January is the peak season for visits to employment websites and with unemployment numbers climbing ever higher, this year was no exception. Each year, visits to employment websites peak the second week of January. This year visits to websites in the Employment and Training category were 17% higher than in January 2008. Growth is due to continued natural growth for the category (see chart below illustrating that visits have been growing for the past three years), as well as rising unemployment rates and job uncertainty.

Career Builder holds the #1 position but is losing share within the category. While Indeed remained #3 in our monthly rankings, it has taken the #2 spot in our weekly rankings so far in February(overtaking Yahoo! HotJobs). The site experienced an 88% increase in share of Internet visits year on year in January.

Top 10 Employment & Training Websites January 2009

Other fast movers include Snag a Job up 99%, LinkedIn up 138%, the Unemployment Office for Ohio up 184% and Simply Hired up 151%.

LinkedIn has seen among the strongest growth in the category (at 138% year on year in January). We analyzed the site's traffic to try to understand the reason for the growth. The site has seen strong growth in visits from California in particular and also with some of the wealthiest MOSAIC groups (based on offline data collected by Experian). Also, looking at our clickstream data, I noticed that more than half of visits to LinkedIn are new visitors, meaning they haven't visited the site in the past thirty days.

In the past few weeks, I've personally noticed a significant uptick in emails from LinkedIn, both in the form of new connections and requests for recommendations. As the labor market tightens, people appear to be boosting their resumes and their network.

Heather Hopkins

Heather Hopkins is VP of Research for Hitwise UK. This piece was originally posted on Hitwise Analyst blog here. 

Image by Brajeshwar