In the wake of a shaky economy and faltering job security, LinkedIn, a social networking site that connects business professionals to each other, is seeing record amounts of unique visitors.
Those who have been recently laid off their jobs — more than 200,000 people joined the ranks in January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — and even recent graduates who cannot find jobs are reeling from the combined effect of a 7.6 percent unemployment rate and more than 2,000 mass layoffs.
And while those affected have been cringing their ways through job searches and interviews, LinkedIn, which was launched in 2003, is benefitting from the bad news.
From December to January, LinkedIn’s total unique visitors jumped 22 percent to 7.7 million, according to data from comScore. The site had 6.3 million unique visitors the month before.
Not only are more people visiting the site, they’re also spending more time on it. According to the same data, total minutes spent on LinkedIn in January doubled from December’s numbers to 96.8 million.
But Michael Walden, professor and extension economist, said businesses — even those that aren’t laying off their employees — aren’t hiring.
“It’s horrible. It’s a bad economy,” Walden, who instructs agricultural and resource economics, said. “It will be a very bad economy for graduates to get jobs. It’s probably the worst economy in 25 years.”
He said regardless of personal contact with employers, it’s going to be difficult to get a job.
“This is not to tell students not to use all possible means of getting their resumes and their information out,” Walden said. “But the unfortunate fact is that businesses simply aren’t hiring, so it doesn’t matter how people get your information, whether from an in-person interview or through a Web site.”
According to LinkedIn, more than 6,000 current and former N.C. State students have signed up for a membership.
And this group does not represent those who are passively looking for jobs.
A study produced by Business Communication Quarterly, which randomly selected 200 LinkedIn members, could not “confirm the claim that business-oriented social networking Web sites may be fruitful sources for identifying potential employees.”
“However,” it continued,”the data derived from this study dispute the claim that business-oriented social networking sites provide a large population of passive jobseekers.”
Recent graduates looking — and failing — to find jobs might have to wait until the end of the year, when Walden said the market will finally hit rock-bottom. Only then will it be able to rebound.
The stimulus package, he said, will likely help only a little.
“Think of the economy as a person falling down into a pit at 50 feet per minute. The stimulus package is going to slow our fall to 45 feet a minute,” Walden said. “The current thinking is that we will hit the bottom at the end of the year at the earliest. We need to hit that before we come back up.”
He said the stimulus package will primarily help those who are already out of work.
“It has a fair amount of money that’s going to extend unemployment benefits for people who are out of work. There are large amounts of money for Medicaid. There’s money for college students,” Walden said. “All of which is good, but if it’s going to have a modest impact on the overall direction of the economy.”