First-time unemployment filings rose last week, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Labor, surprising economists who had expected a decline to 465,000.

Initial jobless claims rose to 480,000 for the week ending Dec. 12, from 473,000 the previous week. It’s the second week in a row that new filings increased. However, the four-week moving average fell for the 15th week straight. The Labor Department says on average, in each of the last four weeks, 467,500 new claims for unemployment benefits were filed.

The Labor Department report says 5.186 million Americans filed a continuing claim during the week. That’s an increase of 5,000 from the previous week, but over the previous four weeks, the weekly average of continuing claims was down.

What do you suppose ZoomInfo is up to?

The company launched Fresh Contacts a month ago offering participants two months free access to the ZoomInfo database just for uploading their personal contacts. Upload one or one thousand contacts, it’s all the same – two months’ access to the 45 million contacts and 5 million company profiles ZoomInfo claims.

Without a doubt, it’s a shot over the bow of competitor Jigsaw, which built its leads business on an early faith in crowdsourcing.

But as you’ll see shortly, there could be more afoot here than a front-on challenge to a competitor.

Enlisting users to provide content is not unknown at ZoomInfo, where the subjects of its machine-created profiles have long been able to correct and update them by “claiming” them.

But this wholesale pitch to users is a first for the company that built a business by aggregating personal and corporate information. Spiders quarry nuggets from all over the visible Web, which are then assembled into profiles.

“The center of our success is technology, and it always will be,” CEO Sam Zales told me at the outset of a GotoMeeting presentation Tuesday. “The secret sauce is really how we connect the dots.”

Even as he was saying that, he was introducing the company’s three-legged stool, which, besides the spidered, processed, and packaged profile content, and the “claimed” profiles, now includes the user-uploaded contacts.

The Fresh Contacts program is one of those win-wins. ZoomInfo gets fresh and updated contacts for its database. Participants, many of whom are expected to be job hunters, get free access to the database, which can make the difference between a resume in an ATS and one that goes directly to a hiring manager.

The contacts themselves get to say yea or nay to being included in the database.

This third leg of the stool is no doubt giving Jigsaw some indigestion. Founded in 2003 on a faith in crowdsourcing, Jigsaw built a community of loyal players who earn points by uploading or correcting contacts. You can buy contacts or trade your points for them.

Like ZoomInfo, it has company data, crowdsourced and presented in wiki style.

Both companies have their limitations. Jigsaw’s contacts are pretty good. The carrot-and-stick reward system tends to keep them fairly accurate. But voluntary contributions of business-card info means the bigger the company, the better the data. Smaller companies, where there are fewer players in the Jigsaw system, are less well-represented and what info there is tends to be staler.

ZoomInfo spiders keep its data fresh, especially the business intelligence. The downside, though, is that machines aren’t very good at telling one John Doe from another. And then there’s the matter of individuals and companies who make an effort to hide addresses and direct dial contact info from the search engines and the “leads” companies.

What if, though, you could combine the self-correcting mechanism of a Jigsaw, with the machine updating of ZoomInfo? And what if somehow you could convince everyone they just had to maintain a personal profile, the way LinkedIn has?

Sam Zales

I ran that scenario past Zales as we were talking. There’s no doubt, he said, that users can mediate spidered content to improve its accuracy. They do that on Wikipedia very effectively. And spiders more quickly can keep a profile fresh and current.

But building a social network such as LinkedIn’s is not easy. That may be why Zales was emphatic in saying, “I want to be clear that we don’t want to be called a social network.”

LinkedIn, he told me, is a complimentary service to ZoomInfo. You can research companies and individuals on ZoomInfo, then go to LinkedIn to see if there is someone in your network who can help open a door to the company or the contact.

Still, something Master Burnett joked about at the Social Recruiting Summit is germane here. Burnett, who’s managing director of John Sullivan’s consulting firm, was poking fun at the digitally illiterate executives who run America’s companies when he said that their LinkedIn profiles are stuck at around 12 percent complete.

That struck a chord when I mentioned it to Zales. ZoomInfo’s spiders could build those profiles and keep them fresh, while the execs would only have to police them.

They can do that with their ZoomInfo profile now, but few do. After three years, not quite a million profiles have been “claimed” by their owners. LinkedIn hit 50 million profiles this year, all of them created by their owners.

See the potential? Zales does. I asked him if my scenario was behind his curve or ahead of it.  “You’re right there,” he said, somewhat ambiguously.

While ZoomInfo might not aspire to be a social networking site, there’s no reason it couldn’t partner with one.

If that’s the direction Zales is taking the company, he didn’t let on. In fact, the Fresh Contacts program, as it is currently structured, is all about growing the ZoomInfo contact database, rather than building a community. At the end of the two months of free access, users have to start paying if they want to continue. At $1,000 a year, the casual user and the job hunter will bow out.

But Zales is a savvy business executive with a background in marketing at American Express and B2B online sales. So he has not put an end date to the Fresh Contacts program and told me it could continue, perhaps with some changes.

Perhaps with something akin to a community?

Today brings news of the U.S. Army’s $38 million recruiting video games, a recruiting marketing video that is surprisingly fresh and entertaining and should be required watching for anyone considering an HR career as a recruiter, and a change at Vault.

America’s Army

When you’re recruiting for an organization where the expression “taking potshots” is no mere idiom, you have to be innovative in your approach, not to mention cutting edge to reach the 17-25 year olds who are your (pardon the expression) target.

No wonder, therefore, that the U.S. Army has been using video games as a recruiting tool for years.

Now comes a report from GameSpot, a site for news about the digital games industry, that puts the 10-year-cost cost of developing and managing the Army’s free PC games called America’s Army at $32.8 million. The original cost to develop the first version of the games was budgeted at $7 million.

An entirely new version — America’s Army 3 — was released in June, and almost immediately the Army cut ties with the game’s developer. GameSpot reported earlier the Army will take over future development and game management.That will be handled by an Army unit formed in 2005 specifically to oversee development of the game.

Head2Head

This Canadian RPO and headhunter has a new video out that will make no friends with newspapers or job boards. Who cares, though. It’s a lot of fun and, ironically perhaps, it may be the most honest career video ever made.

