This trend holds true online as the total US visits to our category of Employment sites increased 8% in July 2012 compared to June 2012 and 18% versus July 2011. Overall, the Employment category received more than 758 million total US visits in July 2012.  The percentage of online traffic to the category has been increasing each month starting in February of this year.

Indeed.com was the top visited site receiving more than 96 million total US visits followed by LinkedIn.com and CareerBuilder.com. JobsRadar.com saw the biggest year-over-year growth among the top 10 visited sites.

Sites that grew the most since July 2011 include Indeed, LinkedIn, JobRapido and Jobs Radar.

So where is the traffic coming from? California, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas and New York provided the largest volume of traffic to Job sites in July 2012. The states that recorded the biggest year-over-year growth to Jobs sites included Maine, New Mexico, West Virginia, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Learn more about Experian Hitwise here.

Specifically, as of October 18, 2010, Experian Simmons found that 6.5% of U.S. adults had changed jobs for something better in the previous year. That’s a relative decline of 34% compared to January 14, 2008, when 9.9% of Americans said they had changed jobs for the better. Meantime, the share of Americans who changed jobs for something at either a lower level or with lower pay remained relatively stable. (As of October 18, 2010, 2.4% of Americans said that in the last year they took a job at a lower level or with lower pay than the one they had before.)

On a more positive note, it appears that Americans are rebounding in terms of moving up the corporate ladder. On April 5, 2010, just 4.6% of Americans said they had taken a better job in the past year, the lowest level recorded in the 145 week observation period. Since then, Americans are increasingly likely to be changing jobs for the better. In fact, comparing the October 2010 figures with those from April, we see that Americans today are 41% more likely to trade up at work today than they were just 6 months prior.

Given the current state of affairs, Americans are still not sure what the future holds in store. In fact, the share of Americans who believe they will change jobs for the better in the next year has fluctuated up and down in the previous years marked by economic turmoil. In any case, as of October 18, 2010, 8.2% of Americans believed they would be making a move to a better job in the next year, a relative increase of 24% compared to July 7, 2010, when only 6.6% of Americans believed they would be moving up the ladder at work. Just one percent of Americans expect to be changing jobs for something at a lower level of with lower pay in the next year.

For more information on Simmons DataStream weekly reporting of nearly 40,000 consumer variables, visit our website.

This week, we approach this data from a different point of view, by looking at changes in attitudes toward the future of the U.S. economy through the eyes of the employed versus the unemployed. Simmons DataStream shows us that just as in the case of small business owners, an increasing percentage of American adults, on average, – whether employed or unemployed – started feeling better about the future of the U.S. economy right after the height of the economic meltdown and the Presidential election in the latter part of 2008. In fact, on average in 2008, just 14% of those who were unemployed and an equal percentage of those who were employed thought that the U.S. economy would be better off in the next 12 months. Fast forward a year and optimism levels had spread to include 30% of the employed and 28% for those unemployed. 2010, however, paints a slightly different picture with optimism tapering off among both segments.

Interestingly, employed Americans now seem to be more jittery about the future of the U.S. economy than the unemployed. In fact, Simmons DataStream reveals that on July 19, 2010, only 18.5% of employed Americans were optimistic about the future of the U.S. economy compared with 37.7% of employed adults who were optimistic on August 3, 2009, a relative decline in optimism of 51% in just a year. During the same time period, the percentage of unemployed adults optimistic about the economy dropped to 21% from 34%, a decline of just 38%. from mid-August 2009 to mid-July 2010, we notice a decrease of 38%.

Just as in the case of increasingly wary small business owners, U.S. adults in general, regardless of their employment status are influenced by conflicting news about the economy, and their optimism has begun to falter. In the chart below, we see a correlation between unemployment levels reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and optimism. Specifically, rising unemployment levels have a strong negative impact on consumers, regardless of their employment status. If anything, those employed are the most fearful (hence the higher decline in optimism), perhaps because they still have got a job to lose.