How much do recruitment agencies really spend on Seek? (and how to cut it)

Most Australian agencies spend thousands on Seek every month, either per ad or through a contract that bundles credits, and prices have risen steadily over the years. Whether it is worth it depends on one number almost nobody checks: your true cost per placement from job boards. Audit that, and the spend often looks very different.

How does Seek job ad pricing actually work?

At a high level, Seek gives you two ways to pay.

The first is buying ads one at a time. You post a role, pay for that listing, and it runs for a set period. Handy if your volume is low or lumpy.

The second is a contract or subscription. You commit to a volume of ads or a set spend over the year, usually in exchange for a lower price per ad and some extra features like better placement in search or branding on your listings. Most agencies running steady volume sit here.

A few things are worth knowing before you sign anything.

Prices are not flat. What you pay per ad changes by location, by industry and by how much visibility you want. A role in a big city in a competitive sector costs more to advertise than a quieter one in a regional town.

Prices also rise over time. Seek has lifted its rates more than once, and the deal you signed two years ago is probably not the deal on the table today. So if you are budgeting off an old quote, you are budgeting off a number that no longer exists.

Because of all that, I am not going to put exact figures here. Ad prices move, and any number I quote would be out of date fast. Check Seek's current rates directly, or ask your account manager for a written breakdown of what you are paying per ad under your contract. That written breakdown is the start of everything else in this article.

Why does the Seek spend feel impossible to cut?

Ask most agency owners about their Seek bill and you get a shrug and the same line: it is the cost of doing business.

And honestly, that feeling is understandable. Job boards are where a lot of active candidates look. If you stop posting, you worry the roles go quiet and your consultants have nothing to work with. The spend feels like oxygen. You do not question oxygen.

But "cost of doing business" is exactly the kind of phrase that hides a leak. It is the thing we say when we have stopped measuring something. Plenty of agencies have never sat down and worked out what each job board placement actually costs them, so the spend just rolls on, year after year, quietly climbing with every price rise.

The good news is that once you do measure it, you usually find room to move. Not by going cold turkey, but by being honest about which spend is working and which is not.

The hidden problem: you may be paying to reach your own database

Here is the bit that stings.

When you post a role on Seek, a share of the people who apply are already in your database. They applied to one of your ads last year. You screened them. Maybe you even placed them once. They are sitting in your system right now, and you are paying job board rates to meet them all over again.

Think about how candidates behave. A good one applies to lots of roles across their career. Over time, your database has been quietly collecting these people. So the overlap between "people on Seek" and "people you already know" is bigger than it feels.

That is the strange maths of relying on volume. You pay a premium to a third party to put your ad in front of strangers, and a good chunk of the people who respond are not strangers at all. You already own that relationship. You are just not using it.

This is the core of why volume is broken and trust is the advantage. The most valuable candidates are rarely the ones refreshing the job boards. Bullhorn data puts it bluntly: 73% of talent is passive, meaning they are not actively looking. You will not reach those people with another ad. You reach them through the people who already know and trust them, and through the relationships already living in your own system.

Why job board volume is getting noisier

It used to be that a pile of applications meant a pile of interest. Not any more.

AI writing tools have made it dead easy to fire off a polished, tailored-looking CV in seconds. Candidates can apply to fifty roles in the time it used to take to apply to five. So your ad gets more applicants than ever, but a smaller share of them are a genuine fit. A lot are just spray-and-pray.

For you, that means more time spent sorting. Your consultants wade through a bigger stack to find the same handful of real candidates. The ad price has not changed, but the cost of getting a placement out of that ad has gone up, because the hours involved have gone up.

This is the quiet trap of volume-based sourcing. The headline metric, applications per ad, can look healthy while the thing that actually matters, quality placements per dollar, gets worse. Robert Walters research found that 7% of applicants make 40% of hires. The signal is concentrated in a small group. Everything else is noise you are paying to wade through.

How do you audit your real cost per placement from Seek?

This is the single most useful exercise in this whole article, and most agencies have never done it. It takes an afternoon.

Step one: add up the spend. Pull your total Seek cost over a clear period, say the last twelve months. Include contract fees, extra ad buys, add-ons, the lot.

Step two: count the real placements. Go through the placements you made in that same period and mark only the ones that genuinely started from a Seek application. Not "we had them in the system and also saw them on Seek." Only the ones where the job board was the true source.

Step three: add the hidden hours. Estimate the consultant time spent sifting job board applicants. That time has a cost, and it belongs in this sum. Sorting two hundred AI-written CVs to find three real people is not free.

Step four: divide. Total cost, including those hours, divided by genuine Seek placements. That is your real cost per placement from Seek.

When people run this honestly, the number is usually higher than they expected, sometimes a lot higher. And the share of placements that were "really" from Seek is usually lower than they assumed, because so many candidates were already in the database.

If you want to model this against other channels without building a spreadsheet from scratch, the RefeRec ROI calculator lets you plug in your numbers and see the trade-off.

How to cut Seek spend without losing output

The goal is not to slash spend and hope. It is to shift spend towards what works. Here is the order I would do it in.

Map where your best hires actually came from

Before you cut anything, look back at your strongest placements over the last year or two. The ones that stuck, that the client loved, that came through smoothly. Where did those people really come from?

Often the answer is not the job boards. It is referrals, repeat candidates, people a consultant already knew, recommendations from someone you placed before. That tells you where the quality lives, and quality is what you want more of.

Grow referrals and known-network sourcing on purpose

Most agencies treat referrals as something that happens by accident. A candidate mentions a mate, you follow it up, lovely. But it is not built into how the business runs.

Make it deliberate. When a candidate engages with you, ask. The numbers say this works far better than people expect. Around 15% of cold-contacted candidates engage, and of those, 85% go on to refer someone. That is a huge well of warm, trusted talent that costs you nothing in job board fees, sitting right inside relationships you already have.

This is what database activation is really about. The names are already in your system. The job is to turn them back into live, referring relationships instead of dead records.

Then trim the spend that is not pulling its weight

Now, and only now, look at your Seek contract with the audit in hand. Which roles or sectors actually produced genuine placements? Which ad buys produced noise and nothing else? Cut or scale back the spend that did not earn its keep, and keep what did.

You are not switching Seek off. For some roles it still earns its place. You are just no longer paying premium board rates out of habit for results you could get cheaper and faster elsewhere.

Why referrals win on cost, speed and quality

When you stack referrals next to job board volume, they win on the three things owners care about most.

Cost. A referral does not carry a per-ad fee. The cost is the bit of process it takes to ask, which is tiny next to a Seek contract.

Speed. Referred hires are 60% faster to place. The candidate comes pre-vetted by someone who knows them, so you spend less time chasing and screening.

Quality. Referred hires stay 25% longer. They were recommended by someone who understood both the person and the role, so the fit is better and the placement sticks. That is fewer redos, happier clients and more repeat business.

Put simply, referrals come from trust, and trust is the one thing a job board cannot sell you. You already have it sitting in your database. The question is whether you are using it or paying to go around it.

Where RefeRec fits

RefeRec is built for exactly this. It turns your existing recruitment database into a referral engine, so the relationships you already paid to build start producing warm, trusted candidates instead of gathering dust.

It is not a heavy lift. Agencies go live in around five weeks with about four hours of client time, and two placements pay for a year of the platform. The maths is meant to be easy.

If you want to see how your own numbers stack up, the ROI calculator lets you model your Seek spend against referrals in a few minutes. You can also look at the pricing to see where it lands for an agency your size.

And if you would rather just talk it through, book a discovery call at referec.com and we will run the numbers with you.