Unemployment boosts online job searching

In the situation of economic downturn popularity of Web career sites has increased significantly. According to comScore Media Metrix, the number of category visitors grew 51% to 18.8 million in 2008. Even November and December, typically slow months for searching, had the heavy traffic. CareerBuilder.com led the online job search pack, with 9.1 million unique visitors in December 2008 versus 5.1 million in December 2007, which means a 78% growth. Yahoo! HotJobs and Indeed came in second and third places in terms of unique visitors with the growth of 146% and 88%, respectively. 

Besides, job seekers and recruiters visit social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Jobvite “Social Recruitment Survey” of 115 US human resources and recruitment professionals at small to medium-sized companies conducted in April, 2008 found that 80% turned to LinkedIn and 36% to Facebook to find candidates. LinkedIn finished the last year with 33.3 million members, up 90% from the 17.5 million that was reported in December 2007. Site membership continues to grow at about one new user per second. The company even intends to implement a new service for recruiters in February 2009.