Alternatives to Seek.com.au

If you’ve ever applied for a job in Australia or you’ve ever posted a job advert to get find candidates, you’ll have come across Seek.com.au

Seek is one of the ‘originals’, probably the largest and oldest job board in Australia.

And that’s great, it’s certainly a wonderful place to run ads and a great place to find candidates. However, it has it’s draw backs.

Sometimes, you’ll get too many applications and you’ll get applications that aren’t pre-filtered. It takes up some time!

You can be flooded with candidates and not have any great way of knowing which one is the best to go for!

Not to mention price, you may find the cost prohibitive too.

Or, maybe there’s just some other reason you want to use a platform other than Seek.com.au

If that sounds like you, then here’s a few alternatives for you to consider.

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Traditional Recruiters

These guys and girls have been around the longest, well before there was job boards, the internet or even classifieds!

A traditional Recruiters job is to find the candidate for you. Their job is to interview candidates before passing them across to you.

Sure, you pay a hefty fee for it, but working with a recruiter means a lot of the hard work is done for you.

Pros:

They take up a lot of the workload for you
Their fees are often contingent, so you don’t pay unless they place someone
They may know a wide range of people within a chosen industry

Cons:

They’re often pretty expensive
They may be searching in the same pool that you are
They’ve got access to the same resources you do
Their view on the best fit person for your role may be different to yours
Often there are contracts associated with engaging them

A simple search on Google for “Recruitment Agency” will show you a number of options.

Indeed

Based out of America, Indeed is a global platform that hosts job advertisements from countries all around the world.

It’s fairly easy to get started and you can do so without needing to pay anything. Your job listings are live fast and you’ll get great exposure across all of Australia.

Pros:

Initial listings are free
A lot of job seekers visit the site

Cons:

Free listings means your job can be lost in among many many others
Differentiating your job is hard
Costs can go up rapidly if you choose to sponsor the job
Candidate management system is limited

You can find Indeed Australia here: https://au.indeed.com

Gumtree

Originally known for selling unwanted bicycles and no longer needed couches, Gumtree moved quickly into listing Jobs.

Jobs come in all shapes and sizes, the visual style of the listing though is basically the same as what’s available to other categories of classifieds.

There’s limited information you can list in a job ad, but it does get seen by enough people to work.

Pros:

It’s free!
There are a lot of people looking for jobs on Gumtree
Candidates can have profiles setup to show they’re looking for work and you can contact them directly.

Cons:

Only one free job listing allowed per account
Tends to be for operational and administrative roles only
Listings are not particularly graphical or pretty
You cannot place links in the adverts

You can find Gumtree Jobs here: https://www.gumtree.com.au/jobs

JobScouts

Trial JobScouts Free for 30 Days

Yep, that’s us. Born out of the desire to avoid online job boards and recruiters alike, Trust-Based Referral Recruitment platform JobScouts leverages ordinary peoples personal networks to find the perfect candidate.

Of course we think we’re pretty good but the proof is in the pudding. With a network reach in the 100,000’s per Australian city, there’s certainly plenty of people for you to call upon as a Hirer.

Pros:

You choose what you want to pay, there’s no set pricing.
It’s guaranteed, if you don’t find a Candidate, you get the money back.
There are many many Scouts waiting for your role to help find the right person for you.

Cons:

Candidates are presented to you as is.
You pay for each first interview you choose, but you can have you Candidate complete a questionnaire before you see their profile.
You’ll wish you’d started sooner.

You can join JobScouts here: https://app.jobscouts.co/choose-role

LinkedIn Recruiter

It’s no surprise that LinkedIn is a prime place for finding new jobs. Heck, it even started way back when as a CV publishing tool. So it’s clearly a place to search for Candidates.

To leverage this immense amount of professional content, LinkedIn released a platform called LinkedIn Recruiter, where you can pay a fixed fee each month to research and approach candidates directly.

Pros:

The sheer number of people on the platform is huge.
Most people have a reasonably well filled out profile which means you can be sure they are actually who they say they are.

Cons:

You can approach the candidates, but they may very well not be looking for a job.
Recruiter invites on LinkedIn do tend to look a little spammy, thus are untrusted.
It’s not cheap.

You can find LinkedIn’s Recruiter toolset here: https://business.linkedin.com/LinkedIn/Recruiter‎

Google

A relatively recent entrant to the job world is Google. Makes sense that they are part of it, but they’re taking a different approach.

Being a mass search engine, they’re not in the business of doing job ads as such, rather they give you a suite of tools to enhance the chances of your job listing being picked up by the search engine and displayed.

Pros: