Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2011. All traffic figures come from a ComScore study reported then, using September 2011 data. Rankings of job sites have changed since.
As we sink deeper into the crisis, the main concern for most Europeans is employment. That is what a ComScore study reported by El Mundo shows: it found strong growth in the number of visits to job websites.
Throughout 2011, websites and blogs related to professional services have been the most visited, with 30% of all visits, and in September 2011 there was growth of 14% compared with the same month the previous year. Monster was the most visited job website in Europe, with 9.4 million unique visitors in September, followed closely by Indeed.com with 8.3 million.
In Spain the leader was Infojobs.net, with more than 2 million unique visitors, followed by Laboris.net. A curious fact about Spain is that, despite being the country with the highest unemployment rate in the European Union, it ranks seventh rather than first in the number of visits to job portals and employment-related sites.
ComScore doesn’t mention growth in other subjects, such as entrepreneurship. On our own blog we could point to considerable growth in readers’ interest in business and entrepreneurship: we have seen a 20% increase in entrepreneurship-related topics and 17% in personal finance and investing. This suggests that nowadays many people are willing to spend a little more time online studying the possibility of starting their own business, and that there is greater interest in managing their money and in learning much more about investing and financial education.
The fact that people are spending more time on job-search websites is not a good sign for the economy, as it reflects an obvious situation. The growing interest in business and investing topics, on the other hand, is good news, because it could be the start of a change in mentality that will sooner or later bear fruit.
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Featured image: Bianca ciw, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
