Despite the massive potential of online recruitment the
industry needs to take steps to increase consumer confidence to get people to
trust the Internet with their personal details, says a new report published
last week.
The Online Recruitment and Employment Survey, carried out
for jobs, skills and advice worksite Workthing.com and the largest research of
its kind, found that of the 5.4 million Internet users to look for a job in the
past six months, some 50 per cent are concerned about giving personal
information over the Web. This suggests a similar scenario discovered by
on-line retailers where browsers put items in their shopping basket, but don’t
process their orders.
This is further corroborated by the fact 73 per cent of
Internet users who searched for a job on-line did not apply to any of the
vacancies they saw, while 33 per cent looked and then applied off-line.
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Yet astonishingly over 2 million Internet users think they
will get their next job on-line. Female on-line jobseekers have also increased
from 1.5 million in spring 2000 to 2.2 million in the autumn.
The research was carried out by BMRB which sampled over
3,000 Internet users in autumn 2000.
