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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Redundancy searches: employee and employer behaviour

June 26, 2008

Recently we’ve looked at how internet behaviour has adapted a number of ways to meet the challenges of an economic downturn, including consumer spending, inflation and house prices. However, until now we haven’t touched on the most worrying aspect: unemployment. In particular, I wanted to look at the fear of job losses, as manifested through internet searches for ‘redundancy’. As you can see from the chart below, these have increased significantly over the last few weeks.

Searches for similar terms, such as ‘unemployment benefits’ and ‘jobseekers allowance’ have also increased (albeit at a slower rate), but it is redundancy-related terms that are experiencing the highest volume. British Internet users searched for over 2,500 distinct search terms containing the word ‘redundancy’ over the last 12 weeks, and most of these were related to job losses - the only exception in the top 10 list was ‘cyclic redundancy check’, and that had a low success rate. As you can see from the table below, the most common redundancy concerns are money related, with words such as ‘payments’, ‘pay’, and ‘entitlement’ appearing frequently in the search term suggestions report for ‘redundancy’.

Following our post last week on the popularity of the term ‘mortgage calculator’, it’s perhaps not surprising to see ‘redundancy calculator’ so high on the list. The top site visited by people searching for the term is a government site for businesses, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), which received 44.2% of traffic; it was followed by My Business (11.1%), a small business advice site. On the other hand, the majority of people searching for the basic term ‘redundancy’ (54.6%) went to the more consumer / public / voter focussed government site, Directgov. Of the people searching for ‘redundancy payments’, 53.4% went to BERR and 20.9% to Directgov.

There are two conclusions that could be drawn from this data. Firstly, different terms are used by distinct groups of people with particular purposes. For example, it seems that most people searching for ‘redundancy’ are employees concerned about their job security. On the other hand, the majority of people searching for ‘redundancy calculator’ and ‘redundancy pay’ are employers wanting to understand the financial implications of laying people off. One potential caveat here: it is possible that BERR and My Business are receiving traffic from those terms because they are well optimized for them, rather than the only people searching for them are concerned workers. The top two union websites in the UK, Unite / Amicus and UNISON – which you might think would be natural destinations for such queries - both receive very little traffic from redundancy-related searches.

However, assuming that there is some truth behind my assumption, the second conclusion is a slightly depressing one. Not only are British people concerned about their jobs and consequently searching for information on redundancy, but employers are also searching too, presumably in order to understand more about redundancy procedure. Indeed, searches for a broader portfolio of the 100 most popular redundancy-related terms spiked after Christmas, but has increased further since. The post-Christmas spike is seasonal and happens every year, but usually searches steadily decline from January to December, not spike again in June.

Posted by Robin Goad at 07:00 AM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Demographics | Economy | Employment | Government | Search

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