Posting a Job on All Trades QLD: What Works, What Doesn’t

Dave runs Reefline Mechanical out of a shed in Mackay — eight diesel fitters, two apprentices, and a constant scramble for shutdown crews when the mines call. Last September he posted his first job on All Trades QLD on a Tuesday night after dinner. By Friday lunch he'd shortlisted four fitters, hired two, and had a third lined up for a labour-hire gig the following month. When his mate at a Townsville workshop asked how he pulled that off, Dave's honest answer was: "I wrote the ad like I was talking to a fitter, not a HR robot." That's the short version. The longer version — what the listing flow actually does, what converts, what wastes your money, and how to keep good posts working — is what this guide is about.

How the listing flow works on ATQ

Before you can post anything, ATQ verifies your ABN against the public register. This isn't bureaucratic theatre — it's the single biggest reason candidates trust the listings. Tradies have been burned by fake ads on generic boards for years, so when they see a verified Queensland business name attached to a role, response rates lift noticeably. The verification pings the Australian Business Register in real time, and as long as your ABN is active and your business name matches, you're through in under a minute. Sole traders, partnerships and Pty Ltds all work the same way.

Once verified, you get three free job posts on your account. No card required, no trial countdown, no "free for 14 days then we charge you" trickery. Those three are genuinely free, and they stay live for 30 days each. After that, additional posts are $99 for a 30-day listing, or you can step up to a subscription if you're hiring at volume — the full breakdown sits on our pricing and features for employers page. Most small contractors never need a subscription; three free posts is usually enough to cover a normal hiring cycle, and the paid posts top you up when you've got a shutdown or a fit-out crew to staff.

The post itself is a single-page form. Title, location (suburb-level, not just "Brisbane"), trade category, pay, certs required, start date, and a free-text description. You can publish in about six minutes if you've got the details to hand. Post a job on ATQ walks you through it the first time with prompts and examples.

What a high-converting ad actually looks like

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most job ads on the internet are bad, and tradies have learned to skim past them. The ones that convert — that pull qualified applicants instead of tyre-kickers — share four traits.

Disclose the pay

If your ad says "competitive rates" or "negotiable based on experience", you've already lost half your audience. Queensland tradies have seen that phrase a thousand times and they read it as "we'll lowball you." Put the number in. "$48–$54/hr + super, depending on tickets" gets ten times the engagement of "great pay for the right person." If you're paying day rates for FIFO or labour-hire, say so plainly — "$1,150/day, 2:1 roster, flights from Brisbane or Cairns." Candidates browsing our day-rate and labour-hire jobs filter on disclosed rates first, and ads without them get skipped.

This isn't just an ATQ preference — Fair Work has been pushing pay transparency for years, and from a candidate's perspective it's simply respect. If you're worried about competitors seeing your rates, remember they already know what the market pays. Your apprentices, however, don't, and they're not going to apply if they have to guess.

List the certs precisely

"Must have relevant tickets" tells a candidate nothing. "Must hold current Standard 11, Coal Board Medical, HR licence, and Working at Heights" tells them in five seconds whether to apply. The same applies to trades: "Open electrical licence (QLD), EWP ticket, current CPR" beats "fully qualified sparky" every time. The more specific you are, the fewer unqualified applicants you screen out manually — and the faster the qualified ones recognise themselves in your ad.

For licensed work, link or reference the actual regulator where you can. Electrical contractors should make their licence requirements explicit; plumbers should reference the QBCC licence class needed. It signals you know what you're hiring for, which matters more than people admit.

Use the FIFO roster picker

If you're hiring for mining, civil or remote work, our listing form has a roster picker — 8:6, 2:1, 14:7, even-time, drive-in-drive-out, the lot. Use it. Candidates filter on roster pattern almost as aggressively as they filter on pay, because a roster that doesn't suit their family kills the application before it starts. A 2:1 roster out of Brisbane is a different job to an 8:6 out of Cairns, and the picker lets you signal that without burying it in paragraph three of the description. Roles posted to mining and FIFO jobs with a defined roster get materially more applications than those that leave it vague.

Write the description like a human

The free-text section is where you either win the candidate or bore them off the page. Skip the generic corporate guff about "dynamic team environments" and "exciting opportunities." Tell them what the work actually is. "We're a four-truck plumbing crew doing mainly commercial fit-outs in Brisbane northside — Chermside, Aspley, Stafford. You'd be running your own van, two days a week with an apprentice, the other three solo." That paragraph tells a plumber more than a thousand words of HR-speak.

