How-to
Using SEEK and LinkedIn job posts to find Australian companies ready to buy
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By the Bingle team · Published 25 October 2026 · Researched from the sources listed below, drafted with AI help and checked against those sources
Short answer
How do you use job ads to find Australian companies ready to buy?
Pick two or three job titles a company only hires when it needs what you sell, save them as daily LinkedIn job alerts filtered to the past week, and write to the hiring manager named on the post within the first few weeks. Bingle, made in Australia, does the LinkedIn half for you: it reads job posts in your buyers' locations, drops recruiter ads and finds the hiring manager. SEEK is the other place to look, but its terms limit its content to personal, non-commercial use, so read them before you prospect from it.
How we researched this
On 25 October 2026 we read SEEK's terms, advice and employer pages, LinkedIn's Help Center pages on job search and alerts, and AusTender's contract notice search, and pulled a week of AusTender notices from its public data feed. SEEK's search pages refused our requests that day, so we describe its filters from SEEK's own advice pages rather than from a live search. We also read Bingle's code for what its hiring signals do.
Which job ads point to a purchase, by what you sell
A hiring signal is only useful if the role creates work your product or service handles. A Melbourne bookkeeping firm doesn't care that a Brisbane startup wants three designers. It cares that a 60-person company just advertised for its first financial controller. Start from what you sell and work back to the titles.
| Job ads worth watching | Why it points to a purchase |
|---|---|
| Sales training, sales tools or outsourced SDRs | |
| A first Head of Sales; two or more Account Executive or Business Development roles in a month | A team being built needs onboarding, a pipeline and tools, and the leader picks them. |
| Managed IT and cyber security | |
| A first IT Manager at a company of 30 to 200; a Cyber Security Analyst at a firm with no security team | The new person inherits the current provider and gets asked what should change. |
| Marketing agencies and marketing software | |
| A first Marketing Manager or Head of Growth; several digital roles at once | A new marketing lead reviews agencies and tools in their first quarter. |
| Accounting, payroll and finance software | |
| Financial Controller, Head of Finance or Payroll Officer at a growing company | Finance hires look at systems, and the year end on 30 June gives them a deadline. |
| HR software and recruitment services | |
| A first People and Culture Manager; five or more open roles at one company | Hiring at that pace breaks spreadsheets and inboxes. |
| Office fit-out, furniture and commercial property | |
| An Office Manager or Facilities role alongside a run of new roles in one city | More people in one place means more space, desks and services. |
| Data and AI consultancies | |
| A first Head of Data or Data Engineer; ads that describe a migration or a new platform | Someone is about to choose a stack, often with outside help. |
Skip ads placed by recruitment agencies for unnamed clients, single replacement hires, and roles that bring in-house the work you'd sell. The companies hiring guide explains how to tell a real opening from a ghost ad. The A$ figure on an ad helps too: on SEEK you can filter by salary, so setting a floor such as A$150,000 for a sales leader search leaves mostly senior hires, the people who own a budget.
Searching SEEK, and what its terms allow
SEEK describes itself as "Australia's no. 1 jobs, employment, career and recruitment site", and it's built for job seekers, so you'll search it the way a candidate would. SEEK's advice pages describe the fields: a keyword for the role, a classification for the industry, and a location that can be a city, a region or a suburb. Under "More options" you can choose the work type, a salary range and "the time period in which the job ad was listed". Sign in and you can save a search and get new matches by email; SEEK's advice describes the alerts as daily.
- Search each title from your table in the What box and set Where to your buyers' cities or states.
- Under More options, pick full time and the shortest listed period on offer, and a salary floor if seniority matters.
- Save the search while signed in so new matches come by email.
- Each morning, note the company, the role, the date listed and whether the ad came from the employer or an agency.
- Take each company to LinkedIn, find the person the role reports to, and check the company's own careers page still lists it.
SEEK's employer pages say its Basic ad gives "a 30-day listing on SEEK". So an ad you've watched for more than 30 days has probably been paid for again or reposted, which tells you the role is hard to fill, not that the team is growing.
