Ms Janne D’Huyvetter’s TikTok account used to look like those of a lot of other travel influencers: full of dreamy sunsets and surf breaks, coffee-shop reviews and tips for backpacking abroad.

To replenish her funds in 2023, the 30-year-old Belgian got a work visa in Australia and picked up a job cleaning dorms and kitchens in an isolated mining camp in one of the country’s deserts. Her content took a surprising turn.

“Day in the life: Fifo Housekeeper,” she wrote in one of her first posts about her fly-in, fly-out (Fifo) job, where workers are flown to remote sites, often for weeks at a time.

In an 18-second video from January 2024, Ms D’Huyvetter showed snippets of her day: putting on a bright yellow uniform with fluorescent banding, pushing a cleaning trolley and eating in the company commissary.

The video drew almost 950,000 views, far more than any of her previous creations, prompting her to post regularly about her life at the mine since.

She is now one of TikTok’s leading Fifo influencers, offering advice to her 83,000 followers about how to follow in her footsteps. (In a nutshell: Get a visa, book a flight to Perth, polish your resume and apply.)

Her account is part of what appears to be an expanding worker pipeline connecting social media to the metal and mineral mines of Western Australia. The hashtag #fifo has appeared in hundreds of TikTok videos since 2023, many of them posted by Europeans in their 20s and 30s.

Australia issued 1,414 second-year working holiday visas – essentially, renewals – to foreigners with jobs in the mining sector in the 12 months through June 2024, up from fewer than 500 a year earlier. Employment sector breakdowns are not available for first-year visas, as workers typically apply for jobs only after they have obtained a visa and arrived in the country.

Google searches for “ Fifo Australia” have soared since then and rank at all-time highs, despite it being a common work arrangement – and commonly used abbreviation – in the country for decades.

The uptick in attention is giving contractors and recruitment agencies – which supply a lot of the workforce for BHP Group, Fortescue, Rio Tinto and other mining giants – more options to fill roles in drilling, truck driving and cleaning, a needed boost amid a broader worker shortage.

The jobs generally involve spending one or two weeks working long days in a remote location before flying back to Perth for time off. Many pay more than A$100,000 (S$84,000) a year, exceeding the country’s median salary. Some listings garner more than 1,000 applications, says consultant Kirsty Sewell, who works with applicants to tailor their resumes: “It’s so much more competitive in recent years.”

Many Fifo acolytes are backpackers trying to save up from short-term jobs that pay considerably more than entry-level roles back home.

It may seem unlikely that a young globetrotter like Ms D’Huyvetter would go from posting videos about the compostable cups at a cafe in Lombok, Indonesia, to a grindingly physical job in an extractive industry.

But with housing, meals and other amenities included, employees have virtually no expenses in the camps, leaving them more cash to spend on trips to TikTok-ready destinations such as Bali, which is relatively easy to reach from Perth.

Mr Thomas Nicoud, a 29-year-old Frenchman with training in interior design, noticed Fifo videos in his Instagram feed two years ago. In them, young people bragged about employers flying them to and from sites with free food, pools and gyms, all while filling up their bank accounts.

Now, he operates trucks and machines that suck debris out of gold or iron ore deposits for large mines in the Australian desert. Mr Nicoud and Ms D’Huyvetter declined to share the names of their employers because of company policy.

Large mining conglomerates are piggybacking off the social media attention, with BHP posting its own videos featuring the # fifo life hashtag to advertise golf courses, grilled steak and single-room accommodations at its mining camps in Australia.

Still, Fifo workers warn that you cannot believe everything you see on the internet. Viral videos often suggest anybody can land a job without prior experience, but getting one of the coveted roles is not easy.

Hostels in Perth packed with young Europeans looking for work testify to the competition. And Australia’s mines are not all friendly workplaces – a 2022 government probe of the sector uncovered dozens of cases of sexual harassment and abuse against women at sites operated by a number of large companies.

Those who manage to get a job say the work is, perhaps not surprisingly, more gruelling than social media lets on. Although many of the wellness amenities shown online do exist at certain camps, leaving for work in the early morning darkness to do hard physical labour under the desert sun leaves many people too exhausted to use them.

“Don’t take anything you see in those videos too seriously, because there are many people who lie for the views,” Mr Nicoud says on a video call, appearing to be covered in dirt after a 12-hour shift. “I’ve been in mining for a year now, and I’ve never used a pool.”

With the jobs in demand, some Fifo workers have tried to make money off their expertise by selling self-written guides to the industry and cover letter-writing services on social media.

Before Mr Luca Spajic moved to Australia for a mining job in January, he paid a Fifo influencer €500 (S$750) for a file that contained tips and recruiter webpage links. “ I got access to a carelessly cobbled together Google document,” he says, calling the product a scam.

Still, since leaving his job as a welder in Germany to work as a boilermaker in mines belonging to BHP, Fortescue and other companies in Australia, Mr Spajic has saved up more than A$40,000. “It’s just a matter of time until everyone wants to come here,” he says. BLOOMBERG

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