From the street, it looks like any other suburban house in Canberra’s leafy inner-south.
But this nondescript home in Narrabundah is the registered address for “Aukus Jobs”, a recruitment firm with a web domain that was secured two days after Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine plans were first announced.
The government has argued the hi-tech multi-decade partnership with the US and the UK will create as many as 20,000 jobs in Australia. But the first result for anyone searching for Aukus jobs on Google is the recruitment platform using the same name.
Aukus Jobs promises to make “the skills, experience and aspirations of jobseekers and students instantly findable for employment and upskilling opportunities within the Australian defence industry”.
Web domain records indicate the website was registered on 18 September 2021 Canberra time – two days after the term Aukus was made public when Joe Biden, Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson unveiled the three-country “forever partnership”.
The company’s ABN was registered on 20 September 2021.
Guardian Australia does not suggest that the business claims to be officially connected with the Aukus program; only that questions are raised by the use of the name and the timing of its launch.
The Australian government, for its part, has distanced itself from the company.
When asked whether it had any concerns about the use of Aukus in the name, a Defence spokesperson said: “Aukus Jobs has no affiliation with the Australian Department of Defence or the commonwealth government.”
The chief executive officer of Aukus Jobs, Mark Korsten, has previously held roles in maritime security and more recently in professional services. He offered a general response to questions on Thursday.
“Aukus Jobs is not a government entity, and has never pretended to be,” Korsten said.
“Aukus Jobs is a commercially available skills matching platform that has been purpose-built to assist the Australian defence industry (and those of our Aukus partners if they choose) to find, upskill and mobilise defence-relevant skills, experience and aspirations more efficiently and effectively.”
Korsten is no stranger to the defence establishment, having served in the Royal Australian Navy until 2007. For two years he was a surveillance operations officer at the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency based in Honiara, Solomon Islands, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Korsten, who has a bachelor of engineering in naval architecture, states he has worked as the manager of the Pacific Maritime Security Program at the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service in the early 2010s.
His profile notes he has undertaken a number of consulting roles, including capability development planning for the Qatar coastguard and maritime security adviser for the Republic of Djibouti.
More recently Korsten held roles with Jacobs Australia, a professional services company that has a long history of providing services to the Department of Defence. Jacobs is listed as a partner on the Aukus Jobs website.
Korsten did not respond to specific questions about Aukus Jobs, including whether anyone had asked him to consider renaming it and how many jobseekers or clients it has.
But he said his business aimed to respond to the fact that most players in the Australian defence industry used “outdated talent acquisition processes that are grossly inefficient and ineffective”.
“This costs the Australian defence industry hundreds of thousands of hours per year in lost productivity, and (ultimately) the Australian taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars when the costs are passed to the government,” Korsten said.
“This inefficiency also undermines the capability and availability of the equipment our military personnel rely on. This would not be a problem if we were talking about baristas; however, inefficiency in mobilising our available defence industry skills and experience is one of the biggest weaknesses in Australia’s national security framework.”
Korsten said his company took “a genuinely novel approach by encoding a skills family for the entire Australian defence industry; allowing jobseekers to mathematically encode their unique professional DNA; allowing employers to mathematically encode their ideal candidate; and making connections within seconds”.
