The Geographies of Online Job Search: Preliminary Findings from Worcester, MA

For those who have online access, the Internet significantly reduces the cost and time of transferring information over distance. This paper explores the potential of the Internet to improve people's employment opportunities by increasing their access to job information beyond that provided via their grounded social networks. Information circulating through grounded social networks is biased socially and geographically toward the life experiences of network members. The tendency for those members to have similar life experiences dampens the variability in the information exchanged in such networks. What is the potential for the Internet to expand people's access to information about jobs and employers' information about workers? We report on a pilot study undertaken in Worcester, Massachusetts, that examined employers' use of Internet recruiting for employees. The results of this qualitative study indicate that these employers use the Internet strategically to enhance the volume of applications when the labor market is tight and to segment the applicant pool when the market loosens and the number of resumes is overwhelming. As a result, we conclude that many grounded social relations that have been integral to the hiring process are resilient to the Internet; pre-Internet geographies shape Internet geographies, and grounded social relations continue to define access to information about job opportunities even online.