As promised the other day I've had a dig around the NORAS data and looked at why the results show that less people have applied for a job they found online in 2009 than in 2008.
For NORAS 2008 we asked a series of three questions about applying for a job online - 'have you ever applied for a job', 'if you have applied did you get an interview' and 'if you got an interview did you actually get the job' with respondents answered 'yes' or 'no' to each question. This showed in 2008 that 76% of online job seekers had applied for a job found online.
For NORAS 2009 (in order to accommodate other additional questions) we combined these three separate questions into a single question and asked 'which of the following have you ever done (tick all that apply) - 'applied for a job', 'obtained an interview', 'obtained a job' or 'none of the above'. This showed that in 2009 68% of online job seekers had applied for a job found online.
19 job boards participated in both NORAS 2008 and 2009, so the best way to track any changes in the results between the two years is to just look at these sites. Some interesting results; only two of the 19 sites showed a year on year increase in the percentage of their users who said they had ever applied for a job online, while the other 17 showed a year on year decrease - 10 sites decreased year by less than 10% and 7 decreased year on year by more than 10% (with two sites showing a decrease of 17% year on year). This seems fairly significant.
We've talked it through in the office and have two possible explanations:
1) Changing the way we asked the question has affected the result, this is certainly possible, but it's a reasonably straight forward change.
2) The economic downturn has introduced job seekers to the online market (through redundancy etc) that have never had to apply for a job online before - the fieldwork for NORAS 2009 took place from September - December in 2008, so the effects of the downturn were certainly being keenly felt right through the data collection - maybe this is evidence of how the recession is impacting on job boards? It's a certainly a candidate rich market and maybe a lot of these candidates are relatively inexperienced online job seekers?
Comments