A prequalification pack arrives, somebody checks that everything on the list is present, and the contracting company is approved.
Completeness is the easiest thing to assess and the least predictive. Every contracting business with a competent administrator can produce a complete pack. What the pack is meant to tell you is whether their compliance will still be true in month eight, and completeness says almost nothing about that.
Here is what to actually look at.
Check the scope on the certificate, not the certificate
ISO 45001 certificates carry a scope statement describing which activities and which sites are covered. A certificate covering a head office and one division does not cover the division doing your work.
This is the single most commonly missed thing in prequalification, and it is missed because the certificate looks impressive and the scope statement is in small type near the bottom.
While you are there: check the certification body is accredited — in Australia, by JAS-ANZ. And check the standard. A pack citing OHSAS 18001 or AS/NZS 4801 is citing a withdrawn standard. Usually that just means the pack has not been revisited in a few years. But the pack is what you are relying on.
Read one SWMS properly instead of filing twelve
Twelve generic safe work method statements tell you less than one specific one.
What you are looking for is whether the hazards have your site in them. "Ensure adequate lighting" is a template. "Task lighting positioned on the eastern side to avoid glare from the haul road" is somebody who has thought about the job.
Then check for evidence of consultation — names, a date, some sign the team doing the work saw it before the job. That is a legal requirement, not a formatting one, and its absence is the least defensible gap in the whole pack because it costs nothing to fix.
Ask when the credentials were last verified, not whether they exist
A pack full of certificates tells you what was true on the day it was assembled.
The useful question is: on what date did the contracting company last confirm this workforce is current, and how? If the answer is "at onboarding", the pack has a shelf life measured in weeks — because tickets lapse, medicals fall due, and people leave and are replaced by people the pack never contemplated.
A follow-up worth asking: can you show me what expires across your workforce in the next sixty days? Not for your site. Across their whole business. A contracting company that can produce that quickly has a system. A contracting company that says they would need to check has a spreadsheet — and their assurance to you rests entirely on it.
That is not disqualifying. It tells you where your own checking has to be strongest.
Look for the plant, because it usually is not there
Most prequalification packs are about people. Insurances, safety management system, worker credentials.
Then a machine arrives with an overdue service and the mobilisation stalls.
Ask for one asset's record: identifiers, service currency, inspections, certifications, and what it is currently assigned to. If that comes from a different system than the worker records — a maintenance database, a whiteboard, somebody's diary — you have found the seam where mobilisations fail, because the site assesses the pairing and nobody has assembled it.
Since 1 June 2026 this is not just an operational point. Verifying a critical control means verifying the person performing it and the plant used for it. If a contracting company's plant records live somewhere their people records do not, then the evidence for half your control is in a different building.
Ask what has gone wrong for them elsewhere
The best question in prequalification, and the one no form asks.
Everyone has had a team turned around. A contracting company that describes one, explains what caused it and says what they changed afterwards is telling you they have a feedback loop.
A contracting company that says it has never happened is small, lucky, or not being frank, and none of those three is what you were hoping for.
The question behind all of them
Prequalification asks whether a company is fit to be engaged. Site readiness asks whether the four people arriving on Tuesday can do the work.
They are different questions, and a prequalification pack — however thorough — was never designed to answer the second one. It will not tell you that somebody's coal mine workers' health assessment (formerly known as the coal board medical) expires mid-shutdown. It was not trying to.
Which is worth remembering when you decide how much weight the pack carries. On a Queensland mine the obligation to ensure that people at the mine are competent for the work they are asked to do sits with the site senior executive, personally, regardless of how good the contracting company's paperwork was at award.
The pack is the start of the relationship. It is not evidence about Tuesday.
