Job hunters favour recruiters over social media sites

Leading recruiters claim white collar candidates still favour using recruitment consultants over other methods when job hunting although IT candidates were starting to use social networking.

The Robert Walters “Employee Insights Survey” quizzed almost 500 white collar workers in Australia to find 68 per cent register with a recruitment consultancy “as the medium they most commonly use for finding a new job”.

Cut by industry, 82 per cent of banking candidates and 67 per cent of accounting & finance candidates preferred to use recruitment consultancies while 56 per cent of the IT workers surveyed used social media as a job search tool.

Despite the growth of social networking site – Linked In has 48 million members globally and 875,000 members in Australia – only 11 per cent of those surveyed by Robert Walters nominated the site as a preferred job hunting medium.
Applying directly to employers via online job boards was the preferred job hunting method with 20 per cent of those surveyed.

Meanwhile Stephen Moir of the Moir Group said networking was still essential for candidates aged in their 40s and above to counter aged prejudice.

The Moir Group, which specialises in finance and accounting, also provides training programs for older job hunters.

““My top tip is for [older] candidates are to know the three or four things they are really good at and to communicate these with plenty of energy and enthusiasm using specific examples that back up these strengths,” he says.

“Older people are not as comfortable talking about their achievements but it is really important they are willing to say ‘this is what I did and this was the result’,” he says.

He says older candidates not only have to communicate their strengths at a job interview but also while networking.

“Building personal networks is really important for older people so they can job hunt amongst people who know who they are and what they are about,” he says.