The Online career seeker - ignore at your business peril

People are big business. IDC, a global market intelligence and advisory firm, forecasts that the online recruitment industry alone will be worth $13 billion by 2005. South African companies, depending on size, spend anything from thousands to millions of Rands each year recruiting new employees. But what exactly do we understand of this ever-changing market?

ìThe impact of the career seeker should not be underestimated,î says Kris Jarzebowski, MD of online recruitment service CareerJunction. ìUnderstanding the career mover market can improve a companyís recruitment policy and motivate internal changes with respect to retention strategies. Recruitment agencies, which make their daily bread through this market, have a clearer profile but do they truly understand this market?î

Nielsen/NetRatingís Red Sheriff, a marketing intelligence company, conducted an external report during April 2004 profiling the CareerJunction career seeker. CareerJunction is an online recruitment service that allows career seekers to place their resumes ñ at no cost ñ in what is essentially an online database. This database is then made available to recruitment agencies at a fee, with Web technologies allowing for directed and specific searches. Confidentiality is a high priority and the resume database is not openly available. At present, CareerJunction has a monthly average of over 114 000 unique users and over 12 000 job ads placed online. (The statistics that follow were drawn from a sample pool of 2 402 respondents.)

Gender, age group, education and professional level
Career seekers are 52.7% male and 47.3 % female, corresponding with the Labour Departmentís Employment Equity report that indicated women comprise approximately half of the total workforce.

Statistics around the age group are in clear opposition to the perception that the Web is the domain of the teen or young career seeker. The majority of respondents fell into the 25-29 age group (29.1%). This was followed by the 30-34 age group (20.2%), the 18-24 age group (18.9%), the 35-39 age group (13.2%) and the 40-44 group (8.4%).

The level of education corroborates the above statistics in that the majority of the respondents have a tertiary education (87.9%), with 24.5% holding a post-graduate degree. In terms of occupation, the highest percentage (28.3%) fell into the professional category, followed by the administrative category (19.9%) and then managerial or executive (15.4%).

Living style and work life
The highest percentage (15%) had a total combined household income (before tax) of R400 000 or more, with this being followed by 11% of the respondents saying it is between R50 000-R100 000. This indicates that online career seekers represent a wide spread of income earners.

Respondents that worked full time comprised the majority at 84%, with only 10.1% not currently working. This clearly indicates a market that moves from job to job rather than one that only moves jobs once unemployed.

The highest percentage (25.9%) of respondents worked in a company of between 500-9 999 people. This was followed by people who worked in companies with between 100-499 employees (16.6%), those that worked in companies with 20-99 employees (15.1%), and those that worked in companies with 10 000 employees (11.5%). Respondents appear to be working in the larger companies, pointing to the stability of these organisations. In general, large organisations are not considered fly by night.

Online behaviour
Online users are currently accessing the Internet primarily from work (66%), with only 22% accessing from home. This correlates with the fact that only 21.6% have access to the Internet from home.

CareerJunction conducted a study of their career seekers on www.careerjunction.co.za over the month of April 2004 through an online poll. Different numbers of people replied to the variety of questions, ranging from 416 to 618 respondents. These results were used as a sample and extrapolated to the greater CareerJunction career seeker population.

Sixteen percent of CareerJunction career seekers only use online job sites to look for jobs, while 30% will go directly to a recruitment agency. The remaining 54% look for jobs in newspapers, or have found jobs through word of mouth or go directly to company websites.

Thirty-eight percent of career seekers visit online jobs sites on a daily basis and at least 30% return to job sites after two to three days. Job sites are chosen dependent on ease of use and the best selection of jobs.

The profile to watch
Online recruitment is a fast-growing industry utilised by a widespread of career seekers. This market is large, both geographically and in terms of earning power and level of qualification. According to a press release earlier this week, Ananzi MD Mark Buwalda said the number of search requests for jobs was exponentially higher than people looking for sex over the past year and is the most searched word on Ananzi, one of SA’s largest internet search engines. This corroborates with a recent media release on global trends in online recruitment which confirmed that 45% of career seekers use the Internet as their preferred method of looking for a job. So the next time you imagine a pimply youth clicking away at a computer late at night, it may be at your companyís peril.

Please note that a complete report on Global Trends in Online Recruitment can be obtained from CareerJunction at gillian@careerjunction.co.za