Now the terms, last updated on 20 July 2026. They say SEEK's content "must only be used for your personal, non-commercial purposes" unless SEEK permits otherwise, and they bar "data mining, robots, screen scraping, or similar automated data gathering". They also bar contacting SEEK Profile owners "for marketing or promotional purposes unless they have clearly opted in". SEEK's robots.txt blocks crawlers from job pages and from any search address with a query string, and our own requests to its search pages were refused on 25 October 2026. Read strictly, the terms cover using SEEK ads to build a prospect list by hand, too. We're not lawyers; if SEEK is central to how you prospect, ask SEEK. Never run a scraper against it, and never message people you found through SEEK's People Search.
Searching LinkedIn Jobs
LinkedIn's job search is the better fit for prospecting because the post often names the people behind it. LinkedIn's Help Center says results show "from any time" by default, and you can narrow them to the last 24 hours, the past week or the past month. Other filters include company, experience level, employment type, "Under 10 applicants" and "In your network". Under 10 applicants is a decent proxy for a fresh ad.
To get new posts without searching again, run the search, switch the job alerts toggle on at the bottom of the results, and use Manage alerts to choose daily or weekly, by email, app notification or both. You can have 20 alerts at once, which is plenty for three titles across a few cities. On a job's page, the "Meet the Hiring Team" section lists the poster and others on the team; LinkedIn says members "will be able to connect and message the entire team listed in this section". That is usually who you want, provided they aren't the recruiter.
| SEEK | LinkedIn Jobs |
|---|---|
| Fresh ads only | |
| Filter by the period the ad was listed | Past 24 hours, past week or past month |
| New ads by email | |
| Saved search with alerts, described as daily | Up to 20 alerts, daily or weekly, email or app |
| Who is hiring | |
| Not something SEEK's pages we read describe | "Meet the Hiring Team" on posts that show it |
| Salary floor | |
| Salary filter | Not among the filters LinkedIn's help page lists |
| Use for sales prospecting | |
| Terms limit content to personal, non-commercial use | Search by hand; LinkedIn's rules on automation software apply |
| Read by Bingle | |
| No | Yes, in your buyers' locations |
How long a hiring signal stays useful
We found no study that measures how long a job ad predicts a purchase, so this is reasoning from how hiring works, with SEEK's 30-day listing as a marker. The short version: the ad is worth most in its first fortnight, the hire is worth a second message once they start, and anything older than a quarter is background.
| What's happening | What to do |
|---|---|
| Ad 0 to 7 days old | |
| The manager has just briefed the recruiter and is thinking hard about the role. | Write to the manager about the problem the hire will face. |
| 1 to 4 weeks | |
| Interviews. The plan for the role is fixed. | Still a good reason; refer to the role, not the ad. |
| Past 30 days, or reposted | |
| Hard to fill, or open-ended. | Lower priority, unless you sell something that makes the role easier to fill. |
| Hire starts | |
| A new person reviewing how things are done. | Write to them a few weeks in; see the job change guide. |
| 3 or more months, no new ads | |
| The moment has passed. | Drop hiring as your reason. |
Several ads in one team last longer than one. A company advertising three account executives in a month has decided to build a team, and that decision holds even when the first ad comes down. One ad for one role tells you less, and for a shorter time.
Timing within the day matters as well. Both sites send alerts by email, so read them first thing and write while the ad is still new. Remember the clocks: from 4 October 2026 to 4 April 2027 Sydney and Melbourne are on AEDT, Brisbane stays on AEST an hour behind, and Perth is three hours behind Sydney. A message you send at 9am in Sydney reaches a Perth hiring manager at 6am. Our Australian outreach rules list the holidays and the summer break too.
AusTender contract wins: a related signal
A government contract win can come before the hiring. AusTender says a contract notice is reported "as a result of a contract being awarded by an Australian Government agency at or above the relevant reporting threshold value of $10,000 (inc. GST) for the majority of Australian Government entities", and it shows the contract period, value and supplier. You can browse each week's notices, or filter by supplier name, ABN or a value range in A$.
Volume is high and mostly small. We pulled AusTender's public data for notices published from 18 to 23 October 2026: 1,018 new contract notices, of which 65 were worth between A$500,000 and A$100 million. A mid-sized supplier that just won A$2 million of work has people to hire and a project to deliver, which makes it a likely buyer for subcontractors, recruiters, equipment hire, project software and training.
Bingle reads AusTender for this when your ideal customer is in Australia. It looks at award notices published in the last 7 days, keeps those from A$500,000 to A$100 million, leaves out government bodies and very large suppliers, and if you give it a keyword keeps only contracts whose description mentions it. It then finds up to three people who fit your ideal customer at each of up to five suppliers a run, doesn't look up the same supplier again for 30 days, and links each lead to the notice. It doesn't read state government tender sites.
