Field notes › Running the business
What clients actually ask for in a labour hire tender
Rate matters, obviously. It is also the part of a tender that everyone can answer, which is why it rarely decides anything. The questions that separate one labour hire supplier from another are about what happens after the contract is signed, and most of them are questions about systems rather than about people.
Prove compliance, for a date in the past
The question is almost never do you check tickets. It is: show me, for these shifts on these dates, who was on site and evidence they held the required qualifications at the time.
That is a harder question than it looks, because it is about a moment in the past rather than the state of your files today. A supplier who answers with a current certificate register has not answered it. A supplier who can produce the roster for those dates alongside the certificate states as they were is in a different category.
If you cannot answer that question quickly today, it is worth fixing before the next tender rather than during it. The audit preparation post goes through the usual shape of the request.
How will we see who is coming?
Sites are increasingly asking for visibility rather than reports. The difference matters: a weekly report is something you produce, and a portal is something they use.
Being able to answer with the client sees their own roster, live, including cover we are still arranging, changes the conversation. It also quietly reduces their reason to ring you, which is worth something to both sides. In Mustr each site gets its own logins, sees only its own roster, can raise and amend requests, and gets told automatically when crew are allocated or a shift changes.
What happens when someone does not turn up?
Every tender asks a version of this, and most answers are a paragraph about commitment to service. The answer that lands is a description of the mechanism: how quickly you know, how you find a replacement, and how the replacement is checked before they are sent.
Being specific is the advantage. A named coordinator, a published pool of qualified crew who can put their hand up, and a compliance check that runs before the replacement is booked is a process. Someone will ring around is a hope.
How do you handle expiries mid-contract?
This one separates suppliers quickly, because the honest answers vary a lot. Being able to say tickets are tracked with expiry dates, anything expiring inside 60 days is visible to us with reminders going to the worker, and an expired ticket blocks a booking rather than warning us, is a straight answer to a question that usually gets a vague one.
Can you scale, and what breaks first?
Clients with growth plans ask whether you can double the crew. Everyone says yes. The more useful thing to volunteer is what would need to change: recruitment lead time, training capacity for the site's specific tickets, and whether your office scales linearly with headcount or not.
Saying our office does not grow with the crew because the roster, compliance and client visibility run on one system is a claim you can substantiate in a demo. It is also true in a way that a client's operations manager will recognise, because they have watched suppliers drown.
Data and privacy
More common than it was, especially with larger clients and government-adjacent work: where does worker data live, who can see it, and what happens in a breach.
Onshore hosting, isolation between clients, two-factor on every login and a stated breach process are all answerable in a sentence each if they are true, and awkward if they are not. Our security page exists mostly so this question can be answered with a link.
What to build before the next tender
If you want to be ready rather than scrambling: be able to produce a compliance evidence pack for any date range in under an hour, have a live client view you can demonstrate, write down your replacement process as a sequence of steps with times attached, and have a single page that answers the data questions.
None of those are tender documents. They are operational facts that a tender happens to ask about, which is why building them once pays off every time you bid.
The compliance page covers the evidence side, and client reporting covers the visibility side.