January 24, 2008

UK job searches and Linkedin

I wanted to expand on Sandra’s excellent post comparing job searches in the UK, USA and Australia. The table below lists the top UK searches containing the word ‘jobs’ for the 4 weeks ending 12 January 2008 for three types of job search: searches by employer, and searches based on location, both within the UK and overseas.

The employer column doesn’t contain a huge amount of surprises: the top two organizations are the UK’s largest public sector (NHS) and private sector (Tesco) employers. The NHS dominates the list, with 4 of the top 10 search terms. Asda is the next biggest private sector employer, followed by Sky at number 10. Otherwise, most of the searches are for organizations that offer a certain amount of security and/or kudos: the Royal Mail, the BBC, the civil service and, falling just outside of the top 10, ‘national trust jobs’ and ‘government jobs’.

The list of domestic locations is more surprising, with a focus on regional jobs – possibly because people feel less of a need to search for jobs in bigger cities such as London, Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester. The generic terms ‘jobs abroad’ is the most popular overseas term, with the rest of list consisting of popular expat locations. Australia is number one, followed by boom-town Dubai. It’s interesting to see that Canada ranks above the USA, although this is partly due to the different spellings for the country (‘usa’, ‘us’, ‘america’, etc.) and also the number of people searching for specific locations, such as California and New York.

Whilst we’re on the topic of job hunting, I’ve heard a few stories recently about people who have found employment via Linkedin, the social network / job site. Looking at the chart below, I should probably expect to hear a few more stories of this kind: the site has quadrupled its market share of internet visits over the last year, and has recently opened an office in London.

Like all social networks, Linkedin sends members and invitees a lot of notification emails, so it’s not surprising to see that, for the week ending 19 January, 12.85% of its upstream traffic came from our Computers and Internet – Email Services category. Of the webmail services, Gmail sent the most traffic (4.45%, ranked 3rd overall), followed by Windows Live Mail / Hotmail (4.29%, 4th), and Yahoo! UK and Ireland Mail 1.76%, 6th). Social networks are also important – more about them here – and, of course, search. Together, as the table below illustrates, these three categories account for over 60% of the site’s upstream traffic.

The table below contains the top 20 search terms sending traffic to Linkedin for the 4 weeks ending 19 January 2008, and its interesting see that only a small amount of its traffic comes from branded search. There are a lot of niche terms sending traffic to the site, and the majority of these are peoples’ names. People are obviously searching for individuals and coming up with their LinkedIn profile. Consequently, LinkedIn’s search traffic consists primarily of a long tail of peoples’ names.

Posted by Robin Goad at 04:04 PM
Posted to Email | Employment | Search | Social networks

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Posted by: Jason McClurg at January 25, 2008 02:13 AM

Posted by: Graham Crisford at January 25, 2008 04:31 PM

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