Time&Money spent on (job) searching

Fact: According to the Internet Index Activity published by OPA and Nielsen/Netratings, 50.9% of internet users’ time is spent on content (any sites or applications that provide news, information and entertainment); 30.4% is spent on communications (such as email, IM and forums); 14.1% is on commerce (shopping websites) and 4.6% is on searching (getting to all of the above).

Fact: Netratings.com offers their data from September2007, where in the UK, each of the rough 35 million internet users spend 45 hours on the internet per month (29 from home and the remaining 16 from work).

Fact: The average hourly pay gross, according to statistics.gov.uk is £13,37 for 2007.

Conclusion: Employees spend £344 million per month searching for content.

How much of that expense can be related to inefficient use of the searching tools or irrelevant content filtering?.

We can take the job searching activity as an example, our area of expertise and definitely part of the £344 million we calculated before. Long working hours, lack of discretion and spare time are the reasons why many jobseekers use company resources to find their next job (not only internet access to perform online search, but also faxing resumes, telephone interviews, etc). We don't know how important that activity is with respect to the total amount calculated before, information that is suitable to be inaccurate since most employees will not confirm they do it, but we can calculate the cost per jobsearch.

It takes an average of 15 minutes to fill in the required information to create a profile in a standard jobboard. Most of this jobboards do not allow any user to apply without having set up a profile, even though they are also requested to attach a copy of their CV to the application (double entry of information). According to NORAS report, a jobseeker visits 5,3 job boards on average when looking for a job. Each jobboard, of course requires its own profile to apply to their jobs, so it adds up to 80 minutes just to set up the profiles. We now need to add the time spent in the job search and the content reading to determine if the search results are suitable. This extra time has to deal with the opposite interests between a jobboard (advertising, sponsored jobs, featured companies, etc) trend to keep the candidate in the site for as long as possible plus the inefficient job searches, job categorization etc producing unexpected results and the interest of a candidate wanting good efficient results spending as less time as possible in a site. My own calculation would give as a figure of another 20 minutes per jobboard to find a suitable set of jobs out of which a positive application is processed.

Conclusion: The cost of the average employee searching for a job at work, is of approximately £42/employee/job found

The debate of employees spending inordinate amounts of time surfing the Internet for non-working related purposes is something to be balanced carefully by each company and depends on many factors out of the scope of this post. The analysis will be done in a future post.

The solution I'd promote is the change in the trend of the existing jobboards (and, by extension, other content&search websites) from a company centric business model into a candidate centric structure to cut short the amount of money spent in inefficient web crawling by the very same companies that advertise on these jobboards (websites). This change in trend is something difficult to monetize in the short term, but will pay back in the longer term due to the fact that a content searcher will choose the efficient site amongst the other competitors for their searches, and hence the numbers/volume war will be won. When looking at advertising, sponsoring and other traditional money drivers in a website, they are all based on the number of users.

Findjobsin.com wants to show its candidate centric nature by allowing users to perform efficient and quick searches. Covering most of the main jobboards in the country and offering relevant results on the search we can help a jobseeker cut short the time spent jobhunting. By doing this, we also help employers in two different ways:

• we cut short the cost associated with the jobhunting of its employees
  
• we cut short the cost associated with the job posting, by applying the same principle to our jobpost feature, next to be released. Easy, fast, cheap and efficient jobposting.
  

Stay tuned.