Joining SEEK at the start of 2018, I worked closely with the ex-Head of Strategy on a SEEK product called Onploy - a SaaS product that helped companies hire the best software engineers in Australia.
Although I joined SEEK as an operations analyst, my role initially required me to wear many hats. My day would include making sales calls, reviewing marketing pitches, creating tools and processes to make backend operations easier and contacting software engineers about companies interested in hiring them (due to the nature of our ‘Houdini’ MVP).
I started to transition into a more product focused role after six months, due to my interest in the Onploy product and my eagerness to learn a new discipline which complemented my previous experiences at both IHR and Settify.
What Did I Do At SEEK?
As my time progressed at the Onploy product, I became the junior product owner for the following initiatives and features of the website:
- Hirer Onboarding
Introduced iterative improvements to the hirer sign up user journey and process, which helped sign up over 1,000 companies as users of the platform in under 2 years.
- Candidate Onboarding
Introduced iterative improvements to the candidate sign up user journey and process, which helped sign up over 10,000 software development candidates to the platform in under 2 years.
- Operations Process
Worked closely with a data analyst to create, design and implement processes in the back end of the website that automates the identification and selection of software engineering candidates for the Onploy platform.
Working at SEEK was one of the most exciting and transformational experiences in my career thus far. All of it was new to me and far exceeded my previous work experience - the collaborative and innovative working environment, the exceptional talent that all my colleagues had, as well as the prioritisation methods and frameworks used to make decisions based on qualitative and quantitative data - they were all instructive in my product journey and I learned so much about what made a company like SEEK so successful for such a long period of time.
Jack was (and still is!) one of my mentors in tech and I’m forever grateful that he had given me the opportunity to take on so much responsibility for an incredibly important product for such a large company at the time. My path and journey towards becoming a product manager was possible only because of him, and the opportunities he had afforded me during my time at SEEK.
Why Did I Leave SEEK?
I left SEEK in February 2020 as I had completed my legal studies at Melbourne Law School by then and decided I wanted to become a lawyer.
I was studying to become a lawyer at Melbourne Law School between 2016-2019. Before graduating in July 2019, I had interviewed and received an offer to work in mergers & acquisitions for Deloitte, which would start in March 2020.
After thinking long and hard, I decided I wanted to give becoming a lawyer a go. After spending 6 years of my life studying to become a lawyer (and accumulating an impressive HECS debt in the process!), it was a career path I wanted to explore to see if it would be something I enjoyed doing in the long run.
Although it was unfortunate that my journey with SEEK had to end, it was still an enriching time for me, in terms of learning more about product methods and processes, as well as making an impact on a product that was initially loved by many and (dare I say) helped a few lucky software engineering candidates find really good jobs in the Australian tech industry!
