Do FIFO Recruiters Check Your Facebook? Yes.

Every week someone in a FIFO group asks why they have sent fifty applications and heard nothing. The CV is fine. The tickets are there. The medical would pass. And they never find out that a recruiter opened their Facebook profile, scrolled for twenty seconds, and moved on to the next one.

I have spent twenty years in HR across Australian mining and construction, most of it on the hiring side, and I can tell you plainly: yes, recruiters and hiring managers look at your public social media before they pick up the phone. Not every one, not every time, but enough that you should assume it. And my own household has lived FIFO for years, so I have seen this from both sides of the camp gate.

What they are actually looking for

They are not checking whether you are fun. They are checking whether you are the person who ends up in an incident report. A site is a small town of several hundred people living in dongas, sharing a wet mess and a crib room, twelve hours a day, for weeks at a time. One person who cannot hold their drink, who starts fights, or who cannot keep their hands or their mouth to themselves costs the company an investigation, a flight home, and sometimes a lot more. So the screen is looking for exactly those signals.

Alcohol and drugs. Drunk posts, the Saturday night photo set, anything that references drugs even as a joke. The industry drug tests constantly and for-cause testing after any incident is automatic. A profile that suggests you use is a profile that suggests you will fail one.
Aggression. Fights, threats, "come say that to my face" comment threads. On site that is a security incident waiting to happen.
Harassment and prejudice. Sexist, racist or homophobic content, even "as a joke". Sites now carry a positive legal duty to prevent sexual harassment, and camps have had very public problems with it. Nobody is taking the risk on a candidate who advertises it.
Bagging out your last employer. If you did it to them in public, you will do it to us.
The reliability picture. Posts about chucking sickies, walking off jobs, or not turning up. Absenteeism on a roster lands on your whole crew, and it is one of the most common reasons a new starter is not asked back.

Why you never hear about it

Nobody rings to say "we saw your Instagram". You just don't get the call. Recruiters are not going to put that in writing, and most of the time it is not even a formal step; it is a hiring manager with two hundred applications looking for a reason to make the pile smaller. Your public profile is either not a reason, or it is.

The five-minute fix

Set Facebook and Instagram to private, or at least go through everything public as if you were the recruiter. A sensible profile picture. Nothing in the visible feed you would not want a camp manager to see. Check what you are tagged in as well as what you posted. Then do the same for TikTok and anything else with your name on it. If you have a LinkedIn profile, make sure the job history matches your CV, because that gets checked too.

This is one of the five things the screen filters on in the first thirty seconds. The others are whether you can legally do the job (licence, trade, the tickets the ad named), whether you are available for the roster and the point of hire, whether you are medically ready, and whether you have done any industrial or site work at all. A CV that answers those in its top third gets read. One that makes the recruiter hunt does not.

Where this fits

Fixing your socials is the cheapest thing on the list and most people never do it. It sits alongside buying the right tickets first and rewriting the CV so the screen can say yes. If you want the full playbook from the hiring side, that is exactly what the guide is for.

The full playbook, from the hiring side

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About the author. The Hiring Desk is a senior HR professional with twenty years in HR across Australian mining and construction, most of it on the hiring side, who still works in the industry, which is why there is a pen name and no surname. Nothing published here is about any one employer; it is how the industry screens, hires and runs sites, from someone still inside it. A FIFO household of her own, onshore and offshore. Author of the The Hiring Desk guides.

Do FIFO recruiters check your Facebook? Yes. Here is what they look for