CVSharkShort answer: yes, applying through SEEK, Indeed and LinkedIn really is the main way people get hired in Australia, and you have not been doing it wrong by starting there. The advice telling you that job boards are a waste of time is based on a number that was made up.
What does go wrong is the shape of the effort. Most people apply to as many roles as they can, as fast as they can, and treat every application the same. That is the part worth changing, and it is a smaller change than starting over.
The flow, before the reasoning
If you want the whole thing in one paragraph: set up saved searches with email alerts on SEEK and LinkedIn so new roles come to you instead of you trawling. Apply the same day where you can. Send fewer, better applications, each one adjusted to the ad in front of you. Register with two or three agencies that actually recruit in your field, and treat them as one channel rather than the plan. Ask people you already know before you ask strangers. If you are eligible for income support, claim it early rather than waiting until it is desperate, because there is a processing delay either way.
Everything below is why, and what each of those is actually worth.
The thing you have been told that is not true
You will have read that 80% of jobs are never advertised, and that the real hiring happens in a “hidden job market” you can only reach by networking. It is repeated everywhere, usually as a reason to stop applying and start cold-messaging strangers.
Nobody can produce the study. Follow the citations and they lead to articles citing other articles, back to careers books from the 1970s and 1980s, written when the alternative to a personal introduction was a newspaper classified. It described a world without job boards, and it has been repeated ever since by people who did not check.
Australia happens to have a real answer. Jobs and Skills Australia runs the Recruitment Experiences and Outlook Survey, asking around a thousand employers a month how they filled their most recent vacancy. In 2022, close to two thirds of recruiting employers advertised on internet job boards, rising to 68% in the major cities. Around one in seven, 14%, did not advertise at all and filled the role through word of mouth or someone who approached them directly.
One in seven is not nothing, and it is worth having a strategy for. But it is not four in five. If you have been feeling guilty for applying to advertised roles instead of doing something cleverer, stop: you have been fishing where the fish are.
SEEK, Indeed or LinkedIn: which one to actually use
For professional roles in Australia, SEEK is the one that matters most. It is where the bulk of white collar vacancies are advertised, and for many employers it is the only place a role is posted. If you only have the energy to maintain one channel properly, maintain that one.
LinkedIn is the second, and it is doing a different job. Its value is not really the job listings, which are often duplicates of what is on SEEK. It is that recruiters search LinkedIn for people who are not applying to anything. A complete profile with the words of your actual trade in it is a passive channel that works while you are asleep.
Indeed aggregates heavily, so a lot of what you see there is the same role you already saw, sometimes routed through a third party. It is worth a saved search. It is not worth applying to the same job twice through two different sites, which happens more than people realise and looks careless from the employer's end.
The single highest-value setting on all three is the email alert. New ads get the most attention in their first days, and applying early is one of the few advantages available to you that costs nothing.
Why sending more applications stops working
An advertised role in Australia can draw hundreds of applicants. Nobody reads hundreds of resumes properly. They get searched, sorted and skimmed, which means the question is not whether your resume is good in general, but whether it answers the specific ad in front of the person doing the skimming.
This is why volume fails in a way that feels unfair. Fifty identical applications are not fifty chances. They are one application, sent fifty times, and it either matches or it does not. Ten applications that each say the words the ad said, in the order the ad said them, will out-perform the fifty, and take less of your evening.
If you want the detail on what happens to your file after you press send, and why the “robots reject 75% of resumes” line is also wrong, that is a separate guide. If you are already deep in this and hearing nothing back, start here instead.
Is it worth approaching recruiters in Australia?
Yes, with one thing understood clearly: an agency recruiter is paid by the employer, not by you. They are not a careers adviser and they are not your agent. That is not a criticism, it is just the commercial arrangement, and knowing it makes the whole relationship easier to read.
What follows from it is practical. A recruiter will be genuinely useful to you when you are close to a role they are already filling, and largely unresponsive when you are not, because their time is spent against live briefs. Silence usually means “nothing open that fits”, not a judgement on you.
So: register with two or three who genuinely specialise in your field rather than twenty who do not. Say plainly what you do, what you are looking for and what you need to be paid. Ask them to keep you on file, then check back occasionally without apologising for it. And never let an agency submit you to a company you have already applied to directly, because a duplicate submission creates a fee argument between them and the employer, and the candidate is what gets dropped to end it.
The one in seven: what networking actually means here
The roles that never get advertised do not usually come from clever outreach to strangers. They come from someone who already knows you hearing about something. Which makes the useful version of networking much less awkward than the version being sold: it is telling the people who already know your work, specifically and concretely, what you are looking for now.
A former manager, the colleague who left two years ago, the person you did that project with. “I am looking for a senior data role in Melbourne, happy to talk to anyone hiring” is something they can act on and pass along. “Let me know if you hear of anything” is not, and is why so many of those conversations go nowhere.
Government help you can actually get
Two separate things, and people routinely confuse them. There is money, which comes from Services Australia. And there is employment services, which is Workforce Australia, the government's job services programme.
On the money: the main payment for people looking for work is JobSeeker Payment, for people aged 22 to Age Pension age. It is income and assets tested, so whether you get it and how much depends on your circumstances and your partner's. The practical point most people miss is timing: there are waiting periods, and you can start a claim up to 13 weeks before your circumstances change. If you know redundancy is coming, that is the moment to look at it, not eight weeks after the money runs out.
On employment services: if you are receiving a payment you will usually have mutual obligation requirements, run through a points system. You earn points in a reporting period for things like job applications, study, training and paid work, rather than being held to a flat number of applications a month. Some people self-manage this online and some are placed with a provider. It is worth understanding properly, because the points can be earned through activities that are genuinely useful to you rather than through applications you send only to satisfy a quota.
You do not have to be on a payment to use the free job boards, resources and workshops these programmes run, and some services aimed at older workers and career changers are open more broadly.
What a reasonable week looks like
Not a system to follow exactly, just a shape that keeps the effort pointed at the things that pay. Most of a job search should be a small number of considered applications, not a large number of fast ones.
- Alerts do the searching. You triage what arrives rather than browsing.
- A handful of real applications, each adjusted to its ad. Five considered ones beat twenty copies.
- One or two conversations with people who already know your work.
- Keep the agency relationships warm, without making them the plan.
- Something that is not job searching. This part takes months, and burning out in week three helps nobody.
The honest caveat
None of this guarantees anything, and anyone promising you a callback rate is selling something. A lot of what determines how long this takes is outside your control: your field, where you live, your work rights, and how many people are chasing the same roles this quarter. Doing all of the above well and still waiting months is a normal outcome, not a sign you did it wrong.
What you can control is that each application is aimed at the role in front of you, that the people who know your work know you are looking, and that you are not paying for the search out of savings you did not need to spend.
If you want to start with the applications themselves, the Australian resume format guide covers the conventions that differ here, and you can run your resume against a specific ad on the home page without an account to see what a recruiter searching that pile would actually find.