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What Candidates Leverage for Their Job Search

It’s unanimous: LinkedIn and Indeed are globally the most leveraged social media and career services sites by candidates during their job search.

This according to the latest Talent Board Candidate Experience Benchmark Research. While there are other regional sites candidates leverage in North America, EMEA and APAC, straight internet searches on Google and other search engines complete the top three, with the exception of North America. That’s where Glassdoor edges out the internet (see Figure 1). Nearly 70,000 North American candidates, 10,000 EMEA candidates and 8,000 APAC candidates responded to this specific question.

A special thank you to industry analyst George LaRocque at #HRWins for sharing his Everything Starts with Google, Except Online Job Search research that we wanted to underscore with our CandE data.

Figure 1. Which Social Media and Career Services Sites Candidates Leverage in North America for Their Job Search

This question is actually asked towards the end of the survey and is intended for the candidates to reflect on their overall job search and the various sites they use. In contrast, early in the survey we ask the candidates what resources they used when researching their specific career opportunity with a specific employer, which will include choices like career site, referrals and others (see the Attract section of the full report).

For example, while Glassdoor is leveraged in job search by over 40 percent of candidates in North America, as a researching in researching specific career opportunities, then percentage drops to 22 percent (and the answer includes more than one review site – Glassdoor, Vault, Great Rated!, etc.). In EMEA, it goes from 22 percent to 12 percent, and in APAC, from 27 percent to 19 percent.

Back to what candidates leverage in their job search, internet searches round out the top 3 in EMEA and APAC, and it’s in the top 4 for North America.

Facebook fares better in EMEA and APAC than Monster or CareerBuilder in the job search (see Figures 2 and 3).

Figure 2. Which Social Media and Career Services Sites Candidates Leverage in EMEA for Their Job Search

Figure 3. Which Social Media and Career Services Sites Candidates Leverage in APAC for Their Job Search

Beyond these, there are a myriad of other niche social sites that candidates leverage for the job searching. Surprisingly, Twitter is used twice as much in EMEA than North America, and nearly twice as much in APAC than North America, and Instagram is utilized similarly around the world (around 3 percent).

Also surprising is the fact that YouTube was touted as a social site leveraged in job search by over 6 percent of candidates in EMEA and APAC, while closer to 4 percent in North America. Besides finding and viewing job-related videos directly on career sites, microsites or as video job descriptions elsewhere online, candidates are finding them in YouTube and viewing them. This most likely will increase dramatically in years to come as video continues to be the preferred medium to consume content.

The 2018 North American Talent Board Candidate Experience Awards Benchmark Research Report is launching this week!

Yes, it’s a super-long name for a super-informative report, so register for it today: bit.ly/2018TBCandEResearch

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