Why Admin Hiring in Brisbane Is Harder Than It Looks

This is the factor most Brisbane employers are not aware of, and it is having a real effect on the available pool.

Queensland’s construction and infrastructure pipeline is valued at $53 billion for the current financial year, with that figure projected to grow to $77 billion by 2027 (ConsultANZ, 2026). Behind every major project in that pipeline sits a layer of administrative and coordination workforce that rarely gets mentioned in the headlines: project support officers, document controllers, executive assistants to project directors, contracts administrators, scheduling coordinators, and team administrators managing the day-to-day operations of large delivery teams.

Cross River Rail, the Brisbane Metro, the Queensland Train Manufacturing Program, the Olympic venues delivery program and the Logan and Gold Coast Faster Rail project are all active or ramping up simultaneously. The Queensland Train Manufacturing Program alone is seeking approximately 100 professional staff including administration and support roles, with positions starting in stages from 2026 (Downer Group, 2026). The Cross River Rail Delivery Authority has been advertising executive assistant and project support officer roles directly, with position descriptions that require exactly the kind of experienced, capable administrator that private sector employers are also trying to hire (Queensland Government SmartJobs, 2025).

These projects are not just competing for engineers and tradespeople. They are competing for the same Brisbane admin talent pool that every other employer draws from. And they are competitive employers: government and government-adjacent project roles typically offer above-award pay rates, defined contract terms, and in many cases hybrid working arrangements.

The practical consequence for a private sector business trying to hire a capable office administrator or EA is that they are competing against a set of very well-funded employers that most hiring managers would not instinctively think of as competitors. Understanding that competition exists is the first step to responding to it.

At the upper end of the administration market, experienced executive assistants and senior administrators are consistently among the harder roles to fill quickly, and for a different reason than most employers expect.

It is not that strong EAs and senior administrators do not exist. It is that the ones who are genuinely good at the job tend to stay put. The relationship between an effective EA and the executive they support is often one of the most stable professional relationships in an organisation. Both parties have invested time in building it, and neither is particularly motivated to disrupt it without a compelling reason.

When experienced EAs do move, they move quickly and they have options. The average advertised salary for PA and EA roles in Brisbane is currently $83,000 per year, with experienced senior EAs reaching up to $148,000 (CareerOne, 2025). Employers who approach these roles with salary expectations anchored to where the market was three years ago will find themselves unable to attract the calibre of candidate they need, and they will usually only discover this after several weeks of unproductive searching.

There is also a visibility problem. Senior admin candidates at this level are rarely active on job boards. They move through referrals, through existing agency relationships, and through direct approaches. An employer who relies entirely on inbound applications for a senior EA role is only ever seeing a fraction of the available candidate market.

If you are hiring at this level, our permanent recruitment service is built around proactive sourcing rather than waiting for applications to arrive.

The conversation around hybrid and flexible work has been running for several years now, but its effect on admin hiring specifically is still underestimated by many Brisbane employers.

Experienced administration candidates, particularly those with five or more years in the workforce and family or other commitments, are now evaluating roles partly on flexibility terms before they look at anything else. A role that requires five days in the office with no negotiation on that point will lose candidates to a comparable role offering two days from home, before the interview stage is even reached.

This is not a generational attitude or a post-pandemic hangover. It reflects a structural shift in what candidates consider a baseline expectation. Across Australia, around 44% of organisations now require employees to spend three to five days in the office, and companies are increasingly using hybrid flexibility as a strategic tool to attract skilled talent in a tight market (Australian HR Institute, via optiBPO, 2025). The employers who are winning admin hires in Brisbane are frequently the ones who resolved this question clearly in the job ad, rather than leaving it vague or saying “flexibility considered.”

Leaving the flexibility question unanswered in an ad does not preserve optionality. It signals to candidates that the answer might be no, and many of them will not apply to find out.

The administration and office support category has one of the widest pay ranges of any white-collar function in Brisbane. The average across all admin and office support roles sits at approximately $67,000 per year, but entry-level positions start at $28,000 while the most experienced and senior administrators can earn above $200,000 (CareerOne, May 2026). That is not a meaningful average. It is a category so broad that the number tells you almost nothing useful on its own.

Where employers consistently run into problems is when they anchor a salary to internal precedent rather than to the current market for the specific role type and experience level they actually need. A business that paid $55,000 for an office administrator in 2021 and is now trying to hire the same role at the same rate will find the candidate pool has moved. The market for capable, experienced admin staff has not stood still, and wage growth across Australia has been running above 3% annually since 2023 (Wage Price Index, ABS, December 2025, as cited in Youngbrook Recruitment Brisbane Hiring Pulse 2026).

The cost of getting this wrong is easy to underestimate. When an admin hire is slow or unsuccessful, the work does not disappear. Executives manage their own diaries. Coordination tasks fall through the cracks. Other team members absorb tasks outside their role. None of this shows up as a line item, but the operational drag is real, and it accumulates across the weeks a role sits vacant.

The straightforward fix is to benchmark the role against what is actually being advertised and accepted in the Brisbane market right now, before writing the position description, not after the first round of interviews has produced disappointing results.

This is a problem employers raise consistently: resumes for administration roles all look similar. Microsoft Office, communication skills, attention to detail, experience with scheduling. After twenty applications, the differentiating information has disappeared into sameness.

