Online Job Seekers Spread Their Net Wider

The number of job seekers in Hong Kong using the Internet to seek employment has jumped 13.1% over the past 12 months, according to latest information from Nielsen//NetRating.

"The online search for a new job continues apace in Hong Kong, where the jobless rate remains at a high of more than 7% said Peter Steyn the company's sales and marketing director for Hong Kong.

A total of 308,800 surfers visited online job search sites in February 2003, compared with 267, 700 a year ago - an increase of 15.4% in the audience to those sites. This compares to a year-on-year increase in the total number of active Internet users in February of only 6.4%.

"This 15% year-on-year growth to the online job search sites did not come solely from new users coming online, but rather existing online users heading increasingly to job search sites in their quest for their next career move", added Steyn.

While Hong Kong's Internet users are still slightly more skewed towards men (54.5%), women are taking the lead in the online job search stakes. Over half (53%) of online job searchers are women, up from 47% a year ago and suggesting that they have perhaps been hardest hit by the local downturn.

The top ranking online job search sites in February 2003 were jobs.gov.hk, jobsdb.com with South China Morning Post's classfiedpost.com coming in third. In fact, JobsDB.com, Asia Pacific's largest interactive recruitment network, despite a slowdown in the hiring market over the past six months, is still providing 40,000 jobs to its job seeker members and visitors across the region.

Job seekers increasingly turn to the Net, says poll

Alex Lo

Increasing numbers of job seekers are using the Internet to look for work as the unemployment rate remains above 7 per cent, a survey has found.

About 308,000 people visited five of Hong Kong's most popular job search sites last month, up 14 per cent on February last year. The official jobless rate is 7.2 per cent.

Peter Steyn, sales and marketing director of Nielsen/NetRatings, a company that specialises in research and carried out the survey, said: 'This growth to the online job search sites did not come solely from new users coming online, but rather existing users heading increasingly to the sites in their quest for their next career move.

'The Web sites are more convenient because you can visit them at home, so more people prefer them over newspapers.'

The survey counted the number of visitors so that even if a person hit a Web page several times in February, he or she would be counted just once.

The survey's top site is the government's jobs.gov.hk, which was visited by 114,800 job seekers, followed by jobsdb.com (92,800 visitors), the South China Morning Post's classifiedpost.com (72,500), jump.mingpao.com (66,200) and pandacareer.com (56,700).

Mr Steyn said the online sites covered jobs in the middle- and lower-salary range, while the more traditional headhunters catered to the top jobs.

A spokesman for the Labour Department, which maintains jobs.gov.hk, said it had a daily average of over 800,000 hits.