jobs, careers and recruitment

As part of some ongoing research here at reed.co.uk, we’ve been taking a look at jobseekers’ areas of interest when looking for work. And it’s revealed some pretty interesting trends.

Perhaps the most notable has been the marked increase in interest jobseekers are showing in professions traditionally dominated by the opposite sex.

Ask someone to imagine a secretary for a small publishing company and the chances are they would picture a woman. Similarly, if you were asked to imagine a mechanic working for a medium sized vehicle repair centre, you would probably picture a man in overalls.

This is a perfectly reasonable judgement to make. Research over the years has shown that, historically, women have been more highly represented in certain occupations and industries than men, and vice versa. As recently as two years ago, research by the Equal Opportunities Commission revealed that gender barriers were creating “no-go areas” in key occupations.

As part of our analysis, the number of jobseekers registering their interest in each industry sector was compared between April 2006 and April 2007. Overall, there was more growth of interest by females than males in a number of traditionally ‘male’ industry sectors, such as:

- Accountancy
- Banking
- Construction & Property
- Engineering
- Financial Services
- General Insurance
- IT & Telecoms
- Manufacturing
- Scientific
- Transport & Logistics

Additionally, there was more growth of interest by males than females in a couple of traditionally ‘female’ industry sectors, including:

- Admin & Secretarial
- Human Resources
- Leisure & Tourism

So, it seems that women, in particular, are challenging expectations. An occupational gender split has always been a prominent feature of the labour market, but the differences seem to be closing.

Perhaps the changes reflect a reduction in gender stereotyping, both in education and employment, and a steady increase in women’s participation in the workforce and in higher education. What do you think?

We’ve known for a long time that reed.co.uk is a popular choice for jobseekers and this has always been borne out by our impressive traffic stats.

Well, now those numbers have an official seal of approval in the form of reed.co.uk’s first official traffic audit by independent industry body, ABCe.

The audit, based on our February 2007 traffic, looks like this:

Page impressions: 48,513,212
Unique users: 1,409,652

Onrec's Top 100 report, published earlier this year, puts these figures into perspective by confirming that reed.co.uk receives more page impressions than any other UK job site.

reed.co.uk has set an official benchmark for audited online job applications, with a figure of 1,040,725 for February 2007.

And we believe the time has come for this metric to become standard practice across the UK’s online recruitment industry, as reported by Recruiter Magazine.

In today's ultra-competitive market, recruiters deserve transparency when making decisions about which online services to use, and independently audited figures equip them with the appropriate knowledge.

Confirmation of reed.co.uk’s ABCE audited applications figure comes after the announcement by JICWEBS of a series of new metrics to enable job sites to measure and report on online job applications.

It’s also a further boost to reed.co.uk’s February audit, published last week.