How e are you? - Tim Elkington's presentation from The Year Ahead Conference

A couple of week’s ago I mentioned that I would do a mini-series of posts about the key elements from each speaker’s presentation at the Enhance Media the Year Ahead Conference.  It’s actually going to be a combination of blog posts and some ukrecruiter newsletter articles.  Here’s the first blog post.

Tim Elkington, MD of Enhance Media, presented the findings of their “How e are you?” research.  He mixed the survey results with an interactive “ready steady cook” type quiz.

How e are you? is a short online questionnaire you complete and then are given your personal e-score, based on what you have and haven’t done online.  Over 12,500 people have completed it so far. 

The majority of people (97%) have used email.  The activity in which least people had engaged was to “buy something for more than £1,000” via the web (less than 20%) and 71% had applied for a job online.

Across all the respondents the average e-score was 53.1. They then broke the data down into demographics with the average male e-score being 60.5 and the average female e-score being 48.6.  The average e-score for someone under 45 years of age is 66.1 and the average for someone over 45 years of age is 46.1. Which I think re-enforces two “internet” stereotypes (which is certainly the case if you compare my mum with my brother).

As part of the survey everyone was asked to give their favourite three sites.  What is interesting is that across the three main top e-types (e-learners, e-citizens and e-experts) they all share the same sites as their “top three” favourites.  These were Google, Facebook and the BBC.  Overall respondents listed 3,031 different sites.  I found it amazing that only 45 sites were chosen more than 20 times (2,986 sites were chosen less than 20 times and 2,371 sites were only chosen once).  Tim listed the top 20 (and I’m sure he would make this list available to anyone who contacts him).  This is a great example of the Long Tail often talked about.

So then we moved on to what the survey tells us about online job seekers.   As I mentioned earlier 71% have applied for a job online.  They are on average 32.6 years of age and they are likely to use more “technology” (laptops, WiFi, MP3, 3G, Blackberry and HDTV) than the average person.  Tim also talked about which job roles are most and least “e”.  At the top of the table, unsurprisingly, were IT roles, followed by design/creative and then marketing.  At the bottom of the table were students.

Tim moved on to commercial usage of the results. Taking all the data you can answer questions like
- Which online job seekers respond best to blogs and forums?
- Which sites do management consultants like the most?
- Which regions contain the most sophisticated online job seekers?
- I’m launching a mobile job board – which sectors should I target first?

Just before he closed Tim revealed they are soon to be adding new questions to the survey and we helped with a bit of pre-release research by holding up coloured cards to show our response to certain questions – you can see this in action on flickr.  This got us all quite excited as you can see on Enhance Media’s YouTube channel.

If you want access to the full research findings Enhance Media will soon be making a report available.  You should contact Tim for further information.