More than the usual number of people turned to the internet in January to research job opportunities, according to Hitwise data for the month of January 2008. Through the first four weeks of 2008, U.S. visits to the Employment category increased 22 percent on average, compared to 2007. During the final week of January, CareerBuilder.com* was the most visited employment site, followed by Yahoo! HotJobs, Monster*, Job.com, and Indeed*.

"Each year we see a spike in traffic to employment websites after the New Year as people make resolutions around finding a new job," said Heather Dougherty, research director, Hitwise. "This year, while there are certainly those seeking a career change, some Internet employment activity is generated from those in need of a job or anxiety over the state of the economy."

Job Searches by Employer, Location, Occupation

By taking a look at the top 200 search variations on "jobs" by type and market for the four weeks ending Jan. 26, 2008, Hitwise data shows how users are researching job opportunities. The majority of searches were location based, followed by occupation, generic and employer.

The top occupation searches were for government and federal jobs followed by teen jobs, local jobs and trucking jobs. Work from home jobs made up many of the generic searches as well.

Career Searches by Employer, Location, Occupation

Providing the same analysis for the search term "careers" reveals that employer searches received the largest percentage of searches followed by occupation and generic searches.

The top five employer searches were for careers with:

• UPS, Federal Express
• Wal-Mart
• Bank of America
• Home Depot

The top occupation searches were for medical, criminal justice, real estate careers, psychology, nursing.

About this data

Notes: The Hitwise data featured is based on U.S. market share of visits, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context.

* The market share of visits percentage does not include traffic for all sub-domains of this website which are reported on separately.

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