Aggregated jobs vs owned listings

ATQ shows two types of roles in search results: jobs you post directly (owned listings) and jobs we aggregate from public sources to keep the marketplace dense. This is worth understanding because it affects how your post performs.

Aggregated jobs are useful for candidates — they make ATQ a one-stop search — but they don't have verified ABNs, disclosed pay, or direct apply. They sit behind owned listings in default search ranking. When a fitter in Mackay searches for mine fitter jobs in Mackay, the verified, employer-posted roles show first. Aggregated results appear below, marked clearly as external.

What this means for you: an owned listing on ATQ is not competing on equal footing with the aggregated noise. You get priority placement, verified-employer badge, direct applications into your dashboard, and candidate messaging. If you're paying $99 for 30 days, you're paying for that priority — not for a slot in a generic feed.

It also means the comparison most employers make in their heads — "should I post here or on the big generic boards?" — isn't quite the right question. The right question is whether the candidates you want are searching trade-specific terms, and the answer in Queensland is increasingly yes. A diesel fitter looking for shutdown work doesn't search a generic board; he searches by trade and region. So do sparkies hunting electrician jobs and apprentices browsing apprentice jobs by year and region.

Bumping a post — when and why

Every owned listing can be bumped back to the top of search results once per week. The bump is included in the $99 post; you don't pay extra. It re-dates the listing in search rankings and re-notifies candidates who saved searches matching your role.

The mistake most employers make is bumping on autopilot — every Monday at 9am, like clockwork. Tradies are not browsing job boards at 9am Monday; they're on site, on the tools, with their phone in the ute. The best bump times we see are Tuesday evening (6–9pm), Wednesday lunch, and Sunday evening when people are reluctantly thinking about the week ahead. Bump then, and your post lands in front of an audience that's actually scrolling.

The second mistake is bumping a stale ad. If your post has been live for three weeks with two applicants, bumping it won't help — the ad itself is the problem. Rewrite the title, disclose the pay if you haven't, narrow the location, add the certs you forgot. Then bump. A bumped ad gets a second look from candidates who skimmed past it the first time, so make sure the second look is better than the first.

What kills a post

A few patterns we see kill response rates regardless of bumping:

• Vague titles like "Tradesman wanted" or "Multiple positions." Specificity wins. "3rd-year apprentice sparky — Ipswich commercial fit-outs" pulls candidates from apprentice year-3 sparky roles who are actively looking.
• Wall-of-text descriptions with no line breaks. People read on phones. Short paragraphs.
• Asking for "5+ years experience" on a role that's clearly entry-level. It signals you don't know what you're hiring for.
• Hiding the location. "South-East Queensland" is not a location. "Bundaberg, with occasional travel to Gladstone" is.
• Requiring a cover letter. Tradies don't write cover letters. They'll just scroll past.

After the post goes live

Applications hit your dashboard in real time. You can message candidates directly through ATQ without revealing your personal mobile until you're ready. Most employers reply within 24 hours; the ones who reply within four hours hire roughly twice as fast. Speed matters more than people think — a good tradie applying for your role is applying for two or three others the same evening, and whoever phones first usually wins the interview.

One housekeeping point worth flagging: make sure your job descriptions reflect your actual obligations under the relevant award. The Fair Work Ombudsman publishes the building, plumbing, electrical and mining awards in full, and the pay you disclose should sit at or above the relevant minimum for the classification you're hiring. Beyond compliance, posting above-award rates is one of the simplest ways to lift application volume — candidates browsing plumbing jobs and similar trade categories sort by pay almost reflexively.

The honest summary

Posting on ATQ is straightforward: verify your ABN, use your three free posts, pay $99 for additional 30-day listings, bump weekly at the right times. What separates a post that fills the role in a week from one that sits there for a month isn't the platform — it's the ad. Disclose the pay. List the certs. Pick the roster. Write like a human, not a HR template. Reply fast.

Dave at Reefline didn't do anything clever. He wrote an ad that read like he was talking to a fitter at the pub, he put the day rate in the headline, and he replied to the first three applicants within an hour. That's the whole trick. The platform handles the rest — verification, distribution, candidate filtering, messaging — but the words on the page are still yours, and they're still what decides whether a good tradie picks up the phone or scrolls on.