CEO MONTHLY / Chairperson Awards 2022 4 International People Services Chairman of the Year 2022: Con Kittos People are at the heart of any and every business, but finding the right people to make a company work is an enormous challenge. With an international edge, the team at Asuria support tens of thousands of people every year into jobs. In CEO Monthly’s Chairperson of the Year Awards, Con and the Asuria team achieved incredible success. We look more deeply to uncover more. uman Services are the very lifeblood of how organisations work, but many companies struggle to implement them effectively. Sometimes, to make things happen, you have to work at a higher level. The team at Asuria are committed to helping governments to deliver outsourced Human Services. In 2022, demand for this level of work saw Asuria become one of the world’s most expansive employment service providers. The team has helped workforces across the world to reach their job and career goals, including parents, young people, mature aged job seekers, Indigenous job seekers, and those with a mental or physical disability. Working collaboratively with government sponsored programs, Asuria unites the public and private sectors in the ultimate goal of getting people into jobs they can thrive in. As an international firm, it’s little wonder that Asuria now has more than 200 offices around the world. Based in Australia, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom, the team provide frontline public services that make a real difference to people’s lives. The team take a strengths-based approach to job seeker personal empowerment, exploring the value that individuals can bring to businesses. For those who are both new to job seeking and who are long-term unemployed, this pioneering approach often gives the foot in the door that is desperately needed. The team’s ability to do this is based on their adaptation of the latest thinking in cognitive science and behavioural economics. By focusing on individual citizen’s strengths, the teamare able to find a worthy match for their abilities in the marketplace. The team licenses best-inbreed technology in order to have the maximumpossible impact at all times. What is truly remarkable, however, is the speed at which this was achieved. Con only took control of Asuria in 2016, and in the last six years has transformed it froma loss-making human resources company to a global, top tier provider of employment services. “I began to emerge as a leader and innovator in Human Services with my previous organisation, AngusKnight, which I joined in 1999,” Con tells us. Just a year later, he would go on to become CEO of the firm. In his tenure there, he oversaw the transformation of a small, registered training organisation generating less than $10 million USD in annual revenue. By the time he left in 2011, AngusKnight was the largest provider in its space, with close to $100 million USD in annual revenue by the time. The business that would become Asuria first came to Con’s attention in 2012 when he joined as Non-Executive Director for the UK-based multinational, A4E Limited. “Following A4E’s acquisition by Staffline Group Limited, and subsequent rebranding to PeoplePlus, in 2015 I was appointed as a NonExecutive Director,” Con says with a smile. “Then in 2016, with the support of a single private investor, I acquired PeoplePlus Australia and set out on the path to turn the business into Asuria, transforming the company culture and focusing on a vision to be a progressive provider of employment services to governments all over the world.” The growth of Asuria is due, in no small part to the driving force that is Con Kittos. He has seen the business grow to its current levels of success. Doing so has seen a shift in how the business works. We asked Con to tell us more. “Asuria is in the business of serving governments,” Con explains. “In order to be among the best at doing that, our job is to understand the immediate and just-over-the-horizon challenges of governments, and to build solutions that respond to what they need to transform their countries, communities, citizens and their businesses.” “We deal in macro issues like immigration, education, unemployment,” Con continues. “These are trends that shift the ground that governments stand on and even influence how they’re elected. These are typical long planning cycles and can span periods of five plus years. After that, it’s about the purchasing cycles of governments in terms of tendering for the services that Asuria is setup to provide. Mar22547 H
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