“Stop putting in print ads. Stop posting on job boards. You may as well set fire to your money,” says an aggressive, sharply dressed gent who at first look might be an arms dealer or a central casting FBI agent.

That’s the opening scene of “What Can 60 Hours Do For You?” For the next 4 1/2 minutes you’re treated to snapshots of a 60-hour recruiting marathon to fill a req for a client where “failure is not an option.”

The credits claim that Head2Head staff wrote and produced the video. The parts were also played by staff members who should all get Oscars for their acting. (Or was it acting?)

Take the 4 minutes and 53 seconds to watch and enjoy. And then you tell me if it doesn’t nail headhunting. Still want to be a recruiter?

Vault.com

Vault, the venerable career information site that was an early leader in providing job seekers help in researching a company and building a personal network, has been struggling this year.

Erik Sorenson called it “stiff headwinds” driven by the faltering U.S. economy. In a memo earlier this month to the remaining staff at Vault, he described 2009 as a “period of right-sizing the company.”

Sorenson, the former president of MSNBC who became CEO in 2007 when Vault was acquired by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, has now stepped aside. His replacement is Claude Sheer.

In looking toward 2010, Sorenson said in the memo, “We need to beef up our senior management and strengthen our strategic efforts by bringing on someone with different knowledge, skills, and interests whose experience and passion is in growth platforms, strategic partnerships, and Internet deal-making.”

The change was effective on Dec. 7th. Sorenson is now Vault chairman and a consultant.

In a blog post of less than 300 words late Friday afternoon, Google announced changes to the way search results will be reported. From now on, the results of an identical keyword search could be different for each user.

It’s been the case for some time that identical searches have produced slightly different rankings in the results depending on the searcher’s country or, in some cases, city. It’s also been the case that users with Google accounts get customized search results, based on their search histories.

Now, though, Google is extending the customization to all searchers unless they happen to reject cookies or figure out how to opt-out. The video offers Google’s explanation of how it works.

For recruiters, the implications of Google’s expanded Personalized Search are broad, if not entirely clear.

As Mark Hornung, SVP of Strategy with Bernard Hodes, wrote in a note tipping me to the development, “The long-term implications for SEO are interesting, to say the least. As with Sidewiki, however, it is impossible at this stage to predict what, exactly, the impact will be on recruiters and recruiting.”

One likely result is that employer branding will become even more important.

For example, a job seeker who regularly clicks into listings for brand-name firms will be offered fewer and fewer alternative companies at the top of the search results.

Hornung and I talked about what that could mean for other firms whose jobs may no longer make the first page of results.

A job seeker might miss out on a great job, because Google sees they mostly look at openings from only certain companies. There’s a potential, now, with this personalized search, for a “diminution of the serendipity factor,” Hornung agreed. He also suspects that candidate diversity may be impacted for the same reason.

“Those who don’t know about me or have an indifferent (or worse) opinion of my company will have even less chance of seeing my links in their results,” he says.

Google insists that it will still present the same array of results, though the results may be ranked differently.

“We want diversity of results,” Google’s product manager Johanna Wright, was quoted as saying. “This is something we talk about a lot internally and believe in. We want there to be variety of sources and opinions in the Google results. We want them in personalized search to be skewed to the user, but we don’t want that to mean the rest of the web is unavailable to them.”

Noted sourcer and Arbita EVP Shally Steckerl doubts that, at least in the short term, most companies will feel the effect.

The universal customization, says Steckerl, “is going to make something slightly more difficult for them that they weren’t doing anyway.”

What he means is that since most companies weren’t doing much in the way of  search engine optimization in the first place they might never notice the impact. For the small percentage of employers who actively work to improve their rankings, “the gym just got moved 10 miles further,” he joked, referring to those unkept New Year’s resolutions about working out regularly.

For sourcers, Steckerl says the impact should be even smaller. Narrowly drawn, properly written Boolean searches for candidates, will still turn up the same list it did before personalized search.

Recruiters can also opt-out of personalized search. And, says Steckerl, sourcers, unlike job seekers, typically conduct searches on a variety of engines. In fact, he suspects that Microsoft’s Bing.com might be the impetus for Google to make personalized searches universal.

“Bing really is better at semantic search,” he says. “Bing is doing a better job of figuring out what you are looking for … This is Google trying to catch up.”

Hodes’ Hornung agrees that Google’s announcement Friday might be a response to Bing’s gain — slowly, and mostly at Yahoo’s expense — of market share.

Regardless of the reason, though, Hornung counsels employers to closely watch their search rankings.

I probably shouldn’t have to say this, but do the monitoring after opting out of the personalization program, lest you and others in the company skew the results.

Hornung warned about that in his initial email to me:

“One could envision a scenario where the employer believes that they rank highly on organic Google searches partially because the employer frequently does searches on their own jobs, thus skewing the profile and the results Google shows. It could also make a competitor appear better than it really is for the same reason.”

SEO is not a “once a year thing,” Hornung says. “You have to stay on top of it.” There are several firms, including Hodes, that provide monitoring and SEO services. But he admits that most companies simply won’t budget for it, even if they are aware of the need.

Rejoice. Do a happy dance. Say “Hallelujah.” Again. “Hallelujah.” The unemployment rate has dropped to 10 percent. Job losses for November were 11,000, the lowest since Dec. 2007, the last month that the number of jobs in the U.S. actually grew.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which released November’s jobs numbers a few hours ago, also dramatically scaled back the numbers for September and October. Job losses initially reported for those months — 219,000 and 190,000 respectively — were revised to 139,000 and 111,000.

Economists had been expecting that November’s report would show job losses in the range of 114,000 to 125,000 and an unemployment rate unchanged from October’s 10.2 percent.

The numbers caught them off guard, with many cautioning that a single break in an otherwise unrelenting pattern of triple-digit losses may be a sign of a genuine turnaround. Or it may be just an aberration.

