London receives nearly 40 percent of UK online job searches demonstrating the capital’s continuing dominance within recruitment, a new study shows.

Digital market intelligence firm SimilarWeb analyzed millions of keyword job searches to the five leading UK job sites: Indeed, Total Jobs, CV Library, Reed and Jobsite from January to March 2016. Collectively these sites attract more 60.2 million combined mobile and desktop visits each month among UK job seekers. The analysis, based on desktop searches from January to March 2016, found London was the most sought after city attracting 37.4 percent market share among the top 17 most searched for UK cities. The capital’s share of job searches emerged more than three times that of second-placed Manchester (11.48 percent share). 

Third-placed Glasgow (8.3 percent) emerged as the third most popular UK city for a job in 2016 ahead of sixth-placed Edinburgh (5.47 percent of online searches). Comparing online searches between January to March 2016, with the same period in 2015, Edinburgh fell from third to sixth place. Glasgow rose from 7th place to third, Leeds crashed down from third to sixth place in searches and Birmingham dropped from 4th to 9th place in 2016. Rising job destinations searched for were Cardiff from eighth to fourth, and Bristol from 6th position to fifth. London remained unchanged in first place. Other European countries searched less for jobs in their capitals – in France, Toulouse took a 21 percent share of online job searches to the country’s five leading job sites, while Paris was in second-place (16 percent of market share). Berlin secured 24 percent of Germany’s job searches by location with Hamburg in second place (13 percent). 

The study,The European Job Site Report: Yearly Review, showed that overall the UK generated more than twice as much traffic than all the leading German and French job sites combined. Job searchers in the UK now spend 20 seconds more on job sites than they did a year ago. Pascal Cohen SimilarWeb Digital Insights Manager said: “Searches for Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Paris, Lyon, London, and Manchester drive the most traffic to job sites in Europe. However the dominance of London for job searches in the UK shows no signs of diminishing. No other European city examined has anything close to exerting London’s recruitment pull.”