One in six people changing jobs do so through the internet

This month’s newsletter looks at what else we can learn about the success of online recruitment by looking at NORAS and other pieces of research in order to build an overall picture of how many people are successfully getting new jobs through the internet. To do this requires a few leaps of faith and some mixing of methodologies from different research projects, this means that this isn’t really textbook in research terms, but nonetheless is an interesting exercise.

NORAS is a piece of research that enables recruiters to differentiate between sites and obtain a better and more focused response from online recruitment advertising. However it also provides information about online recruitment in a wider context. NORAS shows that 71% of online job seekers have applied for a job that they discovered online. It also shows that of this 71%, 29% have actually obtained a job as a result of applying for a job found online.

To discover how many people this represents we have to bring in other pieces of research. BMRB’s monthly Internet Monitor showed that in November 2002 there were 20,350,000 internet users and that 7,530,000 internet users had used the net to look for jobs in the last six months. If we define the number of online job seekers to equal the number of people who have used the internet to look for jobs in the last six months we can then combine this with the figures generated by NORAS to find out how many people have got jobs through online recruitment.

This calculation shows us that 5,350,000 people have applied for jobs found online and that 1,550,000 have actually obtained a new job through the internet (71% of 7,530,000 and then 29% of 5,350,000). This sounds like a big number, but we need to do some more work to put this in context. The Office of National Statistics (www.statistics.gov.uk) tells us that there are 28.7 million people in employment and approximately 5 million people, or 17% of the workforce, change jobs each year.

The questions in NORAS relating to applying for or obtaining jobs discovered online only ask users if they have ever applied for or obtained a job online, unlike the BMRB internet monitor, they do not place any time restrictions on this activity. Because of this we have to turn to an older piece of research in order to try to establish how many people obtain new jobs through online recruitment every year.

Workthing’s Online Recruitment & Employment Survey (ORES), conducted in the spring of 2001, showed that in April 2001 there were 6.3 million online job seekers and that 400,000 users had obtained a new job through the internet.

This means that in approximately the last 18 months 1,150,000 more people have obtained a job through the internet (1,550,000 – 400,000). This equates to approximately 65,000 people a month or 780,000 in the last 12 months (1,550,000 / 18 and 65,000 x 12).