What makes UnitedWeWork.org (password protected until Monday) different from the other job services that have popped up since the recession began last year is that this one is free to employers and job seekers. And it uses the matching power of QuietAgent to automate the finding of jobs and candidates for seekers and recruiters.

And with the likes of AT&T, ADP, Allstate, Hewitt Associates, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts, Office Depot, Sears Holdings, 7-Eleven, and Starbucks involved, UnitedWeWork.com has real jobs available.

Other services, of course, offer lots of jobs for seekers to search, while all the major job boards let recruiters set automatic resume searches. But with Quiet Agent there’s no actual searching. Job seekers spend a few minutes filling in some details about themselves and their career interests, upload a resume, and then go about other business while Quiet Agent technology looks for matches.

Jason Kerr, CEO of Quiet Agent, says UnitedWeWork will simplify the task of sourcing candidates for recruiters and searching job listings for seekers. Because the service is free, Kerr expects to especially attract the smaller employer.

The sponsor companies are all members of AllianceQ, the network launched by QuietAgent last year that enables them to pool resumes and refer their unsuccessful candidates to jobs with other AllianceQ members. (It’s a little more involved than that. BusinessWeek has the details.)

Besides doing good, UnitedWeWork is a way to built the QuietAgent candidate database. As the number of resumes grows, the matches improve for recruiters who use the service or are members of AllianceQ.

“It’s all about volume,” says Kerr, explaining that the more job seekers who participate in UnitedWeWork or submit a resume on the QuietAgent site, the more likely matches will be made and people will be hired.

Candidates who submit resumes on UnitedWeWork, but don’t want to go into the QuietAgent database, can simply delete their resume and profile when they find a job or at the end of the year when UnitedWeWork starts charging. It will remain free for employers with fewer than 100 workers.

Details on how to participate can be found here. The site won’t be publicly available until Monday. Search firms and agencies can’t participate.

• On Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, sign up for this week’s free ERE Webinar — Brand of Be Branded: How to Use Social Media to Market Your Career Identity. Nationally syndicated career expert and workplace consultant, J.T. O’Donnell will show you how to take your personal branding and professional development to a whole new level.
• For those of you looking for your next recruiting opportunity, 10 new jobs have been posted to the ERE recruiters job board. And if you are looking to grow your team, job postings are only $25 through August 1. Let’s all help get our fellow recruiters back to work!
• For those of you on the search and placement side of the business, there are only a few short weeks until the start of the third annual Fordyce Forum conference. Join and learn from other big billers, search firm leaders and top producers from June 10-12 in Las Vegas. And, if you are looking for a discount, drop me a line!
• Also in a few weeks, the first ever Social Recruiting Summit kicks off from Google HQ in Mountain View, CA. Last week, we made a very exciting announcement that LinkedIn Co-Founder and CEO Reid Hoffman will be delivering the opening address to this sold out event! But don’t worry, even though you can no longer purchase a ticket to the event, we will be live streaming Reid’s session and many other ones both on ERE.net and the Social Recruiting Summit site so clear your calendars for Monday June 15!
• And it isn’t too early to reserve your spot at ERE Expo 2009 Fall taking place at the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in Hollywood, FL. The earlier you book, the more your save with our early bird discounts and, if you need a little extra help during this tough economic time, you can let me know.

I want to wish everyone a nice holiday weekend, and if you have any questions about any of this, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Job board insiders are scoffing at rumors that Yahoo is planning on selling HotJobs, saying it is unlikely the company could find a buyer in this market.

“It’s the worst possible moment in history to sell a job board,” says one insider who asked not to be named. “There may be a desire to divest (HotJobs), but who’s got the money to buy?”

The most likely candidates to buy a job board are other job boards. However neither of the two biggest boards — Monster and CareerBuilder — appear in a position to make an acquisition.

CareerBuilder, which lays claim to the highest job-seeker traffic and generates more U.S. revenue than rival Monster, is owned, primarily, by three newspaper companies, one of whom, Tribune, is in bankruptcy. A fourth partner, Microsoft, has been having on-again, off-again conversations about buying Yahoo’s search business.

Publicly owned Monster once tried to buy HotJobs, but was outbid by Yahoo. The search company paid $436 million in cash and stock in late 2001 for the company. Monster’s stock then was trading in the low $40s, about four times Wednesday’s $11.57 close.

