SEEK Brand Guidelines: Melbourne’s 1997 Job Site and “SEEK and You Shall Find”

Two brothers, a friend and the job pages.

SEEK began in Melbourne in November 1997. English Wikipedia names its founders as the brothers Andrew and Paul Bassat and Matt Rockman, joined by two early employees, and describes the idea plainly: an online version of the printed employment classifieds that filled Australian newspapers at the time. The website went live in March 1998, and by 2000 the company had taken venture-capital investment, according to the same account.

The business floated on the Australian Securities Exchange on 18 April 2005, English Wikipedia says, and it is still listed there. Paul Bassat left in 2012 to co-found an investment firm, and Andrew Bassat stepped down as chief executive in 2021. In May 2022 the head office moved into a newly built building in Cremorne, an inner suburb of Melbourne.

SEEK’s own website, read in November 2026, describes the group as a multinational technology company with more than 3,000 employees, founded in Melbourne in 1997 and listed on the ASX. It says it runs online employment marketplaces in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, and that its stated purpose is to help people live more fulfilling and productive working lives and to help organisations succeed.

SEEK writes its name in capitals throughout its own website, and its advertising has long played on the word itself with the line “SEEK and you shall find,” as the trade title Campaign Brief has reported.

From Melbourne to Malaysia, Brazil and Hong Kong.

From the late 2000s SEEK looked abroad. In September 2008, SmartCompany reported, it bought a 10% stake in the Malaysian job site JobStreet and, a day later, a 30% stake in Brasil Online Holdings, which ran the Brazilian job sites Catho Online and Manager Online. Andrew Bassat, then joint chief executive, told the paper that the company wanted its investments in China, Malaysia and Brazil to become a substantial part of the business. In Brazil, the paper noted, job seekers paid to use employment sites, unlike in Australia, and SEEK hoped to build up employer-paid advertising there. SEEK Asia, the group’s Asian arm, lifted its JobStreet stake to 21.3% in 2010.

The larger move came in February 2014, when SEEK announced a plan to take over JobStreet’s online employment businesses and combine them with the Hong Kong job site JobsDB, with SEEK holding three-quarters of the combined business, SmartCompany reported; the plan needed shareholder and regulatory approval in Singapore, and News Corp Australia, which owned 12% of SEEK Asia, said it supported it. SEEK’s website today lists Jobstreet sites in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore and Jobsdb sites in Hong Kong and Thailand among its own marketplaces, alongside SEEK in Australia and New Zealand.

What SEEK sells is matching. Its website says the group holds more than 60 million candidate profiles and more than 360,000 relationships with hirers, which it says place SEEK inside everyday hiring work, and it says those marketplaces produce more than 750 million data points of employment activity every day, and that it builds data-driven and AI-enabled tools to match candidates with jobs and keep listings reliable. It also says it is certified to the ISO 27001 standard for information security and the ISO 42001 standard for AI governance, and that its use of AI follows its own Responsible AI framework.

That positioning runs through the company’s own pages, which give equal space to candidates and to hirers, and through its newsroom, which publishes employment and salary reports for Australia and New Zealand.

How job boards present themselves.

For a designer, a job board is mostly a search box and a list: a field for the job, a field for the place and a button, followed by a column of job cards giving the title, the employer, the location and the date. Where that pattern is shared, the brand has to work in the small places: the wordmark at the top of the page, the colour of the button, the app icon on a phone and the tone of the alerts that arrive by email.

The names do a lot of the work. Many are plain words or short compounds that say what the site is for, and some companies build their advertising directly on the name: SEEK, for example, has long used the line “SEEK and you shall find,” according to the trade title Campaign Brief. Others keep separate names market by market: SEEK’s group runs Jobstreet and Jobsdb sites in Asia alongside SEEK itself, according to its own website.

The second audience is the employer. Job sites sell advertising, résumé search and matching tools to hirers, and their corporate pages speak to recruiters as much as to candidates, with products for job posting, candidate search and employer branding presented next to the public job search.

Ownership is part of the story too. Many of these brands belong to larger groups, and their corporate pages list the countries and sites they run: SEEK’s about page names marketplaces in eight countries, and after the 2025 sale of CareerBuilder + Monster, the new owner BOLD listed CareerBuilder and Monster among its brands, HR Dive reported. This guide sets out who founded each brand, who owns it now and what has changed hands, and treats colours and type as an unofficial interpretation rather than an official specification.

A name that doubles as a promise.

In May 2023 SEEK brought back “SEEK and you shall find” after more than ten years, Campaign Brief reported, with a campaign called The SEEKRET, made by TBWA\Melbourne with its branding unit Brand\Labs and directed by Tom Kuntz. The agency was asked to create disruption across SEEK’s brand experience, and the work ran in Australia and New Zealand. The film shows a self-appointed motivational speaker promising a room of job hunters a secret, which turns out to be nothing more than a search on the SEEK app. SEEK’s marketing director told the title that the company wanted the work to show “the lighter side” of the brand’s personality.

In May 2025 SEEK launched a new brand campaign made by Droga5 ANZ, part of Accenture Song, which Campaign Brief described as building on the same platform. It imagines famous characters just before they found their calling — Tarzan before the jungle, Dorothy before Oz — and ran from 18 May in Australia and New Zealand across television, outdoor, online video, radio, social media and cinema, with the company’s AI-powered search and match at its centre; media was planned by UM Australia and UM New Zealand with SEEK’s internal media team. In September 2025 Santa Claus joined the cast, shown looking for a seasonal job, after a teaser that drew on the peak hiring period for Santa roles on SEEK in September and October, Campaign Brief reported.

For a design guide, SEEK shows how a one-word name can carry a whole brand platform: the same word is the product, the verb in the headline and the punchline of the advert. Compare Jobsdb, the Hong Kong job site in SEEK’s group, and Indeed, another job site built around search. For this guide we use an ink blue, a pink and paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep SEEK’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.