To help employers create competitive farm assistant job offers, DairyNZ has created a 'Job Competitiveness Calculator'.

Finding people for dairy farming roles can be a challenge, due to the small pool of applicants. One way to grow this pool of applicants is to ensure your job offer is competitive compared to people’s employment choices in other sectors.

Terms of employment – including hours of work, roster patterns, remuneration and accommodation - are well understood drivers of competitiveness. We know that getting them right can go a long way to making a farm assistant job attractive to a non-farmer.

Use the calculator below to identify how competitive the farm assistant job you are offering is against comparable jobs in other sectors.

The job you are offering:

What is the region?

How far is it from farm to town by car?

What roster is closest? (Days on : days off)

What are the hours per week?

Is the job paid a salary or an hourly wage?

What is the total remuneration ($ per year)?

Do you provide accommodation as a part of total remuneration?

How much of the total remuneration is the accommodation allowance ($ per week)?

Is this accommodation allowance a full market rate?

What is the hourly wage ($ per hour)?

Do you provide accommodation as a part of total remuneration?

What rent do you charge the employee ($ per week)?

Is this rent a full market rate?

What do you estimate the full market rate for the accommodation would be ($ per week)?

Your hourly wage calculates to:

Scroll down for your results.

Your results:

How will the conditions of the job affect how interested people perceive it?

The perceived adjusted hourly rate shows what rate people out of the sector would realistically value the job at.

It is calculated by taking the hourly rate and adjusting it up or down, depending on the job characteristics, including:

Hours of work
Roster
Location

How competitive is the job compared to other occupations?

This shows how your job's adjusted hourly rate compares to other jobs.

The range shown for the comparator jobs covers the middle 50% of employees.

How does changing aspects of the job improve the perceived adjusted hourly rate?

Adjusted hourly rate ($ per hour).

As an employer, there may be things you could do to improve the job you are offering, for example:

Shorten hours (but keep take-home-pay the same)
Improve roster
Increase wage

This shows an estimate of how your perceived adjusted hourly rate could improve, if you were to change these things.

How does changing aspects of the job increase the percentage of people interested?

As an employer, there may be things you could do to improve the job you are offering, for example:

Shorten hours (but keep take-home-pay the same)
Improve roster
Increase wage

This shows an estimate of how the percentage of people interested in the job could improve, if you were to change these things.

Increases in the number of people interested in the job.

Calculator disclaimer

The calculator draws its data from various workforce and employment databases of other sectors, alongside interviews and surveys of potential new entrants who are not yet in dairy farming. It does not compare dairy farm jobs with other dairy farming jobs. The calculator considers aspects of a job that have been identified as having the most influence on the competitiveness of a dairy farm job relative to opportunities outside of the sector. It is not intended to benchmark between dairy farming roles. There are many more things that impact the competitiveness of an individual role that cannot be considered in this tool. This tool should only be treated as indicative of factors that could improve competitiveness. It should not be relied on as a substitute for a full job evaluation from a remuneration specialist. Talk to your trusted advisor to work out how to make your job offer more competitive. This tool does not collect your data.