Online job search market statistics
Posted by Brett Pringle on 12 Feb 2009 at 12:00 am | Tagged as: Facts & Figures
In January Comscore released a report on the fastest growing online category for search within the US, Job Search. With the current global economy and large job losses, people are turning to the internet for possible new career opportunities. An increase of over 51% was seen compared to the previous year, with a total of 18.8 million visits to top jobsites within the US.
The demographic profile from the report reveals very interesting statistics which includes a decrease in men searching online, while job searches conducted by women have seen a remarkable increase compared to the December 2007 period by 7.2%. There are a number of possibilities for this increase, although a key reason could very well be the key role married women now play in the overall household income within the US, due to the current state of the economy.
While these statistics are based on the US market, this does not mean that the rest of the world does not see the same increase in online job searches. Comscore also released figures for the European market, where in 2007 over 54 million europeans visited a career website in an average month, covering the top performing job sites within the European market.
Hitwise also released a report on the online job search market in February 2008, highlighting the breakdown of online “job” searches within the period of January, reporting that “location“ based job searches held the highest percentage of the overall online job search breakdown. When comparing this to “career” based searches online, “employer“ based searches recieved the highest percentage of searches followed closely by occupation based career searches.
So what does all this data mean?
With the growing concerns over the global economy, and the current job and career search trends online continuing to increase, now allows companies the opportunity to cut down on traditional job/recruitment advertising costs by turning towards search. Increases in “employer” based searches for job related opportunities allows companies to use their current online brand to persue a more cost effective solution by advertising career opportunities through their own website (backed by a strong search marketing strategy to ensure coverage). Not only does natural search provide a more cost effective advertising solution, it also allows a reduced cost by creating a direct recruitment strategy online.
[...] market share and online job search statistics, i’ve covered that in a related post here Online Job Search Market Statistics. Feedback on these statistics is always [...]
These are interesting statistics.
I find it fascinating that the market and the industry as a whole is moving towards MORE results and MORE data in the form of search, particularly in a time when companies are being inundated with hundreds of resumes in this time of higher unemployment.
I am working with a start-up focused on executive jobs, http://www.StrictlyExecs.com, that takes the opposite approach — through matching technology, it reduces the flow of executive positions and candidates, only informing each side when a match exists. Additionally, it allows anonymous candidate profiling and messaging, something that is hard to accomplish with the typical search-and-apply job boards that currently dominate the space.