The UK’s online recruitment market is dominated by London, according to new research into internet job searches.
The research, looking into industry data to classify and total 3,300 of the most popular keywords, showed that London was the most popular location in internet job searches. The phrase ‘London jobs’ accounted for 25% of all searches, with Bristol (6%), Manchester (5%), and Birmingham and Leeds (4%) following.
The report illustrates the importance of location-specific terms, especially when it claims that searches for ‘London jobs’ increased from 368,000 in December 2009 to 673,000 in March.
In response to location-specific keywords, Totaljobs succeeded in achieving 94% visibility for its site, followed by Reed with 74%. Totaljobs on the whole has been noted as the most visible advertiser.
The report also found that there were 14.2 million keyword recruitment-related searches performed in March this year, in contrast to 8.4 million in December 2009. This concurs with data from the Office for National Statistics which demonstrated that the first quarter of 2010 saw the UK’s employment rate down from 72.4% by 0.3%, which is the lowest rate since October 1996.
Job-specific terms, however, were the most searched for, covering 6.6 million of the searches in March (47% of the total volume). The phrase ‘jobs’ also covered 19% of the searches.
The report further showed that job hunters have an ongoing tendency to prefer specialist private sector funded sites to public sector ones. Administration jobs and human resourcing jobs received the greatest number of searches, and retail and sales jobs received a very high volume as well. “Driver job’, however, was the most job-specific search, followed by IT jobs, media jobs, graduate jobs and sales jobs.
As far as generic recruitment keywords go – since the report covered location-specific, job-specific and generic terms – Jobsite was at the top of the list with 65% visibility for those searches.
It was also noted from the research that out of the top 10 websites, seven were recruiters and job boards, while 2 were the multi-channelled websites, Gumtree and The Guardian.
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