What a job seeker is
A job seeker (طالب العمل), also written jobseeker, is a person who is looking for work, is able to do it and is ready to start. The description covers someone who has never worked, someone whose work has stopped, and someone who is in work and looking for a different job.
The term concerns the person’s position in the labour market. It says nothing about their relationship with any particular establishment, and that is what separates it from the words a hiring team uses about the people inside its own process.
How a job seeker differs from a candidate
The difference is more than a matter of wording, and it accounts for a measurement error that can recur in hiring reports:
- A job seeker. It describes where a person stands in the market, and that position exists before they apply for anything.
- A candidate. It is a status that arises when a person enters a specific hiring procedure, and it ends when that procedure ends.
So one person can be a job seeker without being a candidate for any vacancy at your establishment. The same person can also be a candidate at your establishment without being a job seeker in the sense above, if you were the one who approached them. That second possibility is the basis of sourcing. An advertisement reaches people who are looking for work now. Someone content in their current role does not browse advertisements, and may still be the right person for the role, so the establishment goes to them instead of waiting for them to appear.
A third word sits between the two. An applicant is a person who has applied to a particular vacancy. Applying is one route into candidacy, and a direct approach from the establishment is another, so the two words do not cover the same people. A job seeker who neither applies to your vacancy nor is approached for it is neither your applicant nor your candidate, however actively they are looking elsewhere.
The distinction also explains why two hiring channels can produce different groups. A vacancy published on an open channel reaches job seekers. A direct approach can also reach people who were not looking. Which channel each hire actually came from is tracked as source of hire.
When a job seeker becomes a candidate at your establishment
A person enters an establishment’s candidate pipeline through an open vacancy, not through a general intention to hire. The pipeline is taken as beginning when the job requisition for the role is approved, and as ending with an appointment or with the cancellation of the vacancy. Between those two points sit the stages the establishment sets for the role, for example screening, interview and offer. The stage at which a person stands changes as the procedure moves, but the person is a candidate only by reference to that vacancy. On that reading there is no candidate before there is a vacancy, and nobody remains a candidate after it closes.
A person who was not appointed stops being a candidate when the vacancy closes, but their record does not disappear. It stays in the establishment’s candidate database, a store of records built so that a record can be retrieved when a later vacancy opens. At that point the same person becomes a candidate again only by entering the procedure for that vacancy, and whether they are a job seeker at that time depends on their position in the market, not on the record.
How a person is treated while they are a candidate is a separate subject, covered under candidate experience. Entering a hiring procedure does not by itself make a person a job seeker or stop them being one, because the description concerns their position in the market, not the establishment.
Why the job seeker distinction matters in measurement
The number of job seekers in a market says nothing, by itself, about an establishment’s ability to hire. An establishment that reports a shortage of candidates in a market full of job seekers has a problem with reach, with its hiring standard or with its advertisement, not with the supply available. Mixing the two figures produces a conclusion that is reassuring and wrong: that the market is empty.
The question to ask is where the number falls away. If job seekers exist in the market but none reach the vacancy, the problem is reach. If they reach it and stop at a particular stage, the problem lies at that stage, and widening the channel can add to the number who stop there. In either case the days the role stays open count towards its time to fill, and the figure for job seekers in the market does not explain that delay.
A worked case shows the difference, using assumed figures. Assume a market in which 500 job seekers fit the description of a role. An advertisement reaches 40 of them, which is 8%. Twelve of those 40 apply, which is 30%, and none of the twelve passes screening. The figure of 500 shows that the supply exists. The 40 out of 500 points to reach, and twelve applicants with nobody passing points to the hiring standard or to the advertisement. The last line of the hiring report reads that there are no candidates, but the shortfall sits at two stages of the procedure, not in the market.
The same distinction opens a second source of candidates that can be overlooked. An employee who is looking for another role inside your establishment is not a job seeker in the market, but is a ready candidate. Such an employee arrives with prior knowledge of the establishment and its procedures, knowledge that a hire from outside has yet to build. Counting only the external market leaves this group out of the picture.
The job seeker as a status in government programmes
Government support and employment programmes can use the phrase in a narrower, procedural sense: a registered job seeker, with registration and status conditions set by the body that runs each programme. That procedural sense does not necessarily match the general description above. In the sources we reviewed, we found no published text defining a registered job seeker as a general term that applies across programmes. Where a question concerns a particular programme, platform or scheme, its own conditions apply, and those of Jadarat, the Employment Support product described under wage subsidy, Doroob and unemployment insurance under SANED are set out in their own entries.
Which job seeker definition applies to a question
A hiring report and a programme application use the same two words for different things. In a hiring report, the job seeker is a description of the market, to be kept apart from the candidates in your own process. In a programme application, it is a status with conditions, and the definition that counts is the one that programme sets at the relevant date, not the general use of the word.
This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.
A standalone Saudi HR system
One employee file holding the contract, the documents and their expiry dates, the attendance record, leave, salary and end-of-service entitlements. End-of-service, overtime and leave-balance calculations are built into the system.
A standalone system on its own subscription. The connection to Qoyod Accounting is now available.