“It is like a patient after having collapsed with a heart attack sitting up and taking a breath—nothing more than that,” Allen L. Sinai, founder of the research firm Decision Economics, told The New York Times. “Things are getting better, but a one-month respite, frankly, means nothing in the context of the worst labor market ever seen since the 1930s.”

Chris Rupkey of Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi was much more optimistic assessing the report for the Wall Street Journal: “We are one step closer today to the stabilization of the labor market. The massive job cuts during the financial crisis last fall were too aggressive and firms will need to rehire staff within the next couple of months.”

Wall Street clearly liked the good news, running up the Dow more than 100 points shortly after the market opened. Most of the early gains were given back as the euphoria subsided, but stocks were still up at midday in New York.

If consumers sensed the improvement last month, they didn’t share their hopes with The Conference Board. The Consumer Confidence Index compiled by the global business research and leadership group and released two weeks ago showed little change from the previous month.

The November index was 49.5, just slightly above October’s 48.7. While consumers generally didn’t think business conditions were worsening, they also didn’t believe jobs would become more plentiful in the months ahead.

The Monster Index, released Thursday, showed little change from October. The Index measures the availability of jobs posted online. The Index declined one point from October to November.

However, another measure of online jobs posting, The Conference Board’s Help-Wanted Online Data Series, showed an increase in the number of new jobs posted online, the first increase since August.

The BLS reported that manufacturing and construction were the biggest losers, shedding a combined 68,000 jobs. Another 17,000 jobs were lost in IT, with telecommunications responsible for 9,000 of the jobs.

The losses were largely offset by gains in the service sector where hiring for temporary help jumped by 52,000. Healthcare, the only sector that has consistently grown jobs during the recession, added another 21,000 jobs.

In a sign that the jobs improvement has legs, the BLS said the average workweek increased by .2 hours. It’s now at 33.2 hours for production and nonsupervisory workers.

Even with the decline in the unemployment rate, the number of Americans not working or working at part-time jobs because they can’t find anything else or so discouraged they have stopped looking for work came to 26.9 million. Of that number, 15.4 million were unemployed in November. The number of long-term unemployed — those unemployed for more than 27 weeks — rose to 5.9 million.

Those workers may have a tough time finding work, even if companies begin to again add jobs. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told a Senate committee considering his appointment to a second term that the unemployment rate won’t change much next year.

The Wall Street Journal, citing minutes of the Fed’s early November meeting, said government economists expect unemployment to hover above 9 percent a year from now and decline to somewhere above 8 percent in 2011.

for production and nonsupervisory workers

Matt Ferguson doesn’t see pay for performance replacing the pay to post model for job boards anytime soon, if ever. Nor have the job aggregators had much of an impact on the business.

Rather, says CareerBuilder’s CEO, it’s social media in all its forms that poses the biggest threat to the job board industry. The “biggest threat and the biggest opportunity,” he said in a conference call Wednesday with a group of analysts and others.

Arranged by Stifel Financial Corp., Ferguson shared his take on the economy, the job board business, and competitor Monster during a free-ranging 45 minutes Q &A.

Not surprisingly, Ferguson took a few swipes at the Monster, shrugging off the company’s $100 million investment in a site redesign and, especially, in a new, enhanced resume search.

Matt Ferguson

Despite the chatter about Monster’s Power Resume Search on blogs and elsewhere, Ferguson said he has yet to hear it mentioned by any of CareerBuilder’s customers. What’s more, he suggested the new search tool may be limited in its usefulness, since corporate recruiters do much of their work via an ATS.

“They have not integrated” the new Monster tools with the systems, Ferguson said, adding that for CareerBuilder, “It’s business as usual… We have had a recommend engine for five years.”

He declined to discuss the size of CareerBuilder’s international business, saying he wouldn’t talk about a report the company’s dollar volume was in the $50 million range. Acknowledging that Monster had the lead in Europe — but suggesting that might not be true in most of the rest of the world — Ferguson said CareerBuilder was “closing the gap in traffic.”

However, in the pay-for-performance area, Ferguson was adamant that it wasn’t gaining traction within the job board industry, despite Monster’s suggestion that variable pricing for resumes (at least) could be in the company’s future.

“I don’t see it going to a price per hire,” he said. “It’s still an advertising medium.”

Nor, he said, does he feel the pay-to-post model is threatened by the job search engines.

Services like Indeed, which just celebrated its fifth birthday, and SimplyHired,  collect job listings from across the web and aggregate them so job seekers don’t have to conduct multiple searches. By using freely available applications, content publishers and other job boards can make some or all of the aggregated jobs available on their own site.

The sites have aggressively promoted a pay-for-click pricing model that allows an employer to get higher visibility for their position, while paying only when a job seeker clicks on their post.

While the traffic Indeed and SimplyHired receive have pushed them into the top tier of job sites, Ferguson said, “I don’t know that the aggregators have had much impact.” Their biggest customers, he said, “have been the job boards themselves.”

Social media such as LinkedIn does present a challenge to the traditional job board industry, Ferguson said, noting that CareerBuilder has a partnership deal with Facebook. The site itself doesn’t present a direct threat to job boards, at least not the way LinkedIn does, he added.  But, “social media in aggregate” does.

Reports out today may be foreshadowing optimistic news Friday when the U.S. Department of Labor issues its monthly jobs numbers.

Economists are expecting that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will report that between 114,000 and 125,000 jobs were lost in November. If the BLS numbers come anywhere close to the lower end, it will be the smallest job loss since the recession began in December 2007.

The reports, including a Federal Reserve assessment saying the economy in most parts of the country “improved modestly,” come a day in advance of a White House jobs summit Thursday. A broad group of top CEOs, small business owners, academics, and economists will huddle with President Obama to discuss how to reverse the job losses and start growing work.

While the losses have been diminishing, they are seemingly unrelenting. This morning the ADP National Employment Report said 169,000 private sector jobs were lost in November. It’s the eighth consecutive month of declines in lost jobs and the lowest loss since July 2008.

ADP also revised its estimate of October’s job loss, which the company had initially pegged at 203,000. Wednesday’s report lowered the number to 195,000.

Still a Reuters survey predicted the ADP number would be closer to 155,000. Other surveys placed the number as low as 150,000. In any case, the variance had little effect on the stock market, which also took in stride a relatively upbeat report from the Federal Reserve.

