June 19, 2008

Employment markets and predictability - Hong Kong visits a sure thing

One of our favourite topics on the blog is predictability – indeed I'm working my way through an essay Bill mentioned on this topic, The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. While Black Swan covers themes such as outlier events and uncertainty, it's been interesting to contrast those ideas with seasonal patterns we observe online at Hitwise that make the art of prediction sometimes possible.

So it was good timing when my colleague, Rebecca Hannon passed this chart on to me showcasing the regularity in visits to Employment websites by Hong Kong Internet users. While many of the markets we track at Hitwise also indicate seasonal trends in the Employment industry, Hong Kong is noteworthy because the variance in market share between peak months each year is particularly small (0.07% difference between June 05 and May 07).

The regularity of this chart is in fact quite remarkable. I double-checked against other industries that we know to be seasonal in nature, such as Education – Institutions, Shopping & Classifieds and Travel, to see if there were similar effects. While seasonal peaks and troughs in other industries were visible, the Employment category in Hong Kong stood out for its stability of market share of visits over time.

Assuming that the seasonality of Employment visits was probably linked to school holidays, I delved into our Clickstream data to look to see if traffic drivers to the Employment category could provide more context on this trend:

You'll see that there's now more complexity evident in our clickstream data than the original chart. While there's been an overall decline in referrals from industries such as Government and Education, it appears to have been offset by increased comparison research between Employment websites. But this still doesn't really say why the Employment category is so stable.

I'm afraid I don't know enough about the Hong Kong labour market to make strong inferences with our data. The regularity of visits to Employment websites could indicate a stable labour economy; in contrast the increase in Employment comparison traffic suggests greater competition in placing job hunters. But those are just guesses. What's your opinion?

Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 10:16 AM
Posted to Employment and Training

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Comments

Posted by: Simon Wong at June 21, 2008 06:30 AM

Posted by: Sandra Hanchard at June 23, 2008 10:10 AM

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