nations employees.
• Educating the business on best practice and providing timely SME context and data on the challenging pool we work in with Indigenous employment.
• I also contribute to broader ICX initiatives, such as the Guaranteed Interview Scheme and candidate experience reviews, ensuring First Nations applicants with the right skills are progressed fairly and provided the tools to achieve equitable outcomes. In my time, I have been able to create strong relationships with the whole ICX team, flowing between working in an agile way and utilizing my leadership skill sets to aid the team's ongoing success.

Key achievements:

• Creating Roles Around Talent—Not Just Filling Them: Worked with business units to proactively reverse market to strong Indigenous candidates, rather than waiting for vacancies. This 'jobs to the candidate' approach has been a game changer in building sustainable career pathways and building strong relationships.
• Headhunting a C-Suite Executive Returning from Overseas: Personally sourced and secured a high-calibre Indigenous executive returning to Australia, demonstrating the ability to attract senior-level talent and elevate representation at the top.
• Piloting a Cultural Assessment Model for Tech Talent: Helped launch a pilot with Tech (Jane and Donatella) to assess professional-level Indigenous talent for engineering and tech roles. The role included ensuring cultural readiness and shaping the pilot's structure. Tech has historically been a "hard-to-fill" business unit, and we are now seeing some tangible results.
• Utilized AI to Streamline GIS: Streamlined the process to ensure accurate and substantial data outlining candidates' key strengths and role matching for roles based on the job advertisement, reducing the ability for bias or subjectivity to come into the conversation, and allowing for increased rates of interviews.
• Support and Coaching: I have supported our existing sourcers with coaching and development. Taken on higher duties, such as taking business engagement meetings and presentations to business partners.

As First Nations Employment lead at Origin, I am responsible for the development of full life cycle employment strategies to ensure we are succeeding in our Reconciliation targets in line with our Stretch RAP objectives.

Responsibilities include:

• Management of internal and external stakeholders to ensure fair and equitable recruitment processes.
• Analysing the market and trends to report to the business requirements to reach KPI’s.
• Managing budgeting directives across the business, ensuring the business is utilizing the budget for diverse needs.
• Worked with the business to influence their decisions on needs for diverse staffing and implemented strategies to ensure fair and equitable outcomes.
• Development of the first Indigenous Employment strategy at Origin from ideation to implementation.
• All Indigenous Recruitment, Talent acquisition, campaigning, screening, development conversations, exit and stay interviews.

Key achievements:

• Contributed innovative ideas and solutions to enhance team performance and outcomes.
• Lead successfully a diverse group of people to accomplish business goals and address issues related to our employment model.
• Achieved Origins RAP employment target during my tenure (Only time this has ever happened)
• Created and Implemented Origins first Indigenous Employment strategy
• Created a diverse portfolio of talent for the business to utilise
• Started Origins first “Earn and Learn” internal trainees

IBA serves, partners and invests with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who want to own their future. IBA go further than provide money; they invest in people, places and ideas that can’t wait. IBA helps make them real. Deeply invested in the financial success and economic independence of Indigenous Australians.

• Participated in the concept creation of the new project IBA Futures Forum, 7-day event on Worimi Country, NSW. Worked and managed four internal stakeholders to develop the program.
• Delivered the IBA Futures Forum event with 40 event attendees including presenters, venues, flights & accommodation, catering, budget management, RSVP management, sponsorship and merchandise.
• Managed the evaluation process with attendees and presenters as well as final report to the Management team.
• Managing the “Expression of Interest” for the Business Relief Package for NSW, WA, VIC, ACT and TAS, financial support for Indigenous Business owners through the COVID period. Managing the process, report and data management for TFE State Expressions of Interests and referrals through to the next stage of the Relief process.
• Constant point of contact for the Business Solutions team for internal stakeholders as a source of knowledge.
• Was selected to be a member of the working group for the “The Men in Business Project”, an initiative to support indigenous businessmen. Project is at initial stages.

Key Achievements:

• Design and implementation of the “Futures Forum”
• Business design changes to increase talent pipeline population within the Organisation
• Coordinated project timelines and deliverables for Indigenous Business Australia initiatives.
• Assisted in developing and maintaining project documentation and reports.
• Facilitated communication between team members and external stakeholders.
• Supported budget tracking and resource allocation for project activities.

Company Overview: Company Information as above

• Managed the Deputy CEO’S (DCEO) diary, booking in meetings and events, and he had the relevant information and documents for each appointment.
• Balancing internal and external stakeholders’ requests and expectations as they arose.
• Managed all flight and accommodation bookings through TechOne and QBT.
• Expense management for the DCEO with the finance team.
• Designed and prepared quarterly Board papers and presentation for the DCEO.
• Participated in meetings to document the minutes.
• Assist in welcoming new staff members to the team if the DCEO is unavailable.

Medicare Australia providers division works with all areas of the health industry to allow providers the opportunity to give affordable care to Australians.

• Completed day-to-day duties accurately and efficiently.
• Exceeded customer satisfaction by finding creative solutions to problems.
• Managed a broad range of financial accounts for Medical Practitioners, this involved all areas of the Health industry. We were to make sure Practitioners were correctly paid, payment was on time and practitioners hadn’t over claimed or promised to people.
• Checking claims were still available for the practitioners to use.
• Confidently worked in a tier style team structure providing support and advice to other tier team members.