1st Steps In The Hunt: Daily News For Job Hunters and Recruiters

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1st Steps In The Hunt: A Free Online Daily for Online Job Hunters

PEW

July 30, 2002

From the Pew Memorial Trust:

"Fifty-two million Americans have looked online for information about jobs, and more than 4 million do so on a typical day.

Overall, these figures represent a more than 60% jump in the number of online job hunters from March 2000 when we first asked about the subject. We found then that 32 million had used the Internet to check out jobs. Moreover, there has been about a 33% hike in the daily traffic related to job searching. On a typical day in March 2000, about 3 million Internet users were searching for job information.

These current figures come from a Pew Internet Project survey of 2,259 Internet users that was conducted from March 1 through May 19, 2002. The margin of error is plus or minus two percentage points.

Among those who are the most likely to do online searches for jobs:

Young Internet users between the ages of 18 and 29. Some 61% of them have looked for jobs online, compared to 42% of those ages 30-49 and 27% of those ages 50-64.
Men. Some 50% of online men had sought job information, compared to 44% of online women. On a typical day, twice as many online men are job hunting as women.
The unemployed. About 51% of those who do not currently have jobs have Internet access. On a typical day, a tenth of the unemployed with Internet access are online scouring job sites, compared to 4% of the wired Americans who have fulltime jobs.
African-Americans and Hispanics. While 44% of whites have done online job seeking, close to 60% of African-Americans with Internet access and online Hispanics have sought job information on the Internet.
Those in sales-related jobs. Some 55% of those with Internet access who currently hold media sales jobs have looked for new job information online, compared to 44% of the online executives and professionals, and 49% of the wired clerical and office workers. However, on a typical day online the most active job searchers are online office workers. Skilled laborers and service workers are the least likely to have done job hunting online.
Those in higher income brackets and with high education levels. High socioeconomic status is correlated with online job searching. Those who live in households with incomes over $75,000 are more likely than others with lesser incomes to have done job searches online and those with college or graduate degrees are more likely than those with high school diplomas to have explored the job classifieds online.

The findings clearly reflects two broad trends: First, Internet use is growing, especially for important types of information searches. Second, there has been turmoil and tightening of the job market. As of May 2002, the U.S. Department of Labor reported the current unemployment rate at 5.8%, or 8.4 million people. Since October 2000, 2.8 million more people have become unemployed.

It is not surprising, then, to see that nearly half of all Internet users have looked for information about a job online. Some 47% of all the adult Internet users in the United States have gone online looking for job information.

-John Sumser