Why these roles are hard to fill.
A field service technician has to do three things well: fix the equipment, work alone on a customer's site, and deal with the customer while they do it. Few people have all three, and the ones who do are usually in work.
- The skills are narrow. Experience on similar equipment counts for a lot, and some applicants have only installed equipment, never fault-found it.
- The paperwork has to be right. An electrical licence has a class and a state. Site tickets expire. A sharp tradesperson with a lapsed ticket can't start on most sites.
- The lifestyle rules people out. Travel, nights away and an on-call roster suit some people and not others. When this comes out late, the hire falls over late.
- The regions are harder. A regional role draws on a small local pool, or needs someone willing to move or travel.
Before you advertise, decide three things.
1. What must they have on day one?
Separate what can't be taught quickly (a licence, a trade, fault-finding on a type of equipment) from what you can train (your brand, your systems). The shorter the must-have list, the bigger the pool.
2. What does the whole package pay?
Technicians compare offers on on-target earnings: base pay plus overtime and on-call allowances. Work out a realistic figure, and decide on the vehicle (and private use), tools, phone and laptop. See field service technician pay in Australia for what job ads currently advertise.
3. What will the job be like to live with?
Write down the travel radius, nights away, the on-call roster and call-out rates, and who backs the technician up on a hard job. You'll need these for the ad and the first phone call.
Write the ad the way technicians read it.
Job boards show hundreds of loosely matched roles. Technicians skim for the facts that decide whether a job will work for them. Put those first:
- Pay: the base and the on-target earnings, and say which is which.
- Roster and on-call.
- Vehicle, and whether private use is allowed.
- Travel radius and nights away.
- The equipment and the kind of customers.
- The licences and tickets you need, and which ones you will help them get.
Be honest about the hard parts. A candidate who hears about a weekly on-call roster in the third interview is a candidate you lose in the third interview.
Check these before anyone comes in.
These are the questions we ask on every field service role. Getting the answers before an interview saves your service manager's time.
- Trade and licence: the trade stream, and the licence class and state for electrical work.
- Tickets: which ones, with expiry dates. White Card, EWP, working at heights, confined space, test and tag and forklift are common.
- Driving: licence class and record.
- Travel and time away: pin down what "some travel" means to them: day trips, nights away or fly-in fly-out blocks, and how often.
- On-call: tell them the roster and the allowance up front.
- Customer manner: how they explain a fault, and how they handle a customer having a bad day.
Interview for the work, not the CV.
- Ask them to walk you through a recent fault: what they saw, what they tested, what fixed it. Fault-finding shows quickly in how they tell it.
- Ask about a difficult customer and what they said.
- Have the service manager in the room, or on the call. They will spot gaps an HR interview misses.
- If you can, show them the equipment, the vehicle and the workshop. It answers questions they may not ask.
Move fast once you find the right person.
Good technicians are usually weighing more than one option, including staying where they are. Set the interview dates before you advertise, give feedback within a day or two, and make the offer in writing with the full package spelled out. A slow process loses more candidates than a low offer.
If you need someone now.
Most field service hiring starts with a gap: a technician leaves, a contract is won, or a breakdown shows the team is stretched. Contract cover can keep the work going while you run a proper permanent search. Call us on 07 3063 9785 to talk about both.
This guide reflects how we recruit for field service roles. For the screening in more detail, see our pages on field service technicians, field service engineers, commissioning technicians and E&I technicians.