Relationship of Career Orientation and Preferred Job Search Methods

The objective of this study was to investigate association between career orientation of a potential job seeker and the job search methods applied to find a suitable job. Schein's career anchor theory was used as a theoretical framework for this study and eight anchors of career was used as the career orientation of the study participants. It was hypothesized that those participants who had previous employment experience are more optimistic and employ various strategies to find a suitable job. It was also hypothesized that there is a strong correlation between career orientation and the job search methods. The mostly used job search method was found to be vacancies advertised online with 73% participants utilizing this method and newspaper was found to be the second highly used method of job search with 54% participants, followed by job referrals and social networking at 36% and 35%. In the inferential statistics, Linear Regression analysis was applied at (p<0.05) to determine the correlation between different variables. The findings revealed that participants who have reported higher inclination towards career orientation of competitiveness were actively involved in different job search methods such as newspaper, social networking, vacancies advertised online, referrals and other methods (cold calling, temping or internships) at p<0.05. Likewise, participants with career orientation of maximum autonomy and freedom used different methods to find potential employment which is again statistically significant at p<0.05. It was also found that participants with previous employment experience are highly involved in various job search strategies and there is a strong correlation between previous employment experience and job search methods.