Colomba^® & Cleaners for Seniors is an established and successful business operating in the aged care sector on the Sunshine Coast. It helps seniors to downsize/declutter from an existing family home in preparation for moving into aged care; and provides essential domestic cleaning services. Owner and managing director, Jeanne Motteram, is passionate about her clients and the services her business provides: “It’s so important for our elderly clients to remain in their family homes as long as they can, and our job is to maintain high levels cleanliness in their homes so they can stay in their clean and safe home for as long as possible,” she said.

Jeanne attributes much of her business’ reputation and success to her staff and she highly values their commitment and loyalty. But as the business grows, the biggest challenge Jeanne faces is finding staff – she is always on the lookout for people who want flexible hours and variety in their work, but who are willing to do cleaning and importantly, who have the patience and compassion to work with Queensland’s elder citizens.

When Jeanne signed up for Workforce Evolve, she had spent the previous 15 months trying, without success, to recruit the right people for the job. On hearing about Workforce Evolve, Jeanne was instantly attracted to the concept. It was free, could be done online, and in her own time. She found the online platform easy to navigate and intuitive to use. Jeanne downloaded all the resources and believes they will be valuable tools she can use now and into the future.

The program gave her a comprehensive overview of general workforce and HR (Human Resources) information, with access to a wide library of practical resources that were easy to implement. One of the highlights of her learning experience came with Module 2: Creating your Employee Value Proposition.

“This was most useful to me as attracting staff was my number one issue to solve, and the one-on-one mentoring session I accessed when I completed it helped because it was tailored specifically to what my business needed,” she said.

Highlighting the practical application of the program, Jeanne worked with her Workforce Evolve Coach to re-write and improve her job advertisements. As a direct result Jeanne now has 5 new employees, and potentially up to 3 more when she is ready to employ again. Jeanne applied the coaching advice to add a careers page on her website which has resulted in providing her with a pipeline of potential employees without having to rely on advertising. In summing up her Workforce Evolve experience, Jeanne said: “I would recommend other businesses do the program. It gave me time and information to reflect on what I was doing in my business. It provided me with practical information about contemporary recruitment processes and the coaching gave me practical recommendations on how to improve my job advertisements which led to positive results.”