Indeed vs Seek in Australia: which one actually gets you hired?

Ask which board is better in any Australian job seeking forum and you get the same answer. It depends, use both. True, and completely useless when you have two hours tonight and have to decide where they go.

Here is the sharper version, and the one this article backs with numbers. Seek is the better market. Indeed is the better product. Seek has more of the roles that exist in Australia. Indeed does more to get you an answer once you have applied. Those are two different problems and you need both of them solved.

The short answer, before the detail

Seek is the number one job board in Australia and it is not a close race. It is the first place most Australian employers advertise, and in several industries it is the only place.

Indeed is the number one job site in the world. In Australia it runs second on traffic, but it carries roles that never reach Seek, and it is built around getting you a reply rather than just getting you to apply.

So use Seek to find the roles, and use Indeed to find the employers who answer. If you can only run one, run Seek. If you run both, which you should, start at roughly 60% of your time on Seek and 40% on Indeed, then move that split based on your industry. The rest of this article is why, and how.

Why Seek is the number one job board in Australia

Seek launched in 1997 and trades on the ASX as SEK. It was not built somewhere else and shipped here. It grew up in this market, and that is most of the reason it has been so hard to displace.

The traffic backs it up. Similarweb ranked seek.com.au as the most visited Jobs and Employment site in Australia in June 2026, with Indeed second, and put seek.com.au at just over 30 million visits in March 2026. In a country of about 27 million people, that is a job board almost every working adult has touched.

The employer side says the same thing. In FY26 SEEK reported net revenue of $1.199 billion, up 10%, with Australia and New Zealand revenue up 12% and group EBITDA of $530 million at a 44% margin. Employers do not spend at that level on a channel they would rather not use.

The part that matters to you is what paid listings do to quality. A Seek ad costs the employer real money, so it tends to be a genuine, current vacancy that somebody is actively hiring for. Nobody pays to advertise a role they already filled. That is why an hour on Seek returns fewer dead ends than an hour almost anywhere else.

Seek's grip is strongest in healthcare and aged care, construction and the trades, government and the public sector, education, finance, and retail. If you work in any of those, Seek is not a starting point, it is the market. It is also the stronger board outside the capital cities, where a regional employer will often run one Seek ad and nothing else.

There is a second reason to keep a Seek profile current even when you are not applying. Australian recruiters search Seek's candidate database directly, and roles get filled out of that search before they are ever advertised. You cannot be found in a database you last updated in 2023.

Sources: Similarweb, Jobs and Employment sites in Australia, SEEK FY2026 full year results presentation

Where Indeed wins: global reach and a better product

Indeed is the largest job site in the world, with more than 350 million unique visitors a month across 60 countries and 28 languages. Australia is one country inside that machine, which is both its weakness here and its entire advantage.

Indeed works as an aggregator as much as a job board. It crawls company career pages, recruiter sites and other sources, alongside the roles employers post to it directly. That is why you find things on Indeed that Seek has never seen. Small businesses that will not pay for a Seek ad. Startups that only post to their own site. Overseas-headquartered companies that list globally through Indeed by default.

The other half of the case is the software. Indeed attaches company reviews and salary data to the listing, so you can research the employer without opening a second tab. It tracks the status of every application you have sent in one place. And one account works in every country it operates in, which matters if you are here on a visa, weighing up a move, or applying across the Tasman.

Seek is the better marketplace. Indeed is the better piece of software. Most arguments about which one is better are two people comparing different things.

Source: Indeed newsroom, number one worldwide site for job seekers

Why the response rate is higher on Indeed than on Seek

Start with what is honest. Nobody publishes a clean head to head study of reply rates on Seek against Indeed in Australia, so any single number you are quoted for that comparison was invented. What can be checked is how each platform treats the reply, and that is where the gap opens.

Indeed publishes employer responsiveness before you apply. Its Responsive Employer badge requires an employer response rate above 51% across the last 30 days of applications, and it is recalculated every week. You can look at a listing and know whether this company answers people.

Seek has no equivalent. Seek does tell you when an employer opens your application, a push notification or email saying your application has been viewed, sent when the employer interacts with it in the SEEK Advertiser Centre. That is genuinely useful. It also arrives after you have already spent the application.

That is the whole difference in one line. Indeed lets you choose employers who reply. Seek tells you afterwards whether this one bothered to look.

There is a second mechanism and it is quieter. When you apply through Indeed, the conversation stays on Indeed and the employer's reply lands in the same thread. A large share of Seek applications redirect you into the employer's own application system, and from that point the thread goes dark. You are now waiting on an email from a system you cannot see into. Applications do not turn into replies by themselves, and the platform that keeps the conversation in one place collects more of them.

For scale, cold applications across the whole market sit at roughly 2 to 3% reply rates. Published estimates for Indeed sit well above that floor, but they range widely by source, by country and by category, so treat any specific figure with suspicion. The direction is consistent. The precision is not.

