Career Sites Lure The Happily Employed As Well As Jobless

Job listings and career Web sites mainly attract people who are actively seeking work, right? Wrong. A recently released BURST! Media study of 10,535 Web users ages 18 and up found that 50.9 percent of people with jobs--64.4 percent of whom claim to be satisfied with their current position--visit career-focused Web sites.

"This is representative of what we've been seeing for years," affirmed Tony Lee, editor in chief and general manager of CareerJournal.com, The Wall Street Journal's executive career site. A recent survey of CareerJournal's audience revealed that 65 percent of visitors were employed, and 23 percent were actively job hunting.

Because the Internet has become host to an endless stream of job listings, industry-centric career information, advice, and salary calculators, people can readily learn about new job opportunities or compare their salaries with industry averages. And they do. Quipped Chuck Moran, manager of market research at BURST!: "The Internet kind of opened up Pandora's box."

The more settled in a worker is, the less frequently he visits a job site, according to the BURST! study. It found that 21.5 percent of employed study participants who have held their current job for less than one year visit a career-focused site at least once a week. Ten percent or less of employed respondents holding current positions for longer durations said the same. Of those who visited job sites, 22.2 percent of those who are employed check out a job site at least once a week, 31.1 percent do so at least once a month, 24.3 percent a couple times a year, and 22.4 percent once per year.

Of course, the jobless do visit career sites. Just over 53 percent of survey respondents said they were unemployed, and have visited such a site. Sixty-eight percent of dissatisfied workers taking part in the survey indicated that they have visited the job listings section of a career site.

The study did draw one perplexing statistic: of the survey respondents who visited a career site, more than 62 percent of those with jobs said they viewed the job postings section of such sites. However, just 48 percent of unemployed participants said the same. CareerJournal.com's Lee suggests that some of those who claim to be employed in such surveys may, in actuality, not be. "There's still a real stigma associated with being unemployed," he explains. And let's not forget that many people who do not hold full-time positions take consulting jobs, do freelance work--or as Vice President Dick Cheney recently noted--run small selling operations on eBay to pay the bills.

Employed study participants also use job sites for salary information more than their jobless counterparts--25.3 percent compared to 18.1 percent, respectively.

Despite the use of online job listings and career information, survey respondents still glean job information from newspapers. According to the study, 63 percent of employed participants read career or help wanted sections of a newspaper, and 60.9 percent of readers of those newspaper sections also visit career Web sites.

Lee attributes the continued reliance on print newspaper job sections to local appeal. "That local brand always will win out," he believes, in part because there is more likelihood that a greater number of jobs available in a particular area will be listed in a local paper than on a national job site. He also points to a reluctance among employers to post job ads outside of their region. Not only does it take a lot of time and effort to sift through the larger amount of resumes that result in a national Web site posting, companies often don't want to hire someone from outside their local area, since it could require moving expenses.

In the end, asserts Lee, the use of career or job listings sites is one of several things people do to find work. The best job-finding tool, he says, remains networking.

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