The U.S. economy added 120,000 jobs last month, the smallest gain since October and well below what economists predicted. However, unemployment unexpectedly decreased slightly, to 8.2 percent, according to the U.S. Labor Department, which issued its monthly jobs report this morning. Stocks aren’t trading today as the markets are closed in observance of Good Friday... [full article »]

This morning’s report from ADP said the U.S. economy added 209,000 private sector jobs last month, adding to the growing confidence in the steady, if slow improvement in conditions. However, the numbers didn’t do much to help stocks, which was down some 155 points in early afternoon trading in New York. Investors worried over comments... [full article »]

Cloud computing is predicted to spawn millions of new jobs in the next few years in and outside of IT as companies moving to the cloud redeploy the money they now spend to maintain in-house systems. Global tech research and advisory firm IDC says by the end of 2015 almost 14 million new jobs will... [full article »]

Saying, “At a certain price, anything’s for sale,” Monster CEO and Board Chairman Sal Iannuzzi unequivocally confirmed today that the job board or pieces of it could be sold off in the coming months. However, not just any deal will be accepted, he said in interviews conducted at the company’s Innovation Day demonstrations in New... [full article »]

How good are the people who work for your company? An honest, objective answer to that question would likely have you describing a statistical bell curve: Some top performers; a big middle, and a few at the bottom. As an HR professional, your performance management mission is to raise the overall quality of the workforce.... [full article »]

Remember when recruiters spent Mondays fielding calls prompted by help-wanted ads in the Sunday paper? It wasn’t that long ago — not even a dozen years ago — that newspapers were where the recruitment dollars went. In 2000, the watershed year for newspaper employment advertising, the take came to nearly $9 billion, and some newspapers... [full article »]

Is Monster becoming a Mini-ster? That’s the kind of question that’s really meant to be a statement. No matter how you answer it, the predicate already tells us it’s going to be bad for the subject. No surprise, then, that Jason Buss posed it last week in the midst of offering “7 Warning Signs For... [full article »]

HR technology provider SilkRoad says jobs search site Indeed.com is the leading source of external hires for its 700+ customers, providing 42 percent more new employees than CareerBuilder, the #2 source. Overall, the SilkRoad results show job boards accounting for a high percentage of hires that aren’t either internal candidates, referred by employees, or come... [full article »]

For the first time in the history of the profession, human resource practitioners now have a uniform way to measure and compare one of the oldest metrics.The American National Standards Institute has accepted the profession’s proposal for determining cost-per-hire. Enshrined alongside such venerable standards as those that gave us the first computer languages, and set... [full article »]

The U.S. created 227,000 new jobs in February, exceeding what economists predicted, and adding to the optimism that the economy is on the mend. The unemployment, as expected, held steady at 8.3 percent. Surveys conducted before the numbers were released this morning by the U.S. Department of Labor showed economists expected somewhere between about 210,000... [full article »]

New Zealand talent management vendor Sonar6 has been acquired by Cornerstone On Demand in a deal valued at $14 million. Cornerstone’s stock closed up 6.19 percent to $22.12. Sonar6 serves the small- to mid-sized market, while Cornerstone serves mostly larger employers with a full lifecycle software suite that is especially strong in the performance management... [full article »]

Job board operator Monster, which CNN says is officially up for sale, got little help today from a positive jobs employment report that buoyed the rest of the market, helping it regain some of Tuesday’s triple-digit loss. Payroll processor ADP said 216,000 private sector jobs were created in February. The company’s closely watched National Employment... [full article »]

Expectations are running high that the U.S. government’s jobs report this Friday will again show more than 200,000 new jobs were added to the economy last month. If it turns out the predictions are true, not only would it be the third consecutive month of 200k+ growth, it would strengthen confidence in the still-nascent recovery.... [full article »]

The long-rumored sale of employment publisher Monster could become a reality following news today the company is seeking “strategic alternatives” to improving its shareholder performance. Speaking at a business conference in Boston today, Monster Chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi said the company is weighing “strategic alternatives to increasing shareholder value.” Although Iannuzzi did not specifically... [full article »]

Even after cutting their way through 2011, pharmaceutical companies expect to make more cuts this year to their salesforces as they struggle to adapt to the changing marketplace for their products. A survey by consultants Hay Group found that half of Big Pharma, as the major drug companies are collectively called, believe themselves overstaffed, with... [full article »]

On Wednesday one of the newest startups to focus on internships will host one of the largest, if not the biggest, online workshops to be held on Google+. In a sign of maturity for the social network Google launched last summer, as well as for InternMatch, a “names” group of companies have signed on to... [full article »]

Facebook, and potentially other social media as well, can be used to assess a person’s potential for job success. That not-so-surprising conclusion is reported in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, and comes out of two studies — one dealing with academic performance, the other with job performance — conducted on college campuses in Indiana,... [full article »]

Ask the next hire you onboard to describe everything, every step they took on their way to becoming a candidate, and you may be in for a surprise. If you track your source of hire, chances are excellent that what your numbers tell you is only a part of the story — the most recent... [full article »]

After two years of looking internally to fill vacancies, companies in 2011 again began to hire new workers, relying on referrals and job boards for nearly 50 percent of their external hires. Social media, though it accounted for only 3.5 percent of those external hires, evidences a much greater impact on hiring than the numbers... [full article »]

Law schools across the country are being sued by graduates who claim they were misled into believing that a law degree would be their ticket to a well-paying career. The 73 plaintiffs, many of who say they’ve been unable to find a job in their field or have had to settle for poorly paying legal... [full article »]