A Profile of Online Job Candidates
It’s not just the unemployed who are using job resources on the Internet. Internet use for job searches is particularly important to minority job seekers, job seekers aged 18-29, and college graduates.

Corinne Marasco

In a previous article, ChemHR asked the question of who really is an applicant when recruiting online. This article is a follow-up look at the demographics of those applicants—male, female, Baby Boomer, GenXer, employed and unemployed.

Results from a Pew Internet Project survey of 2,259 Internet users last spring drew a portrait of those more likely to end up in the online candidate pool:

• Fifty-two million people looked online for job information, more than 4 million per day—a 33% increase in the daily number of online job seekers from the previous year.
  
  
• Sixty-one percent of Internet users aged 18-29 looked for jobs online, compared to 42% of those aged 30-49, and 27% of those aged 50-64.
  
  
• On a typical day, twice as many men are job hunting online as women.
  
  
• About 51% of those who did not have jobs at the time had Internet access. On a typical day, a tenth of the unemployed with Internet access were looking for jobs online, compared to just 4% of people with full-time jobs.
  
  
• While 44% of whites conducted online job searches, nearly 60% of African-Americans and Hispanics with Internet access sought job information online.
  
  
• Some 55% of those with Internet access who held media sales jobs at the time of the survey looked for new job information online, compared to 44% of the online executives and professionals, and 49% of the wired clerical and office workers. Pew found that on a typical day, however, the most active job searchers are online office workers. September 2002 data from Nielsen//NetRatings also found that online usage at work jumped 17 percent from 2001, an increase driven by female office workers.
  
  
• High socioeconomic status was correlated with online job searching. Those who lived in households with incomes over $75,000 were more likely to have conducted online job searches. Those with college or graduate degrees were more likely to have explored job classifieds online than those with high school diplomas.

Pew’s figures suggest that it’s more than the unemployed who are using the Internet for job-related searches. With a national unemployment rate hovering around 6% and unemployment among chemists (as measured by the American Chemical Society) at 3.3%, workers are using the Internet to keep on top of new employment opportunities as well as distribute their resumes.

Comparing Pew’s findings with companies that hire chemists proved to be a bit challenging. Some of the smaller companies contacted for this article don’t use applicant-tracking systems (ATS) so the responses are skewed toward the larger companies that do have them. Even so, responses to questions about how their applicant pools compare to Pew’s findings tended to be more general than specific.

Applicant tracking systems help recruiters evaluate and manage the hundreds of resumes for jobs at various stages in the selection process. There is a vast array of these products on the market—RecruitSoft, Kenexa, WebHire, Peopleclick, SmartSearch Online, and Alexus, to name just a few. One of the biggest benefits of an ATS is in tracking metrics for critical reports such as EEO reporting for US companies.

The trend for large companies is to advertise their openings on third party sites like Monster.com, but to guide applicants to the corporate site to complete a profile or an application. This process centralizes the collection of applicant demographics and keeps the traffic limited to people who are either interested in a specific company or in the chemical industry.

“The only way to apply for a job at Procter and Gamble is online at the corporate Web site,” according to Ron Webb, manager of doctoral recruiting and university relations for Procter & Gamble. Joanne Terefinko, Americas Staffing Manager with Agilent Technologies, says that applicants are pushed from third-party sites to Agilent’s Web site to apply for jobs. Agilent and P&G use the same system, Recruitsoft, to manage their online application processes.

The system uses a candidate profiler that asks applicants a short series of questions about their experience, skills, and interests. The questions are pretty standard, ranging from education and legal status to questions tailored specifically to a specific position. This profile can be saved and used each time an applicant applies for a job.

Terefinko says the system asks people to self-identify regarding their sex, race, and ethnicity but this is not part of the data that recruiters see.

Webb confirms that P&G’s applicants mirror the Pew results. In a way, says Webb, you get what you shop for: who applies depends on the jobs being filled. “P&G’s philosophy is to promote from within so the jobs advertised online are entry-level. These candidates tend to be younger, reflecting their status as freshly-minted PhDs or postdoctoral fellows who are looking for that first job.”

Webb estimates that 50% of P&G’s online applicants for their doctoral positions in R&D are foreign-born, a higher representation than might be found on many campus programs granting PhD degrees in chemistry, life science, or engineering. He attributes this is to their desire to stay in the U.S. so they make a more concerted effort to be considered for jobs. In comparison, Terefinko says that Agilent attracts a wide range of applicants, which reflects the range of jobs on its site, from intern to senior positions.

Another Pew survey, conducted in January 2002, found that 8 million Americans who changed jobs in the past two years said their use of the Internet played a crucial or important role in helping them through that transition.

The numbers reported above also suggest that online advertising has generated a strong return on investment for recruiters. According to the 2002 Recruiter Budget/Cost Survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and Recruitment Marketplace, on average online advertising represents just over one-third of recruitment advertising budgets and generated approximately one-quarter of the applications. Respondents reported the highest levels of satisfaction with online advertising: 42% reported being very satisfied.

Online recruiting was a close second to newspaper advertising in terms of generating a high volume of applicants. Next to referrals, online advertising was also reported to generate the highest quality of applicants. According to 36% of respondents, online advertising offers the best return on the organization's investment.

P&G has been running Internet ads for as long as they've been available. In the last 4-5 years P&G has transitioned to a paperless, electronic online application system. Applicants are now asked to indicate how they learned about a particular job, which includes the option of Internet ads. "On the issue of our success, I would say the data speak for themselves," says Webb. "About half of all applicants indicate they found our job descriptions on Internet job boards. Because of this we actively search the Internet to identify the best sites for posting, depending upon the kind of job skills we are looking for. This will continue to be a mainstay of our recruiting strategy for the foreseeable future."

Corinne Marasco is Special Features Editor for Chemical & Engineering News, the newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, specializing in career and employment topics.