A global search ended with someone who already knew the business. When Hireup announced Peter Willis as its next chief executive in January 2026, he had spent almost six years inside the company. He had led teams, worked with clients and workers, and helped other providers use its workforce. The promotion gave a larger remit to a familiar face. It also put a particular kind of career in charge: one built around getting people and organisations to work together.
Willis’s story is interesting because the top job arrives after several different versions of responsibility. Campaigning asks people to act. Consulting asks organisations to change. Operations asks a team to make the arrangements work again tomorrow. A CEO inherits all three problems, along with a calendar that is unlikely to show much mercy.
For Willis, now based in Melbourne, the question running through that sequence is practical. What happens after everyone agrees that an idea is good?
Campaigns before calendars
Between 2010 and 2012, Willis was General Manager of Campaigns at Oaktree. It is an early entry in his career that helps explain why the later move into a business with a social purpose feels connected rather than abrupt. Campaigns and service operations use different tools, but both require people to do something beyond approving an argument.
A campaign manager works on the distance between agreement and participation. An operator works on the distance between a commitment and its delivery. The comparison is an editorial way of reading Willis’s career, rather than a claim that every lesson travelled intact. What is clear is that his work in the social sector preceded his arrival at Hireup.
His education also took him into public policy. He lists Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government for 2015 to 2017. That period belongs in the story alongside his campaigning and consulting: the career crosses institutions that think about collective problems, then moves into an organisation responsible for delivering a service.
Learning to stay
Consulting exposed Willis to government and not-for-profit organisations, including the National Disability Insurance Agency. In his account, short projects offered a quick view of different working cultures. Moving into operations changed the time horizon. He could build teams and live with their decisions for longer.
He has also described a lesson in humility: arriving to solve a problem can tempt a consultant to overestimate the value of their own answer. Learning from the people already there became part of his account of leadership. It is a useful admission from someone whose subsequent job depends on colleagues knowing things he does not.
Asked about sport during an April 2026 conversation with podcast host Sarah Heriot, he offered a rather less polished credential.
“I do play hockey very badly on the weekend still.”Peter Willis, on grass hockey
The remark gives the team talk a welcome touch of mud. A leader can value teamwork without presenting himself as its champion athlete.
A workforce with more places to go
At Hireup, Willis helped build the provider offering: a way for other organisations to access the company’s national, flexible workforce. His work brought a familiar service-business problem into focus. A workforce may exist, and demand may exist, while the useful connection between them still needs to be made.
The partnership with SSI shows what that work looked like in practice. Announced in 2023, the initiative gave providers a route to casual staffing through Hireup, with the possibility of offering permanent work after a series of shifts. Workers could gain additional opportunities, while SSI provided screening, training and guidance.
The launch opened eligibility to more than 9,000 Hireup workers across New South Wales and the ACT. That was an available pool for the initiative, rather than a count of people who took it up. The distinction matters: a partnership creates a route, and the route must still be used.
For Willis, the arrangement connected provider staffing needs with opportunities for workers. His enthusiasm was for sharing a workforce that already existed. The underlying idea is refreshingly concrete: help a person find more useful work, and help an organisation fill the work it needs done.
By June 2023, he was discussing the provider team’s experience at the DSC conference. A colleague singled out his presentation about staffing shortages. The topic suits this part of his career. There is little point in an elegant marketplace if the people trying to use it cannot fill a calendar.
The chair comes with obligations
Willis later led Hireup’s client and worker support services as General Manager of Attendant Care. His role had moved from developing the provider offering to a broader operational responsibility. By 2024, parliamentary hearing records listed him with that title, alongside Hireup’s then chief of staff, Katherine Thompson.
The company publicly announced his CEO appointment on 28 January 2026, succeeding co-founder Laura O’Reilly. But the public record already identified him as chief executive in late 2025. His name and title appear on Hireup’s modern slavery statement endorsed on 24 November. The announcement date and the earlier record describe different moments; a tidy biography should make room for both.
The statement is a reminder that executive work includes formal accountability. It describes supplier review, risk assessment and reporting arrangements. These subjects rarely receive the attention given to a new appointment. They nevertheless sit within the company’s obligations, and a chief executive’s signature puts a person beside them.
That is one way to read Willis’s promotion: more of the organisation’s promises now arrive at his desk with consequences attached.
The people inside the platform
Hireup’s employment model supplies useful context for the business Willis leads. It employs its support workers rather than treating them as independent contractors. The platform gives people tools to find and arrange work, while the employer takes on the surrounding responsibilities. The digital interface and the employment relationship occupy the same business.
Willis’s shorthand for decisions within Hireup is a question:
“what’s right for the people we serve?”Peter Willis, Hireup’s decade-of-impact feature
The wording puts an individual at the centre of a system that also has to work at scale. It is easy to approve as a principle. The more demanding part is using it when different interests meet: a worker’s availability, a client’s preferences and an organisation’s staffing needs.
In a November 2025 worker workgroup meeting, Willis introduced himself as CEO and discussed improvements to training and tools for finding and retaining clients. He also emphasised respect and belonging. Those are operational concerns with names and faces attached. For a business organised through a platform, such conversations keep the workforce present in the discussion.
A public argument about accountability
Willis has also become a public voice on provider registration. In April 2026, he backed universal registration and drew a pointed comparison with the requirements for serving alcohol in a pub. His criticism of unregistered provision was unusually concise:
“To be an unregistered provider, you simply need an ABN and you are billing.”Peter Willis, April 2026
It is a business leader’s argument about the conditions under which businesses should operate. Registration, in his account, belongs alongside accountability. His stance also fits the company’s position as a registered provider that carries employer responsibilities. The argument makes those operating differences part of a wider public discussion.
By 29 April, Willis had been named to the NDIS Commission’s refreshed Sector Consultation Forum. The forum brings operational experience into discussions with the regulator. It asks how requirements work in practice, where problems emerge and what organisations see when delivering services.
The role brings his career back towards policy, with a different store of experience. Earlier he advised organisations from a consulting position. Now he contributes as someone running one. In June 2026, a Senate hearing programme listed him representing Hireup alongside corporate affairs director Lliam Caulfield. The path between the operating team and the policy table now runs in both directions.
Keeping the purpose in working order
In announcing his new role, Willis thanked Hireup’s board and its founders, Jordan and Laura O’Reilly. He described a connection to the company’s values from the time he joined, and an ambition to lead its next phase of growth and social impact. The language places him within a continuing enterprise: relationships built before the promotion remain part of the job after it.
That is a useful way to read his story. Campaigns, study, consulting, partnerships and operations each brought him closer to responsibility for what happens after an idea is accepted. The CEO chair gathers those responsibilities together.
An ordinary Tuesday is a fair place to look for the result. Someone needs a booking to work. Someone wants a useful shift. A provider needs available staff. Willis’s next chapter will be written in those arrangements, repeated across the business he now leads.