HR Business Partner

An in-home care provider growing fast — without the HR infrastructure to match

A leading in-home aged care and disability support provider in inner Melbourne was scaling rapidly across multiple sites. The workforce was growing, compliance demands were intensifying — SCHADS, Fair Work, NDIS Quality & Safeguards — and the HR function was struggling to keep pace.

They needed an HR Business Partner who could do more than fill a seat. They needed someone who could redesign onboarding, reduce hiring timelines, overhaul HR policies and data systems, and strengthen workplace culture across a distributed team — all while navigating the specific regulatory landscape of aged care and disability services.

The brief was complex: find a generalist with genuine aged care and disability experience who could hit the ground running under pressure.

A targeted search, led by Gab

This wasn’t a role where a generalist from any sector would do. The successful candidate needed to understand the compliance pressures of aged care and NDIS, bring practical experience in workforce planning and employee relations, and have the judgment to operate independently across multiple sites.

Gab worked closely with the leadership team to define what success would look like — not just the job description, but the 12-month outcomes they needed. From there, she ran a targeted search focused specifically on HR professionals with aged care and disability sector experience, assessing each candidate against practical capability, not just credentials.

Every shortlisted candidate went through a detailed assessment including a case-based task and HR literacy review. Reference checks probed for what matters most in this kind of role: sound judgment, coaching ability, and the capacity to deliver results under operational pressure.

The right person was presented within 30 days.

Tangible improvements within 90 days

Within three months of starting, the placed HR Business Partner had:

• Designed and launched a 90-day onboarding framework with a manager toolkit — giving site managers a consistent, repeatable process for bringing new staff on board
• Reduced time-to-fill by approximately 25% — cutting agency dependency and speeding up the recruitment pipeline
• Built an employee relations triage playbook with clear SLAs — so ER issues are handled consistently, not reactively
• Improved HR data quality and launched a monthly workforce dashboard — giving leadership visibility they didn’t have before

The organisation reported gains in onboarding experience, HR visibility, and consistent policy application across sites.