The Fed’s so-called Beige Book reported improvements in eight of the central bank’s 12 districts. Consumer spending increased and home sales, particularly at the low end of the market, had picked up, leading the Fed to declare that the economy was improving “modestly.”

Job growth, however, remains a challenge, the report said, warning  “further layoffs, sluggish hiring, and high levels of unemployment” will continue at least for the near term.

Another report, this one from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, confirmed the Fed’s expectation of continuing layoffs, but at a pace that is the lowest in almost two years. The global outplacement firm said employers announced 50,349 planned job cuts in November, which is the fewest number of monthly job cuts since December 2007. It’s the fourth consecutive month that layoff announcements have dropped.

The report said that job cuts have averaged 69,252 since July 1, less than half the 149,446 monthly cuts from January through June.

Meanwhile, The Conference Board reported that online job listings jumped in November by 106,500 listings. The last increase in job listings was in August when 169,300 new jobs were posted online. Typically, job listings slow down in November and December, so the increase suggests a greater optimism on the part of employers.

Even so, Gad Levenson, senior economist with The Conference Board, called the jobs improvement “sluggish. We have yet to see a significant increase in employers’ demand for labor, and, until we see job openings pick up, it will be hard to bring down the unemployment rate.”

The Conference Board

Job loss, the Conference Board said, is a key reason why the Consumer Confidence Index is stuck in the doldrums. The Index increased slightly in November to 49.5 from a revised 48.7 in October.

“The moderate improvement in the short-term outlook was the result of a decrease in the percent of consumers expecting business and labor market conditions to worsen, as opposed to an increase in the percent of consumers expecting conditions to improve, ” said Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center. “Income expectations remain very pessimistic and consumers are entering the holiday season in a very frugal mood.”

I don’t personally know Carmen Hudson. But I’d like to.

I heard her speak at a conference a few years ago and last month caught her presentation at the Social Recruiting Summit. Both times I came away with two thoughts: How am I ever going to remember everything she shared, and what’s the secret to her energy and enthusiasm?

She’s a stylish dresser, says Dave Mendoza, with a special love of shoes and a dream of entering the World Series of Poker. She’s on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and too many more to list. Her blog, PeopleShark, is aptly named for a recruiter who is a  recruiter’s recruiter.

A quick Google search — Sorry. In deference to her that should read “A quick Yahoo search” — and you find page after page of listings for her conference appearances, her interviews, her recruiting advice, and, now, her new gig as founder and CEO of Tweetajob.

For Tweetajob, the name says it all. Jobseekers create a profile detailing their work interests and geographic preferences. Recruiters post jobs which are then tweeted to the appropriate candidates. It’s as simple as that.

“We wanted our site to be intuitive, easy to use and understand. Twitter is all about bare-bones simplicity, so that’s what you will see in our front-end and back-end design,” Hudson says, explaining how Tweetajob is different from other similar services, such as TweetMyJobs, an almost identical service that launched early this year.

“Our targeting algorithm distributes matching jobs to jobseekers, sending the tweets instantly. Jobseekers see the jobs in their Twitter timeline, or on their mobile device. Upgraded tweets are also posted to our site, and SEO’d so that they show up in Google search results and they are distributed to other job boards.”

Hudson began experimenting with Twitter while at Yahoo, developing talent communities and cautiously tweeting jobs while trying to avoid spamming the prospects who signed on as followers. Several months she left Yahoo, where she had been senior manager of talent acquisition, taking those lessons with her.

With the same passion that earned her and her team a “Superstar” award at Yahoo and a host of recommendations on LinkedIn dating back to 2004, Hudson built a team and launched the new Twitter service on Nov. 1.

“I was pretty awestruck by the power of Twitter when I first signed up in the spring of 2008,” she told me. “Twitter is an entirely new communication platform, as well as a new style of communication. It’s difficult to see when you log in for the first time, but if you spend a bit of time there, you start to see the possibilities.”

Those possibilities, says Hudson, are broad.  “I think we have only begun to scratch the surface of how we’ll use Twitter to recruit. Having competitors will only make us better.”

The next step, she tells me, is for Tweetajob to go international.

“Other countries –- the UK, India, and Australia in particular -– are hungry for a Twitter solution, because so many of their candidates rely on mobile devices for information. Our marketing plan includes wooing recruiters, being part of the recruiting community, supporting events, providing education and insight. It also includes big plans to attract passive and active jobseekers. As a startup, we will rely heavily on social media and viral marketing, of course.”

“We think of about a hundred ideas every day. We have to force ourselves to focus!”

The New Jersey SHRM council and eight other state HR groups have been honored for their innovative programs addressing local workforce challenges.

The Garden State (NJ) Council won a Pinnacle Award from the Society for Human Resource Management for its military career transition program. Developed in cooperation with Tip of the Arrow and officials at New Jersey’s Ft. Dix, the program is aimed at helping returning Iraq war veterans translate their military training and experience into the language of civilian recruiters.

ERE wrote about the Ultimate Warrior Career Workshops and Job Fair in August. Some 500 military soon-to-be discharged personnel attended the workshops where volunteer recruiters worked with them in groups and one-on-one, in sessions covering everything from writing a resume to preparing an elevator speech.

As the announcement of the award notes:

“More than a provider of “feel good” moments, the program’s goal is to share expert HR knowledge and insights about job searching and interviewing by delivering a broad scope of information and one-on-one attention for each service member.”

Sherrill Curtis, an organizer of the program, said in an email after the awards were announced that the program in New Jersey is growing, with colleges and universities signing on, as well as expanding with more volunteer HR coaches.

“With a local SHRM chapter in Indiana also winning for their similar program,” Curtis wrote, “we are well on our way with SHRM national support for drawing in volunteer HR professionals as career coaches from across the U.S.”

The second military oriented program to be recognized was organized by the Evansville (Indiana)-Area Human Resource Association in cooperation with the Indiana Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve. Besides offering career counseling and connecting employers and transitioning military directly through referrals and job postings, the Evansville-Area SHRM affiliate asked its member employers to list the certifications they require for various jobs. In turn, the military in the area is now offering opportunities for its personnel to earn those specific certifications.

