Seek builds on success

By ADAM GIFFORD

Paul Bassat, the chief executive of Australian and New Zealand job site Seek, has a simple philosophy for online success.

"You've got to be number one. There's no point being number two or number three," he says.

Seek has managed to achieve this in the three years it has been live.

The seek.com.au site is ahead of the field in Australia for jobs posted and numbers of job seekers registered, and seek.co.nz also leads competing New Zealand sites.

Mr Bassat says, in part, that is because Seek has always been a pure-play internet company.

"When we started we saw an opportunity. Most people in the internet employment space were there for defensive reasons and they were not leveraging the medium fully," he says.

He quit his job as a lawyer to start Seek, roping in brother Andrew, formerly a management consultant with Booz Allen & Hamilton, and Matthew Rockman, who was sales and marketing director for Rockman's Regency Hotel in Melbourne.

Much of the initial funding came from Rockman family interests, although the company has since raised more than $20 million from different sources, including an investment from Yahoo.

Much of it has gone into marketing and building brand recognition, with a good percentage of its 80 staff doing sales and business development.

The major clients are job recruitment firms. Even though they have their own sites they have an interest in getting their listings posted widely to increase the candidate pool.

Mr Bassat says Seek should make a profit this year from charging firms which advertise job listings on the site.

"We've focused on building the key metrics - number of jobs listed, number of job seekers. People will accept site shortcomings if there are a lot of jobs across different locations and industry types."

He says a lot of work has gone into the user interface and that Seek has worked extensively with focus groups and talked to advertisers and job seekers about what they want to see.

Most job sites are starting to carry a familiar portfolio of services on top of simple job matching, from resume building to teaching interview techniques, to giving tips and tools for career building.

Under the brand Seek Direction, Seek has also added a psychometric test developed by New Zealand's Selector Group, which gives people pointers on the sorts of jobs or careers they should be pursuing.

Mr Bassat says about 150 people a week are paying to do the test. The site also tries to attract the passive job seeker - the person who is in a job, but could be tempted to move - by posting links on sites like Yahoo.

"The feedback from big corporates and recruitment firms is they're not just interested in people seeking jobs. The best person may be someone who's happy in the job they are doing now - because job satisfaction usually correlates with job performance," Mr Bassat says.

Links:


Seek Australia

Seek NZ