The article ‘Using social media during job search: the case of 16-24 year olds in Scotland‘, which I co-authored with Dr John Mowbray (University of Glasgow), is now available as a PDF from the Journal of Information Science.

We report in the paper that – amongst young people – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are the most popular platforms for job seeking, and that the type of job sought has a bearing on the ways in which job seekers use these platforms. In addition, we reveal that frequent social media use for job search is linked with being invited to attend job interviews. However, most young job seekers only use social media for job search sparingly, unless specifically advised to do so by a professional such as a teacher or careers advisor.

This work is an output from Dr John Mowbray’s PhD, which was funded by the ESRC and Skilled Development Scotland, and completed in 2018. John’s full thesis The role of networking and social media tools during job search: an information behaviour perspective is available from the Edinburgh Napier repository, as is the manuscript of this paper for those who do not have subscriber access to the Journal of Information Science.