The week that Lehman Brothers collapsed more people visited the FreshMinds Talent website than at any other point in 2008. I guess this begs two questions. First, why was this? I suspect it was both the result of former Lehman Brothers employees looking for a new job, and of a general panic in the recruitment market as the full impact of the credit crunch dawned on millions of employees across the UK.
The second question is why on earth do I know this? The answer to that one is easy - it’s one of my roles at FreshMinds to keep a close eye on our Google Adwords and Analytics accounts. As a result, I’ve spent a bit of time looking at the numbers and in a very geeky way realised that they must contain a lot of information about our candidates, their habits and their circumstances.
The first thing you notice if you spend some time with these numbers is that people search for new jobs during office hours. The highest number of visits to our website come during the hours of 2pm to 4pm. Over the period between September 2007 and May 2009, approximately 17% of traffic to the site came during those hours. The next interesting finding is that people search for jobs when they’ve had time off. On average over the period in question we’ve seen that most people visit our site on Mondays. This compares to Fridays, where the number of visits falls by 26%, with the number of visits falling throughout the week. This has been a consistent trend throughout the period. Around summer holidays we see a similar trend. During the months of July and August we get a 37% and 35% increase respectively in the number of hits to our website (compared to the yearly average).
But I think the findings gets even more illuminating than that. If you were to assume that people are more likely to come to our website when they have been made redundant, or suspect they will imminently be made redundant, you could use our analytics to identify the point the recession really started in terms of employee perspectives and circumstances. So I can say that, according to our candidates, the recession really started in February 2009 for people in London, but in other major UK cities it started in January.
Comparing the first three months of this year to the first three of last year, we can make some inferences. For London, we saw no change in January 2009 compared to January 2008 in the average number of hits per day. However, for February 2009 compared to February 2008 there was a 40% increase. For other major UK cities, namely Manchester, Edinburgh and Leeds, we see an increase in the average number of hits per day of over 100% for January 2009 compared to January 2008, and in some cases (Birmingham) by nearly 600%.
So are all the trends and statistics meaningful? Possibly not. When Barack Obama was made President of the United States, we had a 23% decrease in the number of visits to our website compared to the yearly average. Now I have no way of explaining that one.
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About the author
Jafar has recently taken on the role of Business Development Manager for FreshMinds Talent, driving the company’s sales while juggling an obsession for metrics and solving complex problems. A Cambridge University graduate, outside work he plays football with the same blend of modesty and competitiveness that have made him such a popular and successful member of the FreshMinds team.
on May 18th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
[...] as “very courageous.” She then fretted over if Obama had “a lot of angst” before People apply for jobs during office hours - blogs.freshminds.co.uk 05/18/2009 The week that Lehman Brothers collapsed more people visited the [...]
on May 19th, 2009 at 12:21 am
[...] [...]
on Jun 15th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
[...] aardige illustratie vond ik op de blog van Freshminds. Zij maken werk van hun bezoekers statistieken en proberen daar van te [...]
on Dec 9th, 2009 at 6:35 am
because of the economic downfall last year more and more people has no job, thats why they intend to apply in lower position in order for them to live and sustain their everyday needs