Management across Cultures

With an initial dream to be “the destination of choice for Australian job seekers”, SEEK was founded in Melbourne, Australia in 1997 by brothers Paul and Andrew Bassat, together with co-founder Matthew Rockman. At the beginning, the entire business had a very simple purpose: “taking employment classified advertising online and away from the city's newspapers”. Since then, SEEK has established itself as one of Australia's fastest growing businesses, and one of the iconic start-up companies in Australia.

Today, SEEK Limited, as an ASX/S&P 200 indexed company (an index of the leading 200 listed companies in Australia), is a leading service provider in the online employment and training market in Australia and New Zealand. SEEK is best known by its leading job searching engine, seek.com, which has over 150,000 jobs online and is visited 14.7 million times each month. SEEK has expanded its global businesses by its rapid internationalisation process in the last 17 years. By observing the trajectory of this process, it is evident that the company has a clear strategy to focus on emerging markets. To date, SEEK has acquired interests in five online employment websites that operate in countries across South-East Asia, China, Brazil, and Mexico, with exposure to over 2 billion people and approximately 20 per cent of the global gross domestic product (GDP). Overall, SEEK has received over 375 million visits to its global products every month and has over 3 million job opportunities available at any given time and over 100 million jobseeker profiles.

Similar to many multinational enterprises (MNEs) in their early stage of international expansion, SEEK also experienced management crisis together with a mismatch between its rapid internationalisation and cross-culture management incompetence. Although in its organisational culture statement SEEK claims that it aims to promote a culture of excellence and acceptance in the workplace and celebrate the diversity of employees who contribute to the success of the organisation, the statement does not accord well with the story of how it managed its Chinese subsidiary.

In October 2006, SEEK acquired an initial 24 per cent interest in one of the three leading online employment sites in China, Zhaopin Ltd (Zhaopin, hereafter), whose website received a larger number of unique visitors each month than the number of people living in Australia. The Zhaopin investment represented SEEK's first investment in an online employment site outside Australia and New Zealand.