Jobcentre Plus

Figures released today from Jobcentre Plus reveal unprecedented growth in Internet job hunting. In a single week in March, the Jobcentre Plus website experienced a record 6.5 million job searches conducted by nearly 2.2 million online jobseekers.(i) The site has already handled over 70 million job searches this year alone making it the UK's number one recruitment site accounting for over 14% of the overall recruitment market (ii).

Since the start of 2007, the Jobcentre Plus website has received an average of 2 million user visits each week and handled an average of 6 million job searches per week. The last six months has been one of the busy periods in the site's history with the average number of visitors up by nearly 700,000 since the same period last year and the average number of job searches up by over a million, rising from 4.2 million between October and March 2006 to 5.3 million in the same 6 months of 2007. (iii)

It is not only people looking for jobs who have been busy since January; employers have also been placing more and more vacancies online. Jobcentre Plus' award winning Internet service for employers, Employer Direct online (EDON), received an average of over 10,000 vacancies each week and now accounts for 27% of all Jobcentre Plus' vacancies. Launched in May 2005, it is a free online service enabling employers to post and manage their vacancies via the Jobcentre Plus website.

Lesley Strathie, Chief Executive, Jobcentre Plus, said: "Our website provides a vital channel for helping large numbers of people back into work and we hope this recent increase in activity is a sign of continued growth to come. The Jobcentre Plus site has handled a steady increase in traffic since the start of the year as more and more people put their New Year's career resolutions into action. This growth reflects a wider trend amongst individual people and employers to use the Internet to find and fill jobs. It also shows the increasing significance of Jobcentre Plus in the UK recruitment market."

Abby Simons, Recruitment Line Manager at Rentokil Initial said: "We place hundreds of vacancies per month with Jobcentre Plus, and the EDON system has become an invaluable tool with which to promptly and effectively place vacancies, whilst also enabling us to monitor and maintain them."

The Jobcentre Plus website provides help for customers in finding jobs as well as information on benefits, training and how to apply for a job, vacancies can also be found at the job points in Jobcentre Plus offices. Employers can find information on placing a vacancy with Jobcentre Plus and other services available to them. There is also useful information for organisations interested in placing vacancies with Jobcentre Plus.

Of course you can also access our jobbank on Directgov or, if you're looking for a job, call us on 0845 606 0234.

Notes to editor

Glossary of terms

• A User Visit (or User Session) is a visit to a website by a user from log on to log off. Visits can last from a few seconds to hours. User Visits are not the same as Users. Some users will visit sites once, others repeatedly and during a single session more than one user might participate from the same PC.
  
• A Job Search is recorded each time a user clicks the Search for Jobs button on the job search area of the Jobcentre Plus website.

Sources for statistics

(i) Full table of statistics October 2006 - March 2007:

(ii) Hitwise monthly report for jobcentreplus.gov.uk - February 2007. Jobcentre Plus was ranked 1st amongst UK employment and training websites with 14.35% of the overall market share ahead of Total Jobs (4.94%) and Monster (4.03%). Jobcentre Plus was ranked 49th of 145,970 websites in the UK in February 2007. In August 2006 it was ranked 57th of 166,424 websites in the UK.

Hitwise is a leading online competitive intelligence service. Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISP's around the world, Hitwise's patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behaviour of 25 million Internet users.

(iii) Full table of statistics October 2005 - March 2006:

About Jobcentre Plus

Jobcentre Plus, part of the Department for Work and Pensions, brings together employment and benefit services for people of working age based on the objective 'Work for those who can, support for those who cannot'. It provides a professional and modern service to meet the diverse needs of employers and those seeking work, including:

• personal advisers to provide practical support and advice to help those in need find and keep work, including training provision and benefits guidance
  
• a dedicated service to support employers in filling their vacancies quickly and successfully, including the ability to place jobs online
  
• ability to search for jobs both online and over the phone through Jobpoints in Jobcentre Plus offices, the Jobseeker Direct phone line and through the website; and
  
• swift, secure and professional access to benefits for those entitled to them.

Customers can access Jobcentre Plus services through around 1,000 locations across Great Britain, including over 850 newly refurbished Jobcentres. Touch-screen terminals and Customer Access Phones are also available in a further 120 sites such as libraries and local authority premises. Jobcentre Plus works with over 275,000 employers to place 17,000 people into work every week. Over 400,000 vacancies are listed each week on its website and more than 4m job search requests are received, making it the number one UK recruitment website.

For further information on the services that Jobcentre Plus provides employers and people of working age visit the Jobcentre Plus website.

DWP Press Office
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