The practical move is small and it works. On Indeed, filter and sort toward employers carrying the responsiveness signal, and apply to those first. It is the closest thing to a public reply rate that either board gives you.

Sources: Indeed, what is the Responsive Employer badge, SEEK Employer, automatic notifications candidates receive

What SEEK's own FY26 numbers tell you

This is the part almost nobody reads, and it is the most useful thing on this page.

In FY26, Australian job advertising volumes on Seek fell 2%. Over the same period, paid advertising yield across SEEK's APAC business rose 18%, the sixth year running of double-digit yield growth. Translated: fewer ads on Seek, each one costing the employer more.

Two things follow for you. More applicants per Seek ad, because the same job seekers are chasing a slightly smaller pool. And more pressure on price-sensitive employers, mostly small businesses, to advertise somewhere cheaper. The cheapest option is their own careers page, and the thing that indexes careers pages for free is Indeed.

Then there is the number SEEK gives its investors. At its investor day in May 2025 the company put its Australian placement share at 35.4% for the first half of that financial year. SEEK is telling the market it is involved in roughly a third of Australian placements.

Read that again as a job seeker. Around two thirds of the hires in this country happen somewhere other than Seek. Seek being number one and Seek being enough are two different claims. The first is true. The second is not, and it is Seek's own reporting that tells you so.

Sources: SEEK FY2026 results, revenue, yield and ad volumes, SEEK investor day, 35.4% Australian placement share in H1 25

Indeed vs Seek on the things you actually care about

Roles that exist in Australia: Seek, for anything advertised by a mid-sized or large employer. Indeed has the higher raw count, but it is inflated by duplicates and by listings that have already closed.

Listing quality: Seek. Paid ads get maintained and taken down.

Finding employers who reply: Indeed, because of the responsiveness badge.

Speed of applying: Indeed, with a real caveat below.

Being found without applying: Seek. Its candidate search is where Australian recruiters actually look.

Salary and company research: Indeed. Reviews and pay data sit on the listing itself.

Applying across countries: Indeed, by a wide margin.

Regional and remote Australia: Seek.

Now the caveat on speed. Indeed's Easy Apply lowers the barrier for you and for everyone else at the same time. A role that would draw 50 direct applications can draw several hundred Easy Apply submissions, and recruiters move through that pile faster and with less attention. Use Easy Apply for casual work, high-volume categories and long shots. For the roles you genuinely want, click through and apply properly, with a letter written for that job.

The overlap problem nobody warns you about

Here is the thing you only notice once you are applying at volume. A meaningful share of roles appear on both boards. Same employer, same position, two listings.

Apply to both without realising and you have sent one person two applications for one job. At best it looks disorganised. At worst you have burned a slot on a role you had already applied for while a different vacancy went untouched. When you are hand-applying, tracking that across two tabs is genuinely difficult, and most people do not bother, which is exactly how the duplicates happen.

This is the strongest argument for running both boards through one system rather than two browser tabs. Deduplication is boring, invisible work, and it is precisely the sort of thing software should be doing instead of you.

How to split your time between Indeed and Seek

One: treat Seek as your source of roles. Save 3 to 5 searches on exact job titles with a tight location radius, and set your top two to immediate delivery so you see a role the day it goes up.

Two: treat Indeed as your source of employers. Run the same searches there, then work the responsive employers first and the rest after.

Three: cross-check before you apply. If a role is on both boards, apply once, on whichever version gives you a real cover letter field rather than a one-line note.

Four: apply inside 48 hours of a listing going up. Both boards sort by date by default, and the pile grows fast enough that day four is a different competition from day one.

Five: run 20 to 30 applications a day, then pause for about three days to let replies come back. Fast enough to fill a pipeline, slow enough that you can still read what you sent.

Six: for the five roles you genuinely want, ignore both boards. Apply on the company's own careers page with a letter that names the role and the team. Those applications convert at a different rate to anything you send through a board, and you only have the energy for a handful, so spend it there.

How karmik fits into your Indeed and Seek workflow

karmik.ai supports Indeed and Seek only, and that is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation we are working around. A form-filling engine tuned to two boards handles their quirks far more reliably than a generic one stretched across twenty.

It pulls roles from both and treats them as one pipeline, so the duplicate problem in the section above stops being your job. It writes a cover letter per role from the actual job description and your resume, not a template with the company name swapped in. And it optimises your resume against the keywords the ad is actually using.

On Pro there is a desktop app that automates your own browser on your own machine, which is why applications come from your account rather than from a third-party bot holding your password. It is capped at 100 applications every three hours, on purpose. Pace beats raw volume, and a board that sees 400 applications from one account in an hour draws exactly the attention you do not want.

You can run the first ten cover letters free, without a card, and see whether it fits how you work before you decide anything.