Businesses go online to recruit

Increasing numbers of employers with jobs to fill are turning to the internet in order to find candidates, figures have shown.

According to the latest annual Jobcentre Plus employer survey, a quarter of all filled job vacancies were advertised online in 2006.

The proportion of overall vacancies that appeared online rose to 16 per cent, up from 12 per cent in 2004.

Of the 4,500 employers questioned in the survey, one in eight reported that they had posted job vacancies on websites in the past 12 months.

The shift to electronic recruitment is also notable among those looking for jobs. In just one week in June, some 2.2 million jobseekers carried out over 6 million searches on the Jobcentre Plus website.

Elsewhere in the survey, it was revealed that small and medium-sized businesses were the most active in the jobs market. Firms with between 10 and 249 employees were responsible for nearly two thirds of all successfully filled vacancies.

Of the 3.97 million jobs advertised in the last year, over a third of them were advertised with Jobcentre Plus.