PLEASE VISIT OUR SPONSORS

---

Industry News

 

Job Seekers Increasingly Use New Web Search Tools

Tuesday December 2, 2008

 

Minneapolis — Dec. 2
Jobs2Web Inc., a Web 2.0 interactive recruiting solutions provider, announced the results of its October “Job Search Statistics Report.” The “Jobs2Web Job Search Statistics Report” examines job-related Web search traffic, as well as when job candidates look for new jobs.

The report draws its findings from Google's keyword search tool, as well as Jobs2Web's client network, which consists of more than 60 major companies that reported close to 500,000 career site visitors during October.

According to Google, the search term "jobs" ranked sixth in the top 10 search terms, above cars, games and porn. On average, more than 151 million searches were conducted on this search term during October, up from 124 million per month average on the major search engine.

Jobs2Web identified that most job-related searches are performed in the middle of the workday — 1 p.m. CT was the peak time of day for visitors — which means many people perform job searches around the lunch hour with search activity remaining strong through the workday and into the evening hours. Wednesday is the peak traffic day for job-related searches; however, search activity starts strong on Mondays and is sustained throughout the workweek, with a slight drop on Fridays.

Consistent with the size of the respective state, in October, the top states in which job searches were performed were New York (more than 1 million job searches), California and Texas (more than 673,000 job searches in October). Other top state searches included Georgia, Ohio and Michigan, where job searches on Google increased more than 20 percent during October.

Top job categories that saw dramatic increases in searches during October included clerical jobs, with an 83 percent increase, followed by customer-service jobs, executive jobs, attorney jobs and technology jobs, all with 50 percent increases over an average month’s traffic.

Doug Berg, Jobs2Web's chief innovation officer, commented, "According to Google's keyword search tool, searching for job-related content is one of the top 10 things people do on Google. Our findings are consistent with trends being driven by the current economic conditions."

He continued, "Ironically, despite massive increase in job-seeker activity on the major search engines, candidates rarely find employers’ jobs directly on Google and similar search engines because career sites and jobs aren't optimized and are therefore hidden from the search engines and job seekers, who only see paid job-board listings online. As a result, nearly 80 percent of all jobs are hidden from the average job seeker.

"Beyond the massive increase in search-engine use, today's candidates are also utilizing social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, along with other Web 2.0 methods to find jobs and career information. That's why companies are turning to Jobs2Web to enhance their online recruiting strategies, which results in decreased recruiting costs and improved talent pipelines, which helps them to utilize these new interactive technologies as a key part of their recruiting strategy," said Berg.
For more info: http://www.jobs2web.com