However, there is a possible sale scenario in which Yahoo would sell HotJobs, and as part of the deal, be paid a hefty fee to send traffic to the site. These traffic deals are common in the industry. For instance, AOL’s jobs channel is powered by CareerBuilder, which pays the company millions for the traffic.

“HotJobs, unbundled from Yahoo’s distribution, would be worth a lot less,” observes Craig Donato, CEO of classifieds aggregator Oodle. He speculates that if a deal for Hotjobs were to be made it would have to include some sort of distribution arrangement. Make it lucrative enough for Yahoo, he says, and it might not be necessary to come up with all that much money upfront.

There are complications. Donato says the value would depend on the unduplicated traffic between HotJobs and a job board buyer. Another is the impact on the 800 member newspaper consortium Yahoo has assembled.

Put together in late 2006, one of the major drivers has been HotJobs. It was over the distribution of jobs and traffic that Yahoo and a handful of newspaper companies first began talking. The partnership eventually included display advertising and content distribution and search traffic, but the first dollars to come out of the deal were from recruitment. Though the importance of the job board to the consortium has dimmed with the recession, one newspaper executive we spoke with told us if Yahoo were to sell HotJobs it would have to guarantee that recruitment advertising would not be harmed.

“That probably means,” says the executive, “that we (newspapers) would stay on the platform and Yahoo would still distribute the listings.”

Former HotJobs general manager Dan Finnigan, who played a key role in forming the newspaper alliance, says he’s not surprised that Yahoo would be looking at HotJobs or other business units. But he doubts it will actually be sold, barring some other business reason.

“For Yahoo, it’s real money” says Finnigan, who left Yahoo in May 2007 and is now CEO of Jobvite. “It makes money.”

One insider involved in the sale of a major job board in the past suggested that the rumors about Yahoo selling off HotJobs may be nothing more than the kind of thing that goes on in a large struggling company when a new CEO takes over.

“(Carol) Bartz is probably doing what every new CEO does and that’s to look at everything,” he says. “HotJobs would be a tough sell. The market’s not getting any better. As a buyer, I think the feeling is it’s going to be cheaper next month.”

Here in sprawling Los Angeles, though the Bel Air/Beverly Hills elite continues to incorrectly claim that “no one in LA takes public transportation,” the MTA says that “Metro Rail ridership in May shot up 6 percent over May 2007, one of the highest one-month spikes on record.”

In May, more than 7.6 million passengers boarded the MTA’s two Los Angeles subway lines and three light-rail surface lines. The organization employs about 10,000 people, and is hiring engineers, Oracle programmers, and others.

In Chicago, the transit authority is hiring accountants, attorneys, database administrators, and, among other jobs, someone to collect intelligence on terrorism. Challenger, Gray, and Christmas says that the number of first-quarter Chicago passengers increased 5.7% from last year to a record 20.7 million.

Boston-area ridership is up 5-6% over last year.

Light rail use – such as a trolley — is way up in Baltimore, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Meanwhile, use of heavy rail is up sharply in Staten Island. Bus ridership is booming in San Antonio and Denver. In the Seattle area, Sound Transit’s Bruce Gray tells me that hiring will particularly pick up if a ballot measure passes expanding the area’s transportation system. And Morgan Lyons of Dallas Area Rapid Transit tells me the agency will be hiring aggressively as the light rail system expands from 45 to 90 miles through 2013.

Public-transportation payrolls are sometimes set in stone through an annual budgeting process. In other words, if gas prices go up today, that doesn’t mean hiring goes up tomorrow. But I bet public-transportation employers will argue for increased staff as soon as they can get it.

Virginia Miller, a spokeswoman for the American Public Transportation Association, says that trends in public transportation are reversing itself in the sense that 50 years ago, there was rapid movement the other direction — from streetcars to cars. “There’s a demand like we’ve never seen, a sea changing going on,” she says. “It’s like back to the future.”

–Meanwhile, Disney is sued for allegedly not hiring someone who didn’t have the “Disney look.”

–Who says the newspaper is dead? Well, I do, often. But Brian Hauswirth of the Missouri Department of Corrections tells me the paper’s the main reason why his career fair just surpassed all expectations. “When we ask people, ‘where did you hear about the career fair?’ the no. 1 reason is the newspaper,” he says. About 165 people attended the fair, he says, and about 103 applied for Corrections Officer 1 positions at a new prison. They still need to pass background checks, but Hauswirth says the results are “very promising.” Those with military experience make up about a quarter of corrections officers.

