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Social Media in the Job Market

Social Media Enters Real World Job Seeking

September 14, 2009 by Emma Sorensen 

A recent post on the comScore blog by Andrew Lipsman, who is Director of Industry Analysis at comScore, discusses the value of social media in what is a very tight US job market.

One of the fastest gaining online categories in the US in the past year has been job search, which is up 33% vs. year ago to 23.1 million visitors in July, according to comScore.

Andrew argues that there is one online resource (not even included in the job search site category) that particularly stands out: linkedin.com, which currently has a US audience of around 8 million visitors, a 66% increase vs. year ago.

Andrew investigated how linkedin.com might be playing a role as a critical networking resource for those on the job hunt by comparing the share of visitors to LinkedIn who were heavy, medium and light visitors to the Job Search category to that of the US Internet population as a whole. “Heavy” is defined as top 20% of visitors by time spent, “medium” is next 30%, and “light” is the bottom 50%. He writes:

“As it turns out, LinkedIn showed a significantly higher percentage of its visitors from each of the three sub-segments of Job Search category visitors. In fact, 28.5% of its total audience was comprised of job-seekers, compared to just 11.8% of the total US Internet population. Perhaps even more compelling is that 8.2% of LinkedIn.com visitors were heavy visitors to the Job Search category, compared to just 2.4% of the total Internet audience. In fact, LinkedIn had at least twice as high a percentage of visitors from each HML sub-segment than those of the total Internet population.”

“These data indicate that LinkedIn is substantially more likely to be used by those actively job-hunting than by those who are not, which suggests that online job-seekers are actually turning to LinkedIn as a resource to help them network. If that’s the case, then it is a terrific illustration of how social media is changing the way we’re able to leverage of respective social networks to initiate positive action.”