Kevin Brady discusses jobseekers’ online habits post-Brexit

Has the UK voting to leave the EU led to a change in job seekers’ online habits? This seems to be the case for one job search site.

Since Brexit, AdView has noticed a significant increase in traffic since the referendum - particularly from those cities and towns that were firmly for the Remain side.

AdView Sales Director Kevin Brady said:

“With AdView being one of the UK’s largest job search sites, with hundreds of thousands of monthly users and hundreds of thousands of jobs being advertised at any one time, we can infer various job market trends from our databases with a decent amount of accuracy. 

For most of the top ten cities, with the exception of Birmingham and Sheffield, a majority of people voted to remain. In most major cities though, there’s been a significant increase in people searching for jobs since the referendum. 

With jobs and the economy being one of the major issues around Brexit, this perhaps isn’t surprising as many people checked to see what jobs were out there amidst the economic and political uncertainty. The fact that this increase has continued into August may suggest that the impact of the referendum is still affecting job seekers online habits.”

• Towns strongly supporting Brexit saw little change (Hull up 2.8%, Sunderland up
• 2.39%, Middlesbourugh down -0.46%).
• Unemployment has remained at record low rates (ONS), though advertised salaries have continued to fall.
• AdView’s advertised jobs have increased by nearly 5% since the referendum although there are significant discrepancies between different sectors. 

Whilst there are significant variations in the increase in job seekers from different towns since the referendum, those areas that supported Brexit saw less change.

Mr Brady explained: “It’s interesting to note that in the major cities where the vote was almost 50:50 or overwhelmingly for remain there’s generally not been significant increases in people seeking jobs.

“In certain towns that were overwhelmingly in favour of Brexit - Sunderland, Hull and Middlesbrough - the number of job seekers has roughly remained the same or actually gone down.”

“With unemployment remaining at record low levels and the number of advertised jobs remaining steady for now, it’s still too early to fully assess the impact of Brexit on the jobs market. That said we’ll be keeping a close eye on trends over the coming weeks.”

Gmail continues to be most popular webmail provider for job seekers

Whilst it seems Brexit may have spurred more people to look for jobs online, it hasn’t had any impact on their choice of webmail provider to apply for those jobs.

Mr Brady explained, “Whilst we’ve seen an increase in users since Brexit, Gmail has proved consistently to be the most popular webmail provider for job seekers for some time now. Last month over half a million gmail users received jobs by email.”

• Over 500,000 gmail addresses received jobs by email last month
• Hotmail was the second most popular provider with over 350,000 job seekers in August
• Whilst providers may be unimportant to recruiters, it’s recommended that job seekers use as professional an address as possible
• Chrome is by far the most popular choice of web browser with it being used by 45% of job seekers

Whilst these results may not come as a shock to many, do candidates’ choice of email address have any impact on their job hunt?

“Though we’ve yet to see any evidence of job seekers’ chosen webmail provider affecting their job search success, your choice of address could affect your applications.” continued Brady.

“It’s no secret that employers prefer applicants with professional sounding email addresses that include both their first and second name”

“That said, job seekers may want to note that this can be more difficult with the more popular providers since names are often already taken.”

www.adview.co.uk