Do you know where qualified women look for jobs?

By Magnus Bucht

We asked staff of the United Nations where they go to find job opportunities. Our focus was women, and our results shows that printed media belongs to the past, organization’s own job site is still attracting important talents. However, one other source grows faster than any other source and is already the largest talent provider of all.

For talents, the job search at International organizations is both tedious and challenging, the sector is fragmented and to succeed talents must have a great amount of sector knowledge. Many smaller organizations operates in the shadow of larger more famous organizations and data shows that it is still the most ‘famous’ organizations that attracts most traffic to their job sites.

- In 2008 when I started my career as recruiter at UNDP, we paid a fortune every months to get our senior job advertisement in the printed edition of the Economist, says Henrik Ryden, Talent Acquisition Director at Impact Pool.

  Today the Economist’s golden days are gone. The Economist has made an attempt to compete by opening up their own online job board, but with only two measurable outcomes, Low monthly traffic and low engagement from talents! To place the Economist online job board  in a context, UNDP’s job site alone has 20 times more sessions per months.

For International organizations it is important to be strategically positioned to be visible where the talents are engaged. With more and more sophisticated career platforms available focused at careers making positive social impact the talents pattern has quickly changed, from newspaper, via the organisations’ own job sites to career platforms.

The table below shows where qualified women and men are seeking for jobs today.

 

Women/Men

I find jobs in newspapers (print and/or digital)

14%

I look for jobs at sites similar to impactpool

46%

At the organizations job site

36%

I find jobs via LinkedIn

11%

I find jobs via Facebook groups

5.5%

I find jobs via Twitter

0%

 

Where qualified women look for jobs?

Our stats becomes more interesting when dividing age and gender. As many organizations today are committed to gender parity and eager to find more qualified women for their jobs, our study focused at successful women. 99% of the women that responded to our survey holds a Masters Degree, 100% of the women that responded started their UN career as a junior professional on a staff contract. We grouped the women in three age groups: 

 

  • Age group 1: 35 years or below

  • Age group 2: 36 years to 45 years

  • Age group 3: 46 years or above

     

The age groups were selected to hypothetically reflect seniority. We assume that age and seniority are linked - the older the more senior.

  • Age group 1 reflects women in the beginning of their career or at early mid-career.

     

  • Age group 2 reflects women at mid-career and or senior level.

     

  • Age group 3 reflects women at the more senior leadership level

 

When grouping the data this way, we discover some interesting pattern. Printed media as source for job is no longer used at all by the most senior women (Age group 3), that finding goes very much against the prejudice one often meet when discussion sourcing strategies with Human Resources representatives of International organizations. 

 

- When talking social sourcing with organizations, one get the feeling that Senior Leaders can only be targeted by calling up their pager, by sending a fax or by helping them filling out their whole application, says Henrik Ryden.

But reliable data shows something different! Instead the most senior women prefers to go to career platforms where all jobs are available and structured in a logical way, other studies also shows that women are  more likely than men to use career platform where they  can get a better understanding of the employer. In a recent article we mentioned three things that women who retains in an organization has in common, that article emphasize the link between retention and the opportunity for women to ask questions about the job.  Our study showed also that the organization's own career sites is still popular and important. For Age group 1 and 2 one can see a similar pattern, but these groups seem to be using social media more actively in their job search. In common for all age groups is that women prefer seeking jobs through career platforms like impactpool. Second most popular is to go directly to the organization's job site.

 

Download our One-page report with the complete data set of the different age groups if you haven't done it yet.