idealpeople blog

We’ve introduced you to Candidate 2.0 before. Remember Bridget?

Soon, we’re going to be talking a lot more about Candidate 2.0. For now, we wanted to share a piece of relatively interesting research we’ve conducted.

We spoke to a lot of people who had changed jobs in the last four years across a number of industry sectors with the aim of finding out what’s the most effective way of finding a job in the era of Candidate 2.0.

Why?

Well, partly because - let’s be honest - finding a new job is a bit of a minefield, particularly in the internet-centric world of recruitment. There is such a plethora of job advertising sites, on-line CV databases and Social Networking tools being increasingly used, that no-one would ever be able to make maximum, effective use of each one without committing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to such an enterprise.

So where is best to invest your time? If you need a job tomorrow, what’s the best strategy? Rather than rely on pure opinion (why of course, dear readers, your best bet is to register with Idealpeople by clicking right here , we thought we’d actually find out.

And here goes.

The headline news that only 25% of all people who changed jobs using the internet in the last four years found a job through an on-line advert. On the other hand, a quite impressive 50% found their job by uploading their CV into a database, and the remaining 25% of people who got a new job weren’t originally looking for a new job in the first place - or they at least they weren’t actively using the internet to do so when they got one (but the internet played a part…)

This is actually relatively unsurprising - in fact, it ties in nicely with what we’ve been saying on our corporate website for years.

But before you rush out and put your CV in an on-line database, let’s put this in context. Normally, when you apply for a job on-line, you have the option of registering your CV in a database as well. And it’s just easy really, isn’t it? Upload the CV, wait for the phone to ring - it’s the ultimate hassle-free job seeking methodology.

On the flip-side, applying for jobs is time-consuming, and there’s considerable pessimism about the validity (and/or existence) of lots of advertised jobs and there’s a good chance you’ll receive no reply. This is in spite of the fact that we believe that applying for jobs is a really great way of getting attention. So the fact that twice as many people have success through a CV database compared to an ad is unsurprising.

And what of the 25% of people who change jobs without actually looking for one? What’s with that?

Tomorrow (yes, tomorrow readers) and for the rest of the week, we’re going to look at each of these methodologies in turn and provide a nice guide to each one. Want to know how to make an application stand out? Check back tomorrow. Want to know how to make a CV that’ll get so many calls from people scouring the on-line databases? Come back on Wednesday. And on Friday, if you’re really lucky, we’ll show you how to achieve the ultimate…to find a job on-line without actually looking for one.

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