What Google Trends are Interesting for Staffing Firms?

Google Trends is a fun toy to play with if you are trying to figure out whether Paris Hilton or Britney Spears is more popular on Google. There are other interesting comparisons within Marissa Meyer’s Google Trends Tutorial that coincide with an analysis of the hottest searches of 2007. My question is, how can this Google popularity contest be used if you work at a staffing firm?

Competitor Popularity
Google Trends analyzes how many searches have been done for the terms entered. From reviewing Hudson’s own weblogs I know that a LOT of incoming traffic to our website is from users typing our company name into Google and not the browser address bar. I often use this as a gauge of name recognition. A person heard our name someplace and is on the hunt to find us. Let’s have a look at a few staffing firms shall we?

Vendor Popularity
Can we then find out the popularity amongst the general public of our job board and sourcing friends by seeing their relative popularity in Google Search? Try putting in your favorite vendors and see how they’ve been trending over the last few years.

Job Market Popularity
You can get a general sense for the size of different job categories by feeding those into the tool. It is interesting to see that the searches on all of the categories follow a volume pattern that decreases from Q1 through to Q4, except in 2007 when Q3 seems to have more seekers in the market.

Perhaps you can comment with other interesting Google Trends you see that are relevant. Once the impending API for Google Trends gets released, maybe some smart developer can make a website out of Google Trends for recruiting. I would love to see it mimic the “Today’s Hot Trends” list, and make it be Today’s Hot Job Trends.