studies

This page considers major studies regarding online recruitment.

There has been surprisingly little rigorous academic or government publication regarding the online recruitment industry, with media coverage accordingly offering an uncritical view and frequently parrotting figures of uncertain validity from major commercial research houses or particular recruitment site services.

For an upbeat but superficial view of adoption by particular US demographics see the Pew Internet and American Life Project Online Job Hunting report (PDF).

There is a more nuanced treatment in Ben Anderson's 2004 Everyday research in the knowledge society: who uses ICTs to find job and health information (PDF) and Jan Schapper & Susan Mayson's 'The rhetoric and reality of e-cruitment: Has the Internet really revolutionized the recruitment process?' in Human Resource Management: Challenges and Future Directions (Brisbane: Wiley 2003) edited by Ruth Wiesner & Bruce Millett.

Peter Kuhn & Mikal Skuterud coauthored several cogent studies on the efficacy of online job search in the US, including 'Job search methods: Internet versus traditional' in 2000 Monthly Labor Review and 'Internet Job Search and Unemployment Duration' in 2004 American Economic Review (here), with the latter concluding that "either Internet job search is ineffective in reducing unemployment durations, or Internet job searchers are negatively selected on unobservables".

The 2003 paper In With the New, Out With the Old: Has the Technological Revolution Eliminated the Traditional Job Search Process? by David Van Rooy, Alexander Alonso & Zachary Fairchild has a more positive view.

We have pointed to other works such as Mark Granovetter's landmark Getting a job: a study of contacts and careers (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1974) and The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited (PDF) in discussing social software and 'equaintance' networks.

Print and online guides for job seekers, employers and intermediaries abound. Many are of indifferent value and for example repackage received wisdom about "how to write a CV" or - in in an echo of early dot-com primers - feature hyperbole about "winning a job with your keyboard".

Two of the more prominent US works are Pam Dixon's Job searching online for dummies (Foster City: IDG Books 1998) and Guide to Internet Job Searching, 2002-2003 by Margaret Dikel & Frances Roehm (New York: McGraw-Hill 2002).

A perceptive analysis of the matchmaking and bodyshopping industry is provided in Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2004) by Stephen Barley & Gideon Kunda and Headhunters: Matchmaking in the Labor Market (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 2003) by William Finlay & James Coverdill.

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