The difficulty is that the qualities that actually distinguish a strong administrator from an average one do not translate well to a CV. Judgement under pressure. Discretion with sensitive information. The ability to anticipate what a manager needs before being asked. An instinct for prioritisation when everything is apparently urgent. These things show up in the role, not on the page.

This creates two problems. Employers who rely on CV screening alone will miss strong candidates because nothing on the page separates them from weaker applicants. And employers who treat the admin interview as a formality, because the role seems straightforward, will make poor hiring decisions more often than they would in a role they consider more senior.

An effective process for admin hiring typically involves a brief practical component, whether a short written exercise, a scheduling scenario, or a structured conversation about how the candidate has handled specific situations in the past. This is not about making the process harder. It is about generating the kind of information that a CV cannot provide.

Not every administration need is a permanent one, and not every employer is ready to commit to a permanent hire at the point when they need coverage.
Parental leave replacements, project-based coordination roles, peak period coverage and new system rollouts are all genuine use cases for temporary or contract admin arrangements. Our temporary staffing service and contract staffing service are both used regularly by Brisbane employers for exactly these situations.

There is also a legitimate case for using a temporary arrangement as a pathway to permanent employment, particularly in admin roles where cultural fit and working style compatibility matter as much as technical capability. A candidate who performs well in a three-month contract has already demonstrated that they can do the job in your specific environment. The hire that follows carries considerably less risk than a permanent appointment made on the basis of two interviews and a reference check.

For businesses that are growing and expect their admin needs to evolve over the next twelve months, a contract arrangement can also provide operational flexibility while permanent hiring decisions are considered more carefully.

Several of the factors described in this article are structural and cannot be fully controlled. The infrastructure pipeline competing for Brisbane admin talent is not going away before 2032. Salary expectations will continue to reflect a tight market. Candidate flexibility expectations are not going to reverse.
What employers can control is how they respond to those conditions.

Being honest about flexibility in the job ad costs nothing and filters the candidate pool usefully. Candidates who need full remote will self-select out. Candidates who are comfortable with a reasonable hybrid arrangement will apply. The conversation is had upfront rather than at the point of offer, where a mismatch causes genuine wasted time for everyone.

Benchmarking salary to the current market before advertising, rather than after a failed first round, is the single most efficient change most employers can make. The information is publicly available. A quick review of what comparable roles are paying on SEEK and CareerOne in Brisbane right now takes less time than a week of unproductive searching.

Moving quickly when a strong candidate is identified is more important in this category than many employers realise. The assumption that a good admin candidate will wait while internal approvals are sought and diaries are coordinated is often wrong. They will accept the first reasonable offer that comes through, which may not be yours.

Writing the job ad for the candidate rather than the internal job description template also matters. Candidates reading admin ads want to know the actual location, the actual hours, the actual pay range, who they will be supporting, and what the team looks like. An ad that answers those questions directly will produce more relevant applications than one that lists competency requirements and leaves the practical details vague.

If you are finding that your current approach to admin hiring is producing slow results or poor-fit candidates, our administration and office support recruitment page explains how we approach sourcing and screening for this category specifically.

Administration and office support hiring in Brisbane in 2026 is not the soft market it was once assumed to be. The competition is real, the salary benchmarks have moved, and the structural pressures created by Brisbane’s infrastructure pipeline are not going to ease in the near term.

The employers who are filling these roles well are not doing anything extraordinary. They are benchmarking pay accurately, advertising honestly, moving quickly, and treating the admin hire with the same operational seriousness as any other role in the business. That combination, applied consistently, produces results that the standard approach increasingly does not.

CareerOne. (May 2026). Administration & Office Support Jobs in Brisbane QLD. https://www.careerone.com.au/jobs-in-administration-and-office-support/in-brisbane-qld

CareerOne. (October 2025). Personal (PA) & Executive Assistant (EA) Jobs in Brisbane QLD. https://www.careerone.com.au/jobs-in-administration-and-office-support/in-brisbane-qld/occ_personal-pa-and-executive-assistant-ea

ConsultANZ Recruitment. (February 2026). Record Infrastructure Budget for Queensland 2025–26. https://www.consultanz.com.au/record-infrastructure-budget-for-queensland-2025-26/

Downer Group Australia. (2026). Queensland Train Manufacturing Program. https://downergroup.com/what-we-do/rail/passenger-rail/queensland-train-manufacturing-program/

Jobs Queensland. (March 2025). State Employment Projections 2023–24 to 2027–28. As cited in Talent Hub Australia, April 2026. https://www.talenthubaustralia.com.au/2026/04/10/employment-projections-in-australia-in-the-next-decade/

optiBPO. (September 2025). Hybrid Work in Australia: 6 Latest Trends. https://optibpo.com/blog/hybrid-work-in-australia/

Queensland Audit Office. (2025). Major Projects 2025. https://www.qao.qld.gov.au/reports-resources/reports-parliament/major-projects-2025

Queensland Government SmartJobs. (November 2025). Project Support Officer, Cross River Rail Delivery Authority. https://smartjobs.qld.gov.au/jobs/QLD-4501525

Robert Walters. (2026). Brisbane 2032 Olympics Jobs & Infrastructure Recruitment. https://www.robertwalters.com.au/contact-us/australia/brisbane/brisbane-2032-olympics-recruitment.html

Youngbrook Recruitment. (April 2026). Brisbane Hiring Pulse 2026: What Employers Need to Know. https://www.youngbrookrecruitment.com.au/insights/brisbane-hiring-pulse-2026-what-employers-need-to-know