Insights and Insider News

If you’re a workshop owner or fleet manager waiting until January to sort out your diesel mechanic shortage, you’ve probably already lost the best candidates. The strongest skilled trades people are being snapped up right now, in the lead-up to the Christmas shutdown, by businesses that are planning ahead instead of reacting in the new…

  What is one of the most common questions Tavis Shearer at TRS Resourcing hears from tradespeople? Why do some candidates send their CV through and land a role within days, while others wait a lot longer for the same kind of work? The answers to these questions are less about luck than most people…

If you’ve got a trade and you’re weighing up where the work is, mining is one of the strongest bets in the country right now. The mining jobs in Australia that employers can’t fill in 2026 are the skilled one such as: Diesel mechanics Maintenance fitters Underground service roles. Businesses across Victoria, New South Wales,…

Demand has now out run supply, and it’s been happening for a few years now. Our Australian manufacturers unfortunately can’t find enough boilermakers and welders because the qualified trade workforce is ageing and moving out faster than apprentices are coming in, tanker, trailer and fuel equipment builders are all competing for the same jobs at…

If you’re applying for diesel mechanic jobs, please make sure you attach an updated CV to every application. At TRS Resourcing, we can’t put a candidate forward to an employer without one, and applications with no current CV are one of the most common reasons good mechanics get stuck at the first step. There’s plenty…

What the Latest SEEK Data Shows If you work in trades or industry and you’re wondering whether pay is still moving in the right direction, the short answer is yes. SEEK’s Advertised Salary Index shows national advertised salaries rose 4.2% in the year to August 2026, staying ahead of inflation. Here’s what the data means…

More applications haven’t led to better hires. AI has made it easier for candidates to apply for dozens of roles in one sitting, and the result is more noise, not more fit. That’s the strongest case for using a recruitment agency in 2026: a good one cuts through the noise, tests the résumé against the…

Diesel mechanic pay rates in Australia have moved, and many employer offers haven’t kept up. At TRS Resourcing, we’re regularly seeing businesses lose diesel and heavy vehicle mechanics at the offer stage because the base rate on the table reflects the market from two years ago, one year ago, or in some cases only six…

The Melbourne recruitment market is improving, and at TRS we’re hiring across more desks than we’ve had going in a long time. But I’m not going to pretend it’s been a straight line. Industrial recruitment in Melbourne put TRS through a very tough 18 months to two years before this one, and I made a…

  I get asked about the diesel mechanic hourly rate in Melbourne more than nearly any other question, and for good reason. If you’re trade qualified and you’ve been sitting on the same number for two years, you want to know what the market is paying before you go anywhere. So here’s what we’re seeing…

A couple of weeks ago I put out a short video saying the Melbourne recruitment market is improving. I had a few people reach out asking what I meant by that, so here’s the detail. The clearest indicator I’m watching is diesel mechanic pay rates in Melbourne, because rates tend to move before anything else…

If you want to reduce time to hire for an industrial role, fix the four things sitting inside your control: the quality of your brief, your pay benchmark, the speed of your decision process, and the engagement model you choose. The market won’t fix them for you. Last month we published a guide on whether…