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.