SHRM also recognized programs to retain young workers in New Orleans; a Texas career fair specifically for workers with criminal records; a telethon-like seven-hour TV broadcast by two chapters in North Carolina that provided on-air counseling and assistance to about 1,100 callers; a job interview training program for high school seniors in Pennsylvania; a job counseling program for single-parent women and families receiving public assistance in New Mexico; a “Workforce Readiness Toolkit” for individual job seekers and employers in New Hampshire, and a SHRM chapter leadership preparation and training program.

More details on each of these programs and the Pinnacle Awards are available here.

There’s a new, free, ATS in town. Launched today, Zoho Recruit is a nicely featured candidate management system that’s suitable for smaller employers and staffing agencies.

It’s built by the same people who launched Zoho People, a low-cost talent management system we wrote about a while back.

Like People, Zoho Recruit handles all the basics, and then some. You can create a posting from a req, publish it (manually) to your own website, export it to other sites and, of course, manage all the inbound resumes and applications. Read more...

American businesses will stop shedding jobs by the end of March, says a new report from the National Association of Business Economists.

The organization’s latest outlook is even more hopeful than the one issued just a month ago. Today’s report says that the U.S. economy will grow at an annual 3.2 percent GDP, half a point higher than the NABE’s October forecast.

The economists say the recovery will be lead by the  housing turnaround already underway, which will gain momentum next year, and by business investment in equipment, software, and inventories.

“While the recovery has been jobless so far, that should soon change,” said NABE President Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene University. “Within the next few months, companies should be adding instead of cutting jobs.”

Consumers, however, are unlikely to open their wallets anytime soon. The 48 economists participating in the survey expect “lackluster consumer spending gains over the coming year.” Instead, consumers will continue saving, averaging 4 percent during 2010.

The unemployment rate, now at 10.2 percent, is expected to hover there through the first half of next year, declining only slightly — to 9.6 percent — by year’s end. The report said that next to the size of the federal deficit, unemployment over the next five years was the biggest concern of the economists on the survey panel.

When Monster bought Trovix in the summer of 2008, the blogosphere popped with wonder at how the job board would make use of Trovix’ job matching technology.

Forrester Research analyst Zach Thomas suggested that, “By making this acquisition, Monster is putting a real emphasis on search and they believe it will help them leap-frog the competition.” Others were less generous.

The answer has been coming ever since Monster began beta testing Power Resume Search several months ago. A few weeks ago, confident that its $100 million investment was the homerun it expected, Monster turned Power Search live, premiering it during an analyst meeting that was also webcast over a marathon five hours or so.

Tuesday, the company demoed the new search for a group of recruitment consultants and bloggers. And the result was no mere home run; think grand slam.

In a word, Monster’s new Power Resume Search is stunning. Stunning in its simplicity. Stunning in its speed. Stunning in its ability to intuit skills from a title, and to rank and rerank the resulting candidates depending on what skills and other qualities you decide important. Stunning in its potential for changing the job board business.

If you haven’t tried it for yourself, go here and test it out. What you’ll discover is that you can source candidates (if you really want) simply by entering a job title. Look at the results. Add a specific skill or a degree or some other parameter and the ranking changes.

What makes Power Resume Search different — and better — than the typical keyword resume search is that it has the intelligence to cut through the duff. The examples the Monster folks used in the demo were searches for bankers and lawyers. But try your own search, for, say a bookkeeper. Instead of getting a list of hundreds of resumes with bookkeeper in the text, you get a few dozen candidates who are bookkeepers and are most likely to be looking for that kind of work.

Trovix built its job-matching capability around context and concepts. A bookkeeper doesn’t need an understanding of Sarbanes-Oxley; a CFO does. You know that. But unless you exclude candidates with that term in their resume in a standard keyword search, you’re going to get CFO candidates with bookkeeping in their backgrounds along with accountants and … you get the idea.

It’s “the world’s best search engine,” said Monster’s Javid Muhammedali at the beginning of the demo. Google might take issue with the boast, but he is certainly on the mark when he says one of the virtues of Power Resume Search is that it is a search engine “that really helps you stop searching.”

One incidental, yet valuable feature is how a search can unearth skills not listed in the job req, which could or should be. It helps drive the recruiting process forward by arming recruiters with information they can take back to the hiring manager, Muhammedali explained.

It has some other nice touches, including how it presents candidate information and the side-by-side comparison of candidates.

Power Resume Search has a counterpart for job seekers in Power Job Search.

I ran a few job searches on a variety of different titles and got great results, which, in my case, meant fewer, but more accurate results. Monster showed this off during the demo using “business development manager” for the search with the result that all nine listings were specific to the title.

Monster points out that this search has benefits for the employer: the ad visibility improves, as does the likelihood that the applicants will be of higher quality since an ad won’t just turn up in a search because it happens to contain the seeker’s keywords.

Before you go away thinking all your sourcing problems are solved, know that this is a premium service, for which Monster will charge $845 for a two-week access. Right now, it’s a bargain at $260 for three days of searching in an area.

It’s also better at sourcing some types of jobs than others. New job terminology has to be added by Monster, though you can search for a specific keyword in a resume. And it won’t store search histories for OFCCP auditing until early next year.

Even so, it’s a big step. For Monster, it’s a $100 million-plus step. The company spent $72.5 million to acquire Trovix and $30-$35 million more integrating it into the job board. Monster intends to get back its investment and then some.

Muhammedali and Louis Gagnon, SVP Global Products, said the new search opens the door to differential pricing for resume sourcing. It probably won’t be long before Monster puts a higher price on CFOs than on bookkeepers.

Why can’t they do that now? They probably could, but the technical management is a challenge, since the resumes of CFOs and bookkeepers may well be part of the search results in a standard keyword search. But the Trovix powered search is smart enough to know that when you’re looking for a CFO, you don’t want a bookkeeper who reports to a CFO.

Narrowing down results with high precision saves time. Lots of time. And gets better results. That’s worth something.

