Things are looking bleak in the job market. Budgets are running into constraints and it is perpetually impossible to secure any credit. Companies have been trying to weather the storm by reduction of workforce.

This is probably one of the reasons why the professional network, LinkedIn has seen a 22% increase in visitors in the US alone, over the previous month. 6.3 million Visitors in December 2008 sky rocketed to 7.7 million in January 2009; increasing the usual time spent on site by more than 100%. In most other cases, such a claim would be regarded by marketers as an analytics failure, but not so in the current financial situation.

The onset of the New Year and the potential onset of unemployment have resulted in most users making improvements in their profiles. The electronic form of professional character references on the professional networking portal, Recommendations, had gone up by nearly 65%. This was reported by an official LinkedIn Spokesperson.

It can only mean that users are trying to become more employ-able by taking references from ex-colleagues. It is not yet doom and gloom time for every industry. This will also be handy for LinkedIn in terms of its ad revenue which will get a boost because of this increased surge of visitors.