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How matching works (automated decision-making)

When you build your profile, the app automatically compares it against each role and produces a fit verdict — “Strong fit”, “Could be a fit”, or “A stretch”. This is an automated decision-making process: no person reviews each verdict before you see it. The verdict is a guide to help you decide; it never accepts or rejects you, and every role stays visible so the choice is always yours.

What we use about you

The verdict is based only on the profile answers you give us:

  • Your interests — roles that share your interests fit better.
  • Your motivations — such as good money, room to grow, variety, or stability.
  • Your preferences — such as paid TAFE, starting soon, staying close to home, gender-balanced teams, outdoors, accommodation, female facilities, or relocation support.
  • Your preferred work environments — outdoors, indoors, or a mix of places and tasks.
  • Your deal-breakers — the things you’ve told us are hard nos.
  • Your readiness — your stage (school-leaver, recent leaver, or career changer), your licence, your transport, and the tickets and checks you already hold.
  • Your suburb, how far you’re willing to travel, and whether you’re open to relocating.

Other details — such as your school level, contact preferences, and any optional background information (age group, gender, or Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander status) — are not used to work out your fit and never change a verdict.

What we use about each role

  • Its interests, pay, duration, and whether it’s full-time.
  • Whether it offers paid TAFE, accommodation, or relocation support.
  • Whether the employer actively encourages women.
  • Its day-to-day realities, and whether it takes people in their first years.
  • Any must-have requirements before you start — a licence, ticket, check, transport, or qualification.
  • When the intake starts, where the role is based, and whether it provides accommodation or runs on a fly-in fly-out or drive-in drive-out roster.
  • What’s known about the team make-up and on-site facilities.

How distance is used

We measure the straight-line distance between your suburb and the role’s — not the route you’d actually travel, so a real journey is usually longer. Both points are the centre of a suburb rather than an exact address, which is why every distance we show is an approximate one.

How far counts as close depends on how you get around. If you told us you rely on public transport, or have none yet, we treat a shorter distance as close; if you have your own reliable transport, we allow more. Distances also stretch in regional and remote areas, where a longer trip is normal.

Some roles aren’t a commute at all. If a role provides accommodation, or runs on a fly-in fly-out or drive-in drive-out roster, we leave distance out of its verdict entirely rather than counting it against the role — and those roles are always shown to you, however far away they are. Where we don’t yet know exactly where a role sits, we fall back to comparing states, and distance simply doesn’t appear in that role’s reasons.

You choose how far you’re willing to travel, in Discover’s filters. That setting does exactly what it says there: Only roles within this distance are shown. If nothing is within your distance, we tell you plainly rather than showing you roles you can’t get to — and you can widen it any time. Until you tell us your suburb, we don’t limit anything by distance at all.

How that becomes a verdict

We add things up where your profile and the role line up (shared interests, satisfied motivations and preferences, a matching work environment, reliable transport where it matters, an inclusive employer, and readiness for roles that take first-years), and we ease off where they don’t (an out-of-state role when you’d rather stay local, or no transport where a role needs you to get to site). We then land on one of three honest verdicts:

  • Strong fit
  • Could be a fit
  • A stretch

The lowest a role ever reads is “A stretch” — there is no failing grade. If a role carries one of your deal-breakers, or has a must-have you don’t meet yet, we say so plainly (“this involves…”, or “you’ll need … first”) — as honest, actionable notes, never a silent rejection. Alongside the verdict we show the main reasons it fits and any steps to take, so you can see why. We don’t show an internal score or percentage — the verdict and its reasons are what matter.

What we don’t use

Government occupation data (such as typical earnings or employment outlook) is shown beside a role as helpful, attributed context, but it never moves your verdict. We do not use extracted role “skills” to score matches. And there’s no profile you can’t finish: if you haven’t added any interests yet, we ask you to finish your profile rather than guessing a fit.

You can review the full detail in our Privacy Policy and collection notice.

Data sources

Suburb locations and the regional classifications above come from two openly licensed Australian datasets, both modified for use in this app and used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Neither publisher endorses this app or our use of their data.

  • Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF), May 2026 edition — Geoscape Australia, licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia, published via data.gov.au.
  • Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS), Edition 3, July 2021 – June 2026 (Remoteness Areas), released 21/03/2023 — the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Commonwealth of Australia.

Each publisher asks to be credited in their own words. In theirs:

Incorporates or developed using G-NAF © Geoscape Australia licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia under the Open Geo-coded National Address File (G-NAF) End User Licence Agreement

Based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data