With the recruiting industry stuck deep in the recession rut, it’s no surprise that companies are looking to diversify.

The RightThing, an RPO, acquired AIRS, a technology and training firm, in 2008. About the same time, CareerBuilder launched Personified, a recruitment consulting and outsourcing business. Two months ago, recruitment technology vendor Taleo acquired Worldwide Compensation, a comp management technology and services provider.

The oddest diversification, though, has to be TalentHook’s launch of a directory of, ahem, gentlemen’s clubs and their entertainers. The company that provides resume search software to hundreds of employers now lets you search for what less euphemistically are called strip clubs.

Gentlemen’sNightLife.com claims that it has “information on over 2,400 clubs and their performers.” I did not test that claim, at least not thoroughly, though I found that the performer list was limited to only a handful of cities right now, including Las Vegas, TalentHook’s headquarters.

I did find a number of fields you won’t find in TalentHook Sphere, a resume sourcing tool that searches out resumes from the public web and pay boards. On TalentHook Sphere you find fields for experience, salary, and education, among others. On GentlemensNightLife you search for breast size, butt, and body, among others.

It looks to be a membership site, since there is a signup page and a member login. So the searches I was able to do might be limited as a preview.

I emailed Phil Gonzalez, owner of both GentlemensNightLife and TalentHook, but he didn’t get back to me.

In the wake of ERE’s Social Recruiting Summit Monday comes a contest to expand job seeker use of Twitter, while another quarter counsels caution in how job seekers use social media, but says it’s a must for 21st-century workers.

TweetMyJobs, one of the first job distribution services to use Twitter, is now using the service and its followers to promote itself.  TweetMyJobs is running a contest that has a plasma TV or $500 as its grand prize and the only requirement for winning is to watch a video and enter. So far, so traditional. Here’s where the social media aspect comes in: The winner will be the person who accumulates the most points during the contest. Points are earned each time a person clicks on a unique link to access the TweetMyJobs site.

Contestants are emailed a unique link that can be tweeted, posted to Facebook, and shared on over 20 other social sites. The more friends, followers, and connections you have and can convince to click the link, the more points you earn.

It’s a clever contest that TweetMyJobs founder Gary Zukowski says will cost him less than $2,500 and will “show just how powerful social media can be.”

“By using social media we will reach thousands of targeted individuals in a cost-effective manner. It mirrors the service we offer to our clients,” adds Zukowski. TweetMyJobs earns its money by tweeting job postings to job seeking subscribers for a fee.

Zukowski’s contest comes amidst a boom in the use of social media for job hunting and branding. No less an authority than outplacement specialist Challenger, Gray & Christmas is counseling job seekers to profile, post, and tweet.

“We feel that these new networking tools are essential and now advise all of the job seekers going through our program to open LinkedIn accounts and to consider other services such as Facebook and Twitter,” says CEO John Challenger.

The firm cautions job seekers — and this is good advice for recruiters, too — that the various social media are not interchangeable. Nor, says Challenger, will they “replace the face-to-face connections that are critical to a successful search.”

The Challenger announcement cites a recent Jobvite survey that found some 80 percent of companies using or planning to use social networking sites for recruiting. LinkedIn is already heavily used for that purpose, but Facebook recruiting now attracts 59 percent of recruiters, according to the survey. Twitter is used by 42 percent of recruiters.

Because of the pervasive use of widgets and apps, it is possible now for a Twitter message to be simultaneously posted to dozens of sites. Likewise, Facebook status updates can be tweeted automatically, with apps then reposting the tweet to other social media including, say, LinkedIn.

Hence, the warning from Challenger that, “Social networking should be used cautiously.”

He also counsels that online networking is not the only tool. “These online connections are superficial at best. It takes a lot more work to turn them into meaningful relationships that can advance your job search. In the end,” says Challenger, “face-to-face meetings are still the most effective relationship-building tool available.”

Which brings us to Eric Barker. Remember him?  He’s the freshly minted MBA so eager to work at Microsoft that he took out an ad on Facebook to make his pitch. I wrote about him in May.

I got an email from him a few weeks ago. Still no Microsoft job, though he is optimistic: “Did hear from a MSFT recruiter. We’re trying to place me but we haven’t found the right fit yet.”

However he did land a leading role in Facebook Fantasies, an official anthology of Facebook stories, where he is the subject of one of the chapters. The book publishes in February.

Despite mixed results with HR outsourcing, outsourcing parts or all of the recruitment process is growing as companies discover the flexibility and scalability that external worker provisioning can offer.

A new study from outsourcing research firm Everest Global suggests that while the recession is reducing the size of RPO contracts, interest is growing, especially among employers with 8,00-15,000 employees.

“RPO buyers are attracted to a value proposition with cost reduction and scalability elevated due to the current economic climate, followed by improvement of recruitment processes, access to best-of-breed options and technologies, and enhanced employer branding,” said Katrina Menzigian, Global’s VP of  Research.

Growth has been strongest among high tech and telecom firms, with the largest employers — those with more than 15,000 employees — accounting for about 60 percent of the business. North America and Europe are the focal points, but employers with a global presence are adopting RPO for their overseas operations.

In the report — Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) – Moving Beyond the Pioneer Stage — Menzigian and her co-authors observe that one of the challenges buyers and RPO suppliers have is confusion over just what recruitment process outsourcing is. The report notes that buyers consider RPO to be “synonymous” with staffing and headhunting. Though there are certainly significant similarities, RPO, say the authors, “is a much more strategic decision that requires buy-in from senior executives and a long-term partnership with the supplier to achieve business output and outcome.”

Because of the lack of clarity, RPO market entry by staffing and recruiting firms is common, though many lack the expertise, the report says. It cautions buyers and counsels suppliers that they must educate their customers about the differences between RPO and other types of recruitment outsourcing.

Perhaps the broadest message in the report is that RPO is not a niche, interim service to address a short term recruiting problem, but an increasingly important part of a company’s recruitment strategy that depends on a close working relationship between buyer and supplier.

