Regional Development Australia (RDA) Orana CEO Felicity Taylor-Edwards said as recently as within the past fortnight interviews had taken place to recruit South Korean candidates for difficult-to-fill positions in Dubbo and surrounds.

The South Korean government project sponsored partially-trained vocational education students to study and undertake work placements in Australia.

Ms Taylor-Edwards said delegates representing would-be South Korean employees had not raised any concerns about the safety of South Koreans coming to work in Dubbo, rather, it was "quite to the contrary" with South Korean workers and Orana employers keen to find each other.

While there was no suggestion the incidents were targeted attacks, they occurred within about a week of each other in Dubbo.

A Korean national was taken to hospital after he was assaulted by a knife-wielding man who broke into a house in North Dubbo in the early hours of April 6.

Once inside, the intruder threatened two of the occupants of the house then hit one of them in the head with the butt of the knife.

The man then fled on foot with a small amount of cash and a mobile phone he stole from the residence.

A week later on Tuesday April 14, another Korean national was hospitalised after he was allegedly threatened and assaulted by a man armed with scissors at a Dubbo shopping centre.

Ms Taylor-Edwards said interviews had been taking place for skilled vacancies employers had tried to fill locally but were not able to, so the overseas workers were "not taking jobs from locals".

While recent unemployment figures "did not look good" for Orana, she said, they did not give an accurate picture of the issues faced in the local job market.

"We found 68 per cent of local employers, and there were 500 of them, said they didn't use formal methods of recruitment so we can't go off that data," Ms Taylor-Edwards said.

"We asked what they meant by informal methods of recruitment and they told us 'a sign in the window, a tap on the shoulder or we wait for someone to walk through the door'.

"Last week an employee we were working with was offered a job over Skype - he was a migrant who'd walked through the door of a business with his resume, introduced himself and shook someone's hand. He was qualified so they put him on.

"We have high unemployment and at the same time we have businesses that want to grow

"Without exception, employers here know these South Koreans have a work ethic - it's about filling short-term gaps so our businesses can grow while we train our locals to do so in the long run."

Ms Taylor-Edwards said research about what local employers needed in order to grow had "attacked sacred cows".

"Employers said they were knocking back work because they couldn't get skilled people.

"We asked what opportunities they would give someone over 50 who's been retrenched, migrants, disabled workers and Aboriginal people," she said.

"Every single one of them answered 'yes, if they had the skills'. They wanted communication and problem-solving skills and a work ethic.

"The opportunities for this region are huge, but we had to find the reason for this mismatch, why employers weren't employing people, and address that."