Contractor prequalification asks a lot of questions, and most of them are about documents that exist. Insurances, safety management system, licences, financials. All necessary, all answerable by any contracting company with a decent administrator.
None of them predict the thing that actually goes wrong, which is not a missing document at onboarding. It is a credential lapsing in month eight while everybody is busy.
These are the questions that predict that.
1. Who maintains your compliance records, and what happens when they take leave?
The single most useful question on this list, and the one most likely to produce an uncomfortable pause.
If the answer names one person and does not name a system, you have learned that the contracting company's compliance is a personal capability rather than an organisational one. That is not disqualifying — it is the normal state of a business under about fifty people — but it tells you where to put your own checking.
2. Can you show me, right now, what expires across your workforce in the next sixty days?
Not for our site. Across their whole business.
A contracting company that can produce that in a minute has a system. A contracting company that says they would need to check has a spreadsheet, and their assurance to you rests on it.
3. How do you handle the fact that our requirements differ from your other clients'?
Listen for whether they model requirements per site or hold one compliance status per person.
A single status is the more common answer and the more dangerous one, because it will show green for a worker who is fully current for another client and short of something for you. The failure is silent until the gate.
4. What is your process when a credential lapses mid-job?
Two things worth hearing: that it surfaces before the expiry rather than on it, and that somebody specific is responsible for acting.
A contracting company whose answer is "we'd pull them off" without describing how they would know has told you their detection mechanism is your gate.
5. How do you track your plant, and is it in the same place as your people?
Most contracting companies track equipment somewhere other than where they track workers — a maintenance system, a whiteboard, a diary. That separation is where mobilisations stall, because the site assesses the pairing and nobody assembled it.
Ask to see one machine's record: identifiers, service currency, inspections, certifications, and what it is currently assigned to.
6. What is your lead time for a health assessment, in practice?
The coal mine workers' health assessment (formerly known as the coal board medical) is the one that separates people who have booked one from people who have read about one.
The realistic answer in the Bowen Basin is weeks — longer around shutdowns, and longer again in Emerald. A contracting company that says "a couple of weeks" either has excellent arrangements or has not had to do it recently. Worth knowing which.
7. How many of your people are on five-year credentials, and when do they cluster?
Standard 11 and the Coal Mine Workers' Health Scheme assessment are both on five-year cycles, which makes them invisible to any annual review.
A contracting company that hired a group of people in the same year has a cluster of renewals falling due in the same quarter, five years later. If they have not looked at that distribution, they will discover it during a shutdown.
8. Who at your business can answer a compliance question at six in the morning?
Mobilisations are decided early. If the answer to a compliance question requires an email and a business-hours response, then the practical answer at six in the morning is a guess.
9. What would you need from us to make this easier?
This question is not politeness, and the answers are usually specific and cheap: our requirements written down in one place rather than spread across three emails; notice of changes before they take effect; a named person to ask.
A requirement a contracting company cannot practically maintain will be met on paper. Removing the friction is genuinely in your interest, because their records are the foundation of your evidence.
10. What has gone wrong for you on another site, and what did you change?
The best question on the list, and the one that most rewards a contracting company that is being straight with you.
Everyone has had a team turned around. A contracting company that describes one, explains what caused it and says what they changed is telling you they have a feedback loop. A contracting company that says it has never happened is either very small, very lucky, or not being frank — and none of those three are what you were hoping for.
What to do with the answers
None of this is about disqualifying contracting companies. Most of the businesses that will do good work for you will answer several of these badly, because keeping a workforce continuously verifiable across multiple clients is genuinely hard and most contracting companies are doing it with tools that were never designed for it.
What the answers tell you is where your own checking has to be strongest, and how much of the burden of knowing you should expect to carry yourself.
Because on a Queensland mine, the obligation to know that the people at the mine are competent for the work they are asked to do sits with the site senior executive — regardless of how good the contracting company's spreadsheet is.
