Like Heather Dougherty in the US, we have also been looking at the impact of the credit crunch on employment sites. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet traffic to Business and Finance – Employment and Training websites has shot up over the last few weeks. Looking back over the last three years, you can see that this is an unseasonal increase: typically traffic to the category starts falling away at the end of the summer and doesn’t increase again until after Christmas.

While analyzing the online recruitment market we stumbled across an unexpected beneficiary people’s unemployment concerns. One of the key search terms for in the sector is ‘cv’, as it’s fair to assume that people looking for advice on updating their CV are likely top be in the market for a new job. Below is a list of the top 10 sites receiving traffic from searches for ‘cv’ during the 4 weeks ending September 13th.

As you can see, Google Docs and Spreadsheets – the search giant’s online suite of productivity applications – was the top recipient over the period, capturing almost one in every five visits. Over 95% of these visits came via a paid link – although presumably in the case, the ‘price’ was an opportunity cost rather than actual cash! Looking through the list of search terms sending traffic to Google Docs and Spreadsheets over the period, ‘cv’ wasn’t the only content term in the list. The top search term was actually ‘calender’, followed by ‘cv’, while the top 20 also included ‘birthday cards’, ‘covering letter’, ‘letter writing’. Almost all of this traffic came from ‘paid’ terms.
This strategy of driving traffic from searches for things that people do with word processors and spreadsheets has obviously been successful. As the chart below illustrates, Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been steadily increasing its market share since launching, and traffic has increased by 152% over the last year. People are obviously using the service as well: the average session time is now over 25 minutes, up 32% on a year ago.

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