Help & glossary

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The point of this site is to let you compare FIFO jobs against each other rather than reading a thousand ads one at a time. Every ad here is a live Australian mining, resources or energy job ad from Seek — every state and territory. A scraper collects them twice a day, reads each ad, and pulls the terms of employment out of the text into columns you can sort and filter — pay, roster, whether it is FIFO, whether the advertiser is the employer or a recruiter, what the ad promises, and whether there is a sign-on bonus.

Nothing here is typed in by hand. Every value is produced by a rule reading the ad. Rules get things wrong, so each row carries the reason its rule fired: click any row to expand it and see exactly why it was classified that way, plus the start of the ad itself. If a row looks wrong, that panel tells you which rule to blame — and the ad is one click away on Seek.

Refreshing

The list rebuilds twice a day — about 7am and 7pm New Zealand time (2am and 2pm in WA). New ads appear, and ads that have been taken down are removed, not left to rot. The line under the title tells you when it last ran and what changed.

Where these ads come from

Most of what you see is collected from Seek Australia, and some comes straight from employers' own careers sites — those carry a badge like BHP CAREERS, and you can narrow to one board with the first filter. Career-site ads are first-party: the employer is the advertiser, so there is no agency in between. The majors fill plenty of work that way and never post it on Seek, which is the gap those sources close.

The net is deliberately wide. Plenty of FIFO work is not filed under mining at all — a camp chef, a site cleaner, a HD fitter or a site administrator may be listed under Hospitality, Trades, Transport or Administration. Those are searched too, which is what makes this a FIFO comparison rather than a mining-category listing. Anything that survives is then checked for relevance, and obvious noise — fast food, retail, childcare, aged care, teaching — is dropped.

Coverage is Australia-wide: every state and territory, with the work weighted where FIFO work actually is.

How ads are triaged, and who checks it

Every ad goes through the same steps, twice a day:

Three things keep that honest:

• Stored reasons. Source, size, entry level, location and pay each carry the reason they were decided the way they were.
• Confidence, shown per row. A row classified from a snippet is labelled teaser-only and should be treated as a lead, not as data.
• Everything is re-derived on every run. When a rule is found to be wrong, fixing it repairs the whole list at the next refresh — not just ads collected afterwards.

The rules do get things wrong, and have been corrected repeatedly. Use the reason shown on a row when something looks off, and treat the original advertisement as the authority.

Filter recipes

Combinations that answer a real question, rather than clicking about:

The bars under the tiles are filters too — tap a label to narrow to it. Export CSV downloads exactly what you are looking at. Reset all filters clears everything.

The columns

Getting new jobs emailed to you

Set the filters you care about, then press 🔔 Email me these. That saves the filter as an alert and emails you when a new ad matches it. You choose how fast:

Alerts only ever send ads you have not already been sent. When you create one, everything currently matching is treated as already seen, so you are not emailed the whole back catalogue — only what arrives afterwards. You can pause, change speed or delete an alert at any time from the same button, and every alert email links back to it.

You need an account for this, because we need somewhere to send it.

Location and departure hub

Seek's own location field describes the advertiser, not the job — which is why so many Pilbara roles are listed as Perth. Two separate things are pulled out of the ad instead:

If a FIFO ad names only Perth, that is nearly always the airport rather than the work site, so it shows as FIFO ex Perth with no region — the site is genuinely unknown, and guessing would be worse than saying so. "Western Australia" means the ad named no place at all.

Work model

Roster

The roster is read from the ad (8/6, 2:1, 5/2/4/3, "8 days on 6 days off") and classified by the ratio of time on to time off — which works whether the ad counted days or weeks:

Pay

Taken from Seek's own salary field when it has a figure, otherwise from the ad text — the row detail tells you which. Whether a number is hourly, daily, weekly or annual is decided by its size first: under $250 cannot be a salary, over $3,000 cannot be an hourly rate. Ads mention an hourly rate and an annual package in the same breath, so reading the wording first produced nonsense like "$110,000 per hour".

Sign-on bonuses and allowances

Six kinds are pulled out separately, with the amount when the ad states one: sign-on (also signing, commencement, joining), retention, relocation, referral, site/living-away allowance and performance. Each figure goes to the phrase nearest it, so "$2,000 referral bonus, relocation up to $8,000" keeps the two apart.

Three states, and they are not the same: an amount means the ad named a figure; offered, amount not stated means the ad promises one without saying how much; and absent means the ad never mentions it. Filter Sign-on bonus for any of them, or $5k+ / $10k+ for named amounts only.

Conditions

Flags for what the ad claims to offer. Flights, meals and accommodation are matched by proximity with a negation guard — "flights covered by the company" counts, "you will need to pay for flights" does not, and "a short flight from Perth" is scenery, not a benefit.

Tap any green chip to see only jobs offering that. Tap it again, or use Any conditions in the filters, to clear it. The same condition can be saved into an email alert.

Who is advertising

direct employer means the employer placed the ad itself. recruiter means an agency placed it — recognised from the advertiser's name, the category the ad sits in, or the ad talking about "our client", "register your interest" or "roles available".

unclear means the company and advertiser names genuinely differ and nothing settled it. Cosmetic differences are ignored first — "Thiess" and "Thiess Pty Ltd" are the same firm. Those rows are worth a look by hand: some agencies use names that read like miners.

Why it matters: recruiters state pay far more often, but advertise casual work about twice as often, and one vacancy can appear through several agencies at once — which is what the reposts chip is there to catch.

Employer size

Entry level

Flagged when the ad says something strong: no experience necessary, entry level, trainee or traineeship, full training provided, we will train you, graduate program, apprenticeship, career changer, "your first role in mining".

A bare "training provided" is not enough — skilled ads say it constantly, and counting it filled the entry-level list with Leading Hands and Supervisors. A senior title (supervisor, superintendent, manager, senior, engineer, geologist…) overrides the flag, as does an ad demanding several years of experience.

Score

One number for ordering a very long list, nothing more. It rises with stated pay, a better roster, more of the conditions people actually care about, a sign-on bonus, dealing with the employer directly, and entry-level openness. It falls for casual work and for ads reposted over and over, which usually signals churn.

Confidence

Market patterns

Open Market patterns above the filters for four things the whole list can tell you that a single ad cannot:

On a row, ×N reposts means that employer and title appear N times in the current list. Same caveat: a prompt, not a verdict.

Appearance

◐ Theme in the menu offers five colour themes — Ironstone, Pilbara, Goldfields, Ocean and Graphite — each with its own light and dark version, plus a System setting that follows your phone or laptop. Your choice is remembered in that browser.

The site is built for a phone first: on a small screen each job becomes a card and the filters fold into a drawer; on a wide screen the same data becomes a sortable table.

What not to trust

• Ads are marketing. Every condition here is an advertiser's claim, unverified.
• Pay is what the ad says — often "up to", often nothing at all.
• Seek is not the whole market. The majors run their own careers sites and fill many entry-level roles through nominated agencies and referral pools.
• One job can appear many times through different agencies. The reposts chip helps, but it cannot catch every duplicate.
• These are pattern-matching rules, not comprehension. They are right most of the time and auditable when they are not — which is the entire point of the reason shown on every row.

Every rule that produced a value is shown on the row itself — click a row to see it. If something looks wrong, the ad on Seek is the authority, not this page.