Does Gender Make a Difference? Undergraduate Students' Use of Smart CVs for Career Planning

In the contemporary society, gender equality in accessing the job market is advocated, and often protected by law in developed countries. In reality, however, gender differences exist in different aspects and stages of recruitment processes and career development, say from career planning, job search, application, recruitment and promotion. Such differences are usually exemplified by different interesting findings in the literature. Some research findings had shown that male candidates spend less time than female candidates to secure a post-displacement job; male candidates in overall are more "linear" in job seeking than female candidates. One proposed explanation on the phenomenon is on how male and female candidates use online CVs for job hunting. This research aims to investigate the undergraduate students' perceived effects of three facets: Portfolio, Presentation and Presence in career planning, job search and application processes by using online CVs. Initial results indicate that gender differences exist on the perceptions of 3P's in career planning. Notably, female candidates see their Presence has direct relationship with Career Planning but male candidates do not. While male candidates perceive a direct relationship between Portfolio and Career Planning, but their female counterparts do not.