If LinkedIn can make $243M/year selling to recruiters and job seekers in a recession, what do you think happens when we have a global recovery and the inevitable hiring boom comes?
People are going to be 'networking' most intensely when they don't have a job or are worried about their current job. If there are fewer people looking for a job and those people get pulled out of the market more quickly, there's less money to be made from them.
LinkedIn is not likely to make money out of job seekers. Their fastest growing income stream is LinkedIn Corporation Solutions. I'd assume that headhunting is harder during good times, thus I think they are more cyclical than counter-cyclical.
I'll tell you what happens. Recruiters and third parties sign up in droves for the sole purpose to spam the userbase, which ultimately drives members away from the site.
LinkedIn earned their 100 million users by providing a professional networking platform where the users could choose who they network with. When the userbase has less of a choice regarding who contacts them, they'll abandon linkedIn as fast as a teenager terminating his MySpace account.
If LinkedIn can make $243M/year selling to recruiters and job seekers in a recession, what do you think happens when we have a global recovery and the inevitable hiring boom comes?