Jane Hawkins has more than two decades of experience shaping large, complex workforces across financial services, higher education, and global organisations, and is recognised as one of Australia’s leading practitioners in strategic workforce planning and total workforce optimisation. Her career has centred on helping organisations make better, more commercially-savvy decisions about how they source, structure, and manage their workforce—permanent, contingent, consultant, or outsourced—to reduce risk, improve capability, and lift productivity.
Currently Director of Workforce Strategy & Planning at UNSW, she leads enterprise-wide strategy for workforce design, talent planning, future skills, and organisational capability. Her role includes implementing workforce planning methodologies, strengthening digital and analytical capability, guiding senior executive decision-making, and embedding governance frameworks that give organisations clear visibility and control over their labour models.
Prior to UNSW, she held senior leadership roles at BOQ Group, AMP and Macquarie Group, where she built and led Workforce Management and Workforce Optimisation functions responsible for labour budgets ranging from $100m to $600m. Her work has delivered significant and measurable results including multimillion-dollar labour cost reductions, uplifted capability in both permanent and contingent labour categories, improved forecasting accuracy, streamlined organisational structures, and reduced high-tenure contractor risk. She has led major technology implementations—including SAP Fieldglass and Workforce Management modules, Workday Adaptive Planning and Beeline—giving organisations greater transparency of contingent labour, improved rate governance, automated payment processing, and stronger compliance with labour law and financial controls.
Having designed, implemented and operated both insourced and outsourced contingent workforce models, she brings deep practical insight into the real benefits, risks, cost drivers and operating considerations behind each approach. Her experience includes outsourcing contingent labour management to MSPs, establishing internal capability in large and complex environments, and building governance frameworks that prevent contractor misuse, duplicate or inaccurate worker profiles, shadow labour decisions, and escalating cost leakage. She has seen first-hand how data integrity issues can compound risk exposure, create compliance gaps, and obscure workforce decision-making.
A passionate advocate for workforce strategy as a driver of organisational resilience, she excels at helping leaders understand the economics of labour, the technology and process architecture required for safe and efficient contingent workforce management, and the stakeholder engagement critical to securing executive buy-in. Her practical, commercially grounded approach has made her a trusted partner to senior executives navigating insourcing vs outsourcing decisions, MSP assessments, labour model design, and the future capability needs of their organisations.