About half of the IT jobs filled in the 12 months up to February 2004 were sourced through online job advertisements, while print media is no longer a significant source of IT jobs, according to a survey commissioned by Multimedia Victoria (MMV).

The survey of 32 recruitment agents, conducted by the IT Contractors and Recruitment Association (ITCRA) for MMV's ICT Skills Tracking and Monitoring System, showed that almost exactly half (50.2 per cent) of jobs were placed through online job boards, with Seek by far the dominant player.

Although Seek holds sway in the online jobs board market, however, it is not the primary source of jobs, according to the ITCRA survey. The survey found that 33.2 per cent of all jobs were filled from the existing databases of recruiters, while Seek was the second major source of successful IT candidates accounting for 26.9 per cent of positions filled. Personal referrals also played a major role in filling jobs, supplying 10.2 per cent successful IT candidates. Other major sources of jobs came from ITCRA's own online IT job board IT2, which filled 10.1 per cent of jobs and the JobNet online jobs board, which filled 9.4 per cent of jobs.

The survey also indicated that Australia's mainstream print media organisations have been severely marginalised in the IT jobs market, both in the online and hardcopy spaces. The MyCareer online jobs site, owned by Fairfax, accounted for 1.3 per cent of jobs filled, while CareerOne, owned by News Limited fared even worse, supplying just 0.7 per cent of successful candidates. An even bigger eyebrow raiser was the finding that, according to the survey, newspapers and other print media have all but disappeared as an IT jobs source, filling just 0.2 per cent of jobs in the year up to February 2004.