What Bingle does with job posts, and what it doesn't
We make Bingle, so here is what its code does on 25 October 2026. It reads LinkedIn job posts from the last 30 days for the roles you name, in your ideal customer's locations, plus the public careers pages of companies you already track. It drops posts from recruiters and staffing agencies, including ads written "on behalf of our client", and skips your competitors' own ads. From what's left it raises four kinds of signal:
- The hiring manager named on a post for a role your product supports, as a lead in their own right. That's LinkedIn's hiring team on the post, or the poster when their profile shows they work at the company in a role that isn't recruiting or HR.
- A company hiring the first person in a function, such as a first finance or data role.
- A job post that names one of your competitors or describes the problem you solve.
- Three or more open roles in the team you sell to, as a hiring surge.
With your LinkedIn connected, good-fit leads with no recent reason get their company's job ads re-read once a week. Hiring counts in full only when the role matches your buyers' titles or the roles you told Bingle to watch, and the signals fade with age: a single hiring-manager signal fades faster than a hiring surge. Each lead shows the ad as its reason, with the date and a link, and the first message is written in your voice for your OK unless you switch review off. Messages go from your own LinkedIn inside each sequence's send window, which has its own hours, days and time zone, so a Perth list can run on Perth hours.
What it doesn't do: it doesn't read SEEK, so an ad posted only there won't reach you through Bingle. It has no email sequences, no contact database and no phone numbers. Plans start at US$49 a month after 7 days free; see pricing. Raises often come before the hiring; our guide to finding Australian startups that just raised funding covers those.
Questions
Can I use SEEK to find sales leads?
SEEK's terms, updated 20 July 2026, say its content must only be used for "personal, non-commercial purposes" and bar scraping and other automated collection. Read strictly, that covers prospecting from its ads, so ask SEEK before relying on it, and never scrape it.
How long does a job ad stay up on SEEK?
SEEK's employer pages say its Basic ad gives a 30-day listing. An ad still up after that has likely been reposted or upgraded, which suggests the role is hard to fill.
Does LinkedIn show who the hiring manager is?
When the post has a "Meet the Hiring Team" section, yes: LinkedIn says members can connect with and message everyone listed there, including the poster. Check their title, because the poster is sometimes a recruiter.
What job titles show a company is about to buy?
Firsts and clusters: a first Head of Sales, IT Manager, Financial Controller or Head of Data, or three or more roles in one team within a month. A single replacement hire tells you little.
Are AusTender contract notices public?
Yes. AusTender publishes notices for most Commonwealth contracts of A$10,000 or more including GST, with the supplier, value and contract period, and you can search them by supplier name, ABN or value range for free.
Sources
- SEEK, Website Terms and Conditions (last updated 20 Jul 2026). read 25 Oct 2026
- SEEK, robots.txt. read 25 Oct 2026
- SEEK, How to find your perfect role on SEEK. updated 9 Dec 2019; read 25 Oct 2026
- SEEK, How to make the most of your job search. updated 23 Jul 2026; read 25 Oct 2026
- SEEK, How to stay on top of your job search. updated 21 Jan 2020; read 25 Oct 2026
- SEEK, How to get the most out of your SEEK job ad. read 25 Oct 2026
- LinkedIn Help, Filter and sort job search results. read 25 Oct 2026
- LinkedIn Help, Job alerts on LinkedIn. read 25 Oct 2026
- LinkedIn Help, Find relevant jobs through social hiring and meeting the team. read 25 Oct 2026
- AusTender, Contract Notices. read 25 Oct 2026
- AusTender, OCDS data feed (one day of six queried, 18 to 23 Oct 2026). queried 25 Oct 2026
- NSW Government, Daylight saving. read 25 Oct 2026
More from the blog
- How to find Australian startups that just raised funding (and when to reach out)
- Is LinkedIn outreach legal in Australia? What the Spam Act and Privacy Act mean for your messages
- How to know when a customer or prospect changes jobs (with or without Sales Navigator)
- How to score LinkedIn leads by fit and intent (with a worked formula)
- How to turn event and webinar attendees into LinkedIn leads
- Gojiberry vs Valley: two signal-based LinkedIn tools compared
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