“There are multiple drivers moving this forward,” Menzigian told me. While the anemic recovery has gotten more employers looking at outsourced recruiting, rather than adding in-house recruiters, Menzigian said another consideration is the technology. Not all companies necessarily want to manage an ATS or invest in upgrades or replacements.

The technology, therefore, is an ingredient in the strategic recruitment decision process.

If, though, there is one point to emphasize, Menzigian says it’s that the RPO space is a dynamic one, with more companies entering the space as the business grows.

The global recession has taken a toll on workers everywhere, but except for a few high-profile departures and bonus forfeitures, CEOs have seemed mostly immune. Now comes a report from Compdata Surveys that says CEO base pay declined an average of 9.3 percent since 2008.

In fact, most of the C-suite has seen their base take a hit, says Compdata, which surveyed some 5,000 organizations across the country to compile its proprietary report Executive Compensation. CIO pay is down 2.1 percent while COOs are down 11 percent.

But unless you happen to hold one of those titles, don’t get all weepy over the news. The average CEO is still earning $346,000 in base pay a year. COOs average $214,000 and CIOs average $175,300.

Only CFO base pay was up. Not much — barely 1 percent — but it was up. The press release from Compdata doesn’t say what the average CFO earns, but it does offer some industry examples: “The average base salary of a Chief Financial Officer in the insurance industry is $232,200, while CFOs in healthcare earn $208,900. The utilities industry pays their CFOs $194,900 on average, compared to those in banking and finance, $191,500. CFOs earn the least in the not-for-profit industry, $173,900.”

Lest you think that these numbers are skewed by the inclusion of some of those highly compensated C-people, even modest-sized firms with 500-1,000 workers pay their CEOs an average of $361,300. At a company with under 100 workers the CEO averages $264,700.

The $600 report has much more information than this, of course. It covers 65 job titles — including HR — and has the data arranged by region and industry, covering bennies like company cars, travel expenses, stock options, and the more usual health, life, and other insurance coverage.

If you decide, despite the decline in salary, to climb up the alphabet titles, keep an eye on your company’s succession plan. Or, if there isn’t one, get one started.

Korn/Ferry says more and more companies are developing them; so many, in fact, that the giant talent management firm issued a press release saying it has seen a 400 percent surge in its CEO succession planning consulting work. And that’s just in the first six months.

The company didn’t offer a number, but it did say, “This is more than twice the number of succession planning projects in the prior two years combined.”

It currently is at work on more than 25 CEO succession planning projects.

“With increased government business regulation, the turbulent business environment and real-time examples of corporate boards that did not have immediate CEO replacements at the helm, we are seeing a significant increase in corporate boards planning for CEO succession,” said Joe Griesedieck, vice chairman and managing director of Korn/Ferry’s Board & CEO Services.

A deal announced Monday  between Twitter and LinkedIn makes it a snap now for users of both services to cross post status messages.

You can choose to have some or all your tweets posted to your LinkedIn groups and vice versa. This is a boon for recruiters who now can more easily reach their entire network with news of jobs and opportunities, while job seekers can use it to enhance their personal brand.

“More and more, people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways,” said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, in a video he made with LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman.

Stone likened the deal to “bringing the peanut butter and the chocolate together to make the perfect combination,” which explains our use of the otherwise inscrutable graphic from the LinkedIn site.

The two services, of course, serve different purposes and different constituencies. Twitter users tend to be younger and tweet about social activities. LinkedIn is very specifically focused on business networking.

The integration takes these differences into account, giving Tweepl a choice where there tweets go. Use either #li or #in to post your tweet to your LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn messages will generally go to all your Twitter followers, unless you choose to post only to LinkedIn.

I tried to set this up several times last night and this morning, but got error messages. Some of them were the usual Twitter overloaded kind, but the others were likely the result of the rollout. According to the original announcement, the integration will take a few days to complete, accounting for the lack of a setting on Twitter itself for the LinkedIn connection.

You can also set up an account on Ping.fm. This is a free service that lets you organize all your social media sites so you can post to some or all simultaneously. In addition to LinkedIn and Twitter, the Ping network includes Facebook, Diigo, Yammer, Plaxo, MySpace, and 39 other sites.

The LinkedIn/Twitter integration comes on the heels of announcements over the last couple of weeks that Twitter messages will now be indexed by Bing and Google. Search results now include tweets.

When Chad Sowash said tens of thousands of new jobs sites were on their way, he wasn’t kidding. Millions of new job boards is the goal, says a new website from DirectEmployers and Employ Media, the registrar and driving force behind the .jobs addresses.

“Soon hundreds of thousands (and, eventually, millions) of geographical .jobs domain names will come online,” boasts the website, Universe.jobs. It’s home base for what the partners are calling The Dot Jobs Universe, a heady name for the job boards that will officially make their debut in January.

These boards are powered by the DirectEmployers Association, a recruitment focused consortium of employers that includes many of the top brands in the U.S.  The job boards will have occupational or geographic Web addresses or addresses that are a combination of the two.

Some of these are already launched. There’s NewYork.jobs, Boston.jobs, India.jobs, and more. A video on the Dot Jobs Universe site offers other possibilities; FloridaNursing.jobs, for instance.

Employers who are members of the DirectEmployers Association will have their jobs posted to these sites automatically, with their corporate logo, at no cost. Non-members who own a .jobs address will also be permitted to post jobs for free.

There’s no indication on the site of what happens to employers who are neither members of DirectEmployers nor holders of a .jobs address.

When I spoke with Sowash a few weeks ago, he said they might have to pay a posting fee or have some limitations. “The rules haven’t been hammered out,” he said then.

However, the partners are selling premium placements on the sites. At rates ranging from $1,500 to $5,000 an employer can buy a listing position for a year on one or more sites. The more sites you buy, the lower the per site cost.

Placement.jobs explains how it works and takes your order. Members of DirectEmployers get preference in ordering these premium positions. A webinar is scheduled Nov. 17th to detail the .jobs Universe and the premium positioning program.

The relationship between DirectEmployers and Employ Media has raised eyebrows and apparently prompted enough questions that Ray Fassett, VP of operations and policy with Employ Media, felt compelled to blog about it.

