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.

Despite the economy, most recruiting professionals I speak with are busy. As the head of global recruiting for Expedia (I have returned to the corporate world!), I can tell you that we’ve never been busier. Candidate applications are up more than 100% from last year, recruiting budgets and teams are smaller, but the business is growing, not shrinking like you might expect.

I feel like we’re on the cusp of another breakout period for our profession. Good stuff is ahead, and I’m excited to be part of it. As a regular ERE speaker, I’ve enjoyed networking with and learning from my colleagues over the past five years, and I’m thrilled and honored to be your ERE conference chair and MC for the Spring Expo March 15-17, 2010.

ERE has put together a great program for us. Some of the usual suspects, plus a bunch of newer faces. All ready to share best practices and help us improve our personal and organizational recruiting capabilities as we prepare for what will certainly be a year where our businesses need us more than ever.

So, what do we have lined up for you? Check out the speakers and topics here. Here are a few things I’m most excited about this year…

• GLOBAL: Almost every recruiting team I’ve worked with in the private sector is going global or is struggling to support global markets. ERE has put together a slate of great speakers who will share best practices for recruiting outside the US. A global mindset is key to taking our careers to the next level.
• BIG BUDGETS, BIG BRANDS … AND SMALL BUDGETS, SMALL BRANDS: We’ve got speakers from big companies like AT&T, Starbucks, Ernst & Young, Microsoft, and Sodexo — which is great. But the ERE team also listened to feedback that not all of us work for big-brand, big-resource companies, so you’ll find speakers this year who are from lesser-known companies that lack the big dough to spend on recruiting. In fact, we’re offering a special brainstorming session for companies without a big staff or budget.
• FROM INBOX RECRUITING TO SOMETHING MORE: A number of speakers will share how you can bring a headhunting orientation in-house and how you help your corporation (or government agency, or non-profit) achieve its business goals.
• SOCIAL MEDIA: It would be impossible to hold a recruiting conference in 2010 and not talk about social media’s impact on our worlds. We’ll learn about building talent communities at a company that has embraced social media, and how a conservative company convinced its organization to get on the bandwagon with great results.
• FUTURE OF TALENT ACQUISITION: Learn where “Top 100 Influencers” in our industry think recruiting is headed, and how we need to morph our thinking to remain relevant and add value in a world that’s changing.
• AND MORE: We’ll also have great topics around creating a phenomenal candidate experience, leveraging the right metrics, building a quality college recruiting and executive recruiting function, and a facilitated, audience driven Q&A session with ERE Excellence Award winners.

I’m excited to learn from our speakers and colleagues, get exposed to tools and partners that can help me recruit the best people, and build new connections that can help me grow as a recruiter and recruiting leader. I always leave ERE inspired to try new things, reframe critical conversations I’m having with the businesses I support, re-prioritize my workload, and put all of the great ideas into practice back home. I hope you’re able to join us this Spring in beautiful San Diego.