A contractor electrician shows up to work on your switchboard. So does a staff electrician. The work is the same, the hazard is the same, and under Australia’s model WHS laws your duty of care is the same — it is non-delegable, and it does not soften because the person holds an ABN instead of an employee number. So here is the question most contractor systems cannot answer: are these two people held to the same standard of competency before either touches the board?
In most platforms, they are not. The employee is assessed against a structured set of competency requirements. The contractor is a folder of PDFs.
A document store answers the wrong question
The incumbent model for contractor compliance is essentially a filing cabinet with a login. A contracting company uploads its insurance certificates, its workers upload their licence scans, and the system stores them. When you need to know whether someone is “compliant”, you open the folder and look at what is in it.
That tells you a document exists. It does not tell you whether the document is the right document for the work in front of you.
A document store will happily hold an expired High Risk Work Licence (HRWL) next to a current white card and a trade certificate for a different discipline. It can confirm a file was uploaded. It cannot confirm that the worker who actually turned up today is qualified to perform the specific task your site is about to ask of them. The question a PCBU has to answer is not “do we have paperwork on file”. It is “is this person competent for this work, right now”. Those are different questions, and a folder only answers the first one.
A competency matrix answers the right one
Lattice Look already runs your employees against a position-to-competency matrix — the architecture we wrote about in Why We Built a Training Matrix From Scratch. The matrix maps positions to the competencies they require: which licences, which inductions, which certifications, which of those are mandatory versus recurring versus competency-gated, and what currency each one demands.
Contractor Management does not bolt a second, weaker model onto the side for external workers. It points the contractor at the same matrix.
When a contractor is brought on for a role, the system resolves that role to its competency requirements and assesses the worker against them — not against an empty list of “whatever they happened to upload”. A contractor electrician inherits the competency requirements of the electrician position. The result is the same Green / Amber / Red classification your employees already produce:
- Green — every required competency is present and current.
- Amber — present but approaching expiry, or a non-mandatory gap.
- Red — a required competency is missing, expired, or the wrong type for the work.
The difference from a document store is the word required. The matrix knows what the role demands, so it can tell you what is missing — not merely what is present.
One model, two clearly separated workforces
Holding both workforces to one competency model does not mean blurring them together in your data. Employees and contractor-workers are distinct person types throughout the platform. The discriminator is explicit:
- In the data, every worker carries a person-type. An employee record and a contractor-worker record are never silently merged.
- In reporting, you can filter, count and audit each cohort on its own. “How many of our electricians are Red” and “how many of our contractor electricians are Red” are both answerable, separately.
- In billing, the separation is real money: contractor profiles are billed at $150 per contractor per year, on active profiles only, while employees sit on the per-employee tiers. The two never get confused at invoice time.
What is shared is the standard, not the identity. Two workforces, clearly distinguished — assessed against one competency model.
Why this matters at the gate
The payoff shows up at sign-in. Lattice Look runs a six-check right-to-work gate every time a contractor checks onto site, and one of those six checks is induction-and-competency. Because that check reads from your real position-to-competency matrix rather than a static folder, the gate can return an explainable PASS, WARN or BLOCK with an actual reason: “BLOCKED — electrician role requires a current HRWL; the worker’s licence expired on 14 May.”
A document store cannot produce that sentence. It does not know the role requires an HRWL, because it was never told what the role requires — it only knows which files were uploaded. The competency matrix knows, because it is the same model that already governs your employees.
This is also why currency matters more than collection. Certificates expire, insurances lapse, and the person on site today is not always the person who was vetted at procurement six months ago. A matrix that tracks each required competency for currency catches the expiry; a folder that simply holds the original scan does not.
The same backbone, extended
None of this is a separate contractor product grafted onto the platform. It is the existing competency backbone, extended to a second workforce. The matrix that powers your employee compliance scores, your gap analysis and your audit packs is the same matrix that decides whether an external trade is fit to start work — with the person-type discriminator keeping the two cohorts cleanly distinct everywhere it matters.
If you want to see how the contractor side fits together end to end — prequalification, insurance registers, the right-to-work gate and a tamper-evident audit trail — that is laid out on the Contractors page, alongside the broader Features overview.
Two workforces. One matrix. The same standard of proof for everyone who works on your site.