SEEK
Senior Strategy Manager · 2020–2025
Five years inside one of Australia's most important digital marketplaces, learning that a 'simple job site' is anything but.
What I Learned
- The products that look simplest from the outside are often the ones with the most carefully constructed logic underneath -- a job site is really a labour economics problem wearing a search interface.
- Agility and experimentation often matters more than pure strategy. Strategy without speed becomes doctrine. Speed without strategy becomes noise.
- The hardest product questions aren't technical -- they're definitional. What makes someone qualified for a job? That question alone took months to answer precisely enough to build on.
I joined SEEK during COVID, which looking back was genuinely lucky timing in a pretty dark moment -- the jobs market was about to do something wild, and I was inside the data as it happened.
What I didn't expect was how complicated a job site could be. You look at it from the outside and it's... a list of jobs. Get in, and you quickly realise it's a finely tuned two-sided marketplace with incentive structures that took years to develop, network effects that cut both ways, and pricing logic sitting at the intersection of labour economics and media. The team I landed in didn't make it any easier to feel smart quickly -- a crack group of strategists from McKinsey, BCG, Kearney, and in-house marketplace veterans who genuinely were world-leading thinkers in their specific domains. Intimidating at first. Worth every uncomfortable moment.
The work I'm most proud of was conceptualising, designing and prototyping a product called Cost per Qualified App. It sounds clean on paper -- you pay per qualified applicant, not per click or per posting. But the hard question it forces is: what makes someone qualified for a job? For a niche role with tight requirements, that's manageable. For a broad marketplace serving virtually the entire employed population, it's genuinely difficult. Qualification depends on the employer, the role, the market conditions, the moment in the hiring cycle. Getting that definition precise enough to price against without breaking the supply side took a lot of careful thinking.
I also led the due diligence process for a potential takeover of ASX-listed Xref, which was a different kind of challenge -- moving fast through financial, commercial, and strategic dimensions under real pressure.
The thing that surprised me most after five years of very deep first principles strategy work is that agility and experimentation often matters more than pure strategy. The best people I worked with knew this -- they had both. Strategy without speed becomes doctrine. Speed without strategy becomes noise. I only really understood that by seeing both extremes up close.
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