“Why has .jobs chosen DirectEmployers Association to lead this project?,” Fassett writes in a blog on the Dot Jobs Universe site. “By offering an answer to this question publicly, I think I can dispel some myths that have come to my attention from commentators in other forums.”

“Let me be clear that .jobs has not provided the DirectEmployers Association with an exclusive. .jobs has not provided DirectEmployers members with an exclusive. So let’s dispel these myths right out of the gate.”

Fassett goes on to list six points that apparently made DirectEmployers an attractive partner. These include its non-profit status, the quality of the management team, its board of directors, and the participation of Fortune 1000 companies.

The argument that there’s no exclusive seems weak, if not plain wrong. Rules on the Employ Media site itself say only company names can be registered; occupational and geographic names are “reserved.” While DirectEmployers doesn’t own the addresses for the new job boards, it manages them, collects the money, and provides special opportunities for its members.

There’s no evidence that other job boards or organizations were invited to offer proposals for making use of the occupational and geographical domains held by Employ Media. Indeed, there’s even some question whether they can be used at all.

Tom Embrescia, CEO of Employ Media, told me that DirectEmployers approached him with the idea for the universe of job boards. The conversation turned earnest about the time Embrescia publicly floated the idea of selling off the reserved names.

When Employ Media and the Society for Human Resource Management, which sponsored the domain, applied for the designation, they said a .jobs address would only be issued in the name of the requesting company. That condition — and others, including adherence to the SHRM code of ethics — was written in the agreement by the approving agency, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Steve Rothberg, founder and president of CollegeRecruiter, wrote in a post, “This new domain was promoted as only being available to employers to promote their own jobs. Clearly that hasn’t been the case.”

However, Gary Rubin, SHRM’s Chief Publishing and E-Media Officer, said in an email, “SHRM is responsible for ensuring that Employ Media is complying with the terms of their charter with ICANN… The names that you have cited such as atlanta.jobs and sales.jobs appear to be in compliance with the terms of the charter.”

ICANN’s Chief gTLD Registry Liaison Craig Schwartz told me in an email, “…it’s not possible for ICANN to police every name in every registry and more importantly it’s not our responsibility to do so. What ICANN is responsible for is to ensure that its contracted parties are in compliance with their agreements. To that end, I will be following up on your inquiry (about the appropriateness of the use of geographical and occupational terms) with the appropriate staff at ICANN.”

I put the same question to Embrescia: How is it Employ Media can allow these domains to be used, when the agreement with ICANN says, “These (geographical and occupational terms) restricted lists are in addition to the restriction that .jobs domains comprise only trade names or commonly-known names?”

He didn’t respond to the question. But in the blog post on the Universe.jobs site, Fassett writes, “The question for us has been, since inception, how can geographic and occupational names exist in .jobs to serve the interests of the global human resource management community? I admit many did not realize this question was out there…

“We are working in cooperation with SHRM. We are approaching our community as ICANN expects us to do. I also fully admit there is not a single definitive answer to this question. But there are answers. Our obligation is to select one or more.”

The Conference Board is predicting that the monthly job losses that have hammered U.S. workers since January 2008 will end early next year.

The Board’s Employment Trends Index rose for the second consecutive month in October, and is now at 89.3, up 0.7 percent from the revised September figure. It’s still down significantly from a year ago, when the index was 104.5.

The improvement, said Conference Board senior economist Gad Levanon, foreshadows an end to job loss, but not an immediate, strong, uptick in hiring.

“The Employment Trends Index has likely turned a corner in September, and the historical relationship between the index and employment suggests that job losses will end in early 2010,” said Levanon. “While layoffs have certainly declined in recent months, we still expect to see employers adding hours to their existing workforce before hiring will strongly increase.”

Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which issued its October jobs report on Friday, show little change in workers’ hours over the past several months. Since June, the average number of hours worked weekly in the private sector has been steady at 33. In the manufacturing sector, weekly hours have ticked up by 30 minutes since June and now stand at 40 hours a week on average, with 3.2 hours of overtime work weekly, an improvement over June’s 2.8 hours.

October pulled a trick on economists who had expected the U.S. would be treated to a slowing job loss. Instead, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said this morning that 190,000 jobs were lost during the month, helping push the unemployment to a surprising 10.2 percent.

Surveys of economists had predicted the numbers would be closer to 150,000 to 175,000 lost jobs and an unemployment rate of 9.9 percent. The spike pushed the unemployment rate to its highest point since April 1983 and the job loss was the 22nd consecutive month of declines.

The largest losses were in construction, manufacturing, and retail trade. The three sectors and finance are responsible for the biggest share of job losses since the recession officially began in December 2007. Construction alone has lost 1.6 million jobs. Manufacturing has lost 2.1 million.

The rate of job losses is well off its highs from earlier this year, some of it due to government stimulus efforts. But the numbers still portend a slow recovery for the labor market.

With the latest numbers, the government says 15.7 million are unemployed. An additional 11.7 million people are working part time because they can’t find full-time jobs or had given up searching for at least the four weeks before the survey period.

Unemployment, however, is not evenly spread across the labor force. It’s worst for teenagers who are part of the labor force, at 27.6 percent, and lowest — 4.7 percent — for those 25 and older with at least a four-year college degree.

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Other indices, including the Monster Employment Index, showed little movement. Consumer Confidence, which had improved in the last few months, declined, as did the number of new jobs posted online.

In Canada, the jobless rate hit 8.6 percent as employers there cut 43,000, surprising labor market forecasters who were expecting a gain of 10,000 jobs.

Sal Guatieri, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto, told Bloomberg.com, that the report was a “big disappointment.” “Our economy seems to be struggling out of the recession and the weak employment just fits into that trend.”

Another economist, speaking about the U.S. job outlook, but who could just as well have been talking about Canada, too, told BusinessWeek: “This recovery is shaping up to be a jobless one, just like the last two.”

Added Paul Ashworth, an economist with Capital Economics in Ontario, “Our concern is that, unlike the last recovery, with credit still tight, households aren’t going to be able to smooth their consumption using credit until the labor market eventually strengthens.”