We know the way that people are searching for jobs is changing. We used to look in the newspaper; then we used online job sites such as Monster, Reed and the Guardian, and we are seeing now as a recruitment agency that people are coming to us from an ever more diverse variety of sources, in particular social networks.
We were keen to pin down exactly how recent graduates conduct their job hunt these days, and so many of you will have received our recent survey – which showed some interesting results!
Unsurprisingly, the most popular way to begin a job hunt is still through the traditional online job boards, with nearly 97% of people using them. Of the job boards, the most frequently searched were Total Jobs, Reed, the Guardian and Graduate Jobs, with over 60% of people searching on these sites. Google searches on keywords were the next most popular way of beginning a search.
However, what was more surprising was that nearly half of graduates have used LinkedIn to search for a job, and nearly a third have used Twitter. This demonstrates the changing way that we are searching for jobs, using our existing networks to help us both proactively search for work and also allowing contact from potential employers by having our personal information in the public domain.
Well over half of our respondents used Twitter to follow recruiters or brands that they’d like to work for, but under 1/3 used Facebook for the same purpose, suggesting that Facebook is very much a personal network, while Twitter usage is more varied.
Feedback from LinkedIn is that graduate usage is generally quite low, but our survey suggests otherwise with more than half of our respondents not only having an account, but actively using it to follow and engage with companies.
We will conduct the same survey in a year's time - it will be interesting to see what trends we start to see!
