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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific
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Job Searches by Brand, Location, Occupation
January 21, 2008
January and February are usually busy months in Australia each year for visits to the online Employment industry as users formulate New Year's resolutions and ruminate on career or lifestyle changes. Visits last year peaked during week ending 3 February 2007 with 0.85% share, and the prior year during week ending 14 January 2006 with 1% share.
I thought I'd take a look at how users are researching job opportunities, with a breakdown of the top 200 search variations on 'jobs' by type and market:
• Location, occupation and employer are typically associated with searches for 'jobs' in each market, with brand searches (e.g. recruitment agencies) relatively low.
• Australia had the highest percentage of jobs searches related to employers; several terms indicated an interest in state government employment.
• UK had the highest percentage of searches related to location and brand. There were a number of searches for jobs in places outside of London, such as Kent and Cornwall; 's1 jobs', a Scottish agency, was the leading branded search.
• US had the highest percentage of generic searches with several queries related to working from home.
Delving into Australian searches gives an indication of which brands are performing strongly and searches that should be prioritised in SEO and PPC campaigns:
* The leading brand variation was on 'jobs' was 'seek jobs'. Seek Australia indeed received the highest portion of search traffic on the term 'jobs' accounting for 35.5% of traffic.
* Leading domestic destinations for employment included 'perth jobs' and 'sunshine coast jobs', while 'uk jobs' and 'dubai jobs' were popular offshore locations. International variations comprised 14% of jobs searches, on par with the UK, but ahead of US searches with 2%.
* 'mining jobs' was the second most popular occupation variation, highlighting that job seekers are still seeking to benefit from the mining boom.
One caveat about this analysis is that searches for 'jobs' could be from users of a certain socio-economic status. Search variations on 'careers' for example bring up a number of professional employers; but are not, due to semantics, typically associated with geographical locations. Let me know if you think there are any other employment search terms worth investigating.
Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 09:52 AM
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Comments
I've always wondered how searches for specific jobs trended and if there was any success in building SEO/SEM campaigns around specific positions that were open. Think VP/Director/C-level.
The cost to recruit such a person must be a great cost and Paid Seach campaigns, in my opinion, may be effective.
Off topic.. but I'd like to know if you have any insight.
Posted by Waldo | January 23, 2008 03:47 PM
Hi Crystal,
Thanks for your comments. A quick scan through government jobs searches does indeed show a number of NSW related queries. Also, searches for 'australian government jobs' rank lower than state government searches. Here's the top 10:
nsw government jobs
queensland government jobs
jobs.wa.gov.au
www.jobs.qld.gov.au
www.jobs.nsw.gov.au
government jobs nsw
qld government jobs
nsw gov jobs
wa government jobs
australian government jobs
Posted by Sandra Hanchard | January 24, 2008 02:29 PM
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I was interested to read that state government jobs were near the top of the list, but think there's two factors that haven't been mentioned that might have influenced this:
First: with Workchoices still in force, state government agencies are one of the few areas where award jobs are still (mostly) available, along with better worker protections. I'd imagine that might make them a more desirable employment option.
Second: a number of agencies in NSW, at least, have been going through round after round of job cuts over the past few years as state budgets got ever tighter, creating an ever expanding pool of employees pending redeployment. Although I'm not sure of exact numbers, all of these would be searching for state govt jobs in order to retain their long service, holiday and other entitlements.
It would be interesting to compare the rates of state government job searches from state to state, to see if states under federal arrangements got less searches than the others.
Crystal
Posted by Crystal Woods | January 21, 2008 01:18 PM