Motivation and Antecedents of User Engagement with Job Advertising Websites in Sri Lanka

Abstract

With the intense advancement of technology, in order to seek new job opportunities, young people tend to use social media and the internet. This behaviour has been accelerated by some positive influences such as ease of navigation, attractiveness, information provision as well as usability of the website of online job advertising sites. Despite the fact that Sri Lanka has a large number of job advertisement websites, job seekers only use a select handful of them to look for employment. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the influence of preidentified factors through the pilot study on users' engagement with job advertising websites in Sri Lanka. Moreover, through this study, it was expected to explore what features users enjoy most on job promotion sites that drive them to re-visit and recommend them to their peers. Data collection for this study was completed through self-prepared questionnaires, which are distributed to final-year students of the University of Ruhuna and selected 300 undergraduates based on a purposive sampling technique. Data analyses were done as descriptive statistics, and Coefficients to find the influence of the variables using SPSS. The results demonstrated that the ease of navigation has a significant impact in favor of users' engagement and website usability has less significance. The findings of this study revealed the three factors respectively ease of navigation, attractiveness, and information provision that have a significant impact on users’ engagement. The findings of this study are very much beneficial to online job promotion website developers and through this study, the researchers reflected some features that have to gain the attention of online job promotion website developers such as the accuracy and consistency of information, the attractiveness, ease of navigation and website usability.