Employers beware: Your staff may be looking for a new job during work hours. According to research released today by U.K. recruitment site Experteer.co.uk, the busiest hour for online job searches is 3:00 PM on a Thursday.
Based on the search records of over 600,000 active members of Experteer across the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland, the company found that most job hunters seem to be using their mid-afternoon coffee breaks to scour the Internet for job opportunities. 3:00 PM is the most popular time of day almost universally in Europe except in Germany where most searching is done only slightly earlier, immediately after lunchtime at 2pm.
In the U.K., 24 percent of job hunters look for jobs online after their lunch break, between 2pm and 4pm GMT. The morning is consistently a quieter period across Europe, with only 17 percent searching between 9am and 11am GMT.
With the economic downturn, you’d think that anytime would be a good time to search, but Europeans are keeping weekends to themselves. Saturdays and Sundays are the least popular days for job hunting with less than one in five searches done on weekends in the U.K., Germany, France and Switzerland, and less than a quarter in Italy.
Considerably fewer searches are also done on Fridays.
Job hunters in the U.K. tend to spend an average of 4 minutes on each session vs. those in Italy who spend just 5 minutes. The numbers dovetail with the average 5 minute long coffee break period.