–Cellular South has completed a redesign of its careers site. It’s no EY site, but the company does use video to try to get applicants who fit its culture: fast-paced, challenging, competitive. It had Bernard Hodes (profile; site) help out (after realizing that consumer marketing and employment branding are cousins, not siblings, so Cell South can’t just use its in-house marketing folks), but still uses Sonic (profile; site) to track applicants.

Barb Miller, VP of human resources for the 1,000-employee company, one of the largest privately held wireless companies in the U.S., says the employees you see on the site are indeed employees, not actors, though Hodes and Miller’s team did discuss the idea of using actors (some Cellular South employees underperformed on camera, resulting in an SVP filling in at the end). Cellular South will measure results of the site through the “capture rate” (who leaves the site?); quality of hire (performance reviews, retention); traffic; and productivity (how many customers they can get with a certain number of employees). I asked Miller about the company’s snooze-inducing job descriptions. “You hit on something good,” she says. “That will be the next phase of what we do.”

Here’s a mini-clip from Cooke, talking at ERE’s Spring Expo about paying non-employees for referrals.

And, another clip, this one of Cooke on why money can be overrated in a referral program.

For the whole Cooke presentation, check out http://www.ereexpoblog.com/video.

One attendee is Debbie Rocco of Amylin, a fast-growing bio-pharma that’s hiring for many of the positions you’d expect as well as for an Ohio manufacturing facility. Interestingly, and fairly unsually, it also has a link to recruiter information on its website.

Amylin is a lot like a startup, and is just starting to do such things as “capacity planning.” It’s finding, for example, that in the past it hired a lot of specialists and needs to either hire more generalists or do more training to give people a broader background needed to start a new project when their last one ends.

Rob Reindl’s here from Edwards, a company that once received Workforce Management’s Optimas award. Every time you hear him talk, and I’ve hung out at his HQ with him, you can’t help but think about how special the work is that his firm does. It’s easy to convince candidates that a job at Edwards would “make a difference”; it would save lives.

There’s a recruiting job open at Edwards, which the company’s website bills as a “great opportunity for 3rd party recruiters looking to ‘break in’ to corporate recruiting.” Indeed, Edwards likes to recruit in-house, not with agencies, when it can. It also likes the “time-to-fill” stat — one that’s not a Sullivan favorite. Reindl pooh-poohs the idea that his hirers would compromise quality just to put a warm body in a seat quickly.

Not everyone here’s growing in the 20% range like Amylin; one HR leader from a large packaging firm says the economy’s been real slow, and for a really long time. Like all year, and then some. That’s both bad and good news. Bad news for them, of course, but good news in the sense that with the average recession lasting somewhere in the range of one year, maybe less, it means that if we’re even in one, it may already be more than half over.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced on Thursday that it has plans to hire more than 1,300 people.

The FDA needs to fill openings for medical officers, consumer safety officers, chemists, nurse consultants, biologists, microbiologists, health/regulatory/general health scientists, mathematical statisticians, epidemiologists, pharmacologists, pharmacists, and veterinary medical officers.

Most of the jobs are located in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, where the FDA oversees human and veterinary drugs, biological products, medical devices, food, cosmetics, and products that emit radiation. The FDA needs to protect the country in numerous areas, and as such, also will be expanding at more than 179 resident posts and the newly created FDA offices overseas.

(Of course, protect can be interpreted many ways.)

As part of this multi-year hiring initiative, the FDA hopes to fill 600 new positions and hire about 700 others to fill older positions. The FDA says this is nearly triple the number of people hired from 2005 to 2007.

While it’s always a challenge to find quality candidates with science and medical backgrounds, the FDA is banking on a couple of things to get the job done.

First, the Office of Personnel Management has granted Direct-Hire Authority to the FDA, an operating division of the Department of Health and Human Services. Direct-Hire Authority can expedite the hiring of qualified candidates during “critical” times and have them on the job within three weeks.

Second, the FDA will be participating in and holding job fairs throughout the country.

So a mortgage company in Michigan seems like a double negative.

Then again, maybe not.

Robert Rahal, president of the southeastern Michigan company Shore Mortgage, which specializes in government loan products, says he’s looking to hire about 100 people for underwriter, loan officer, and support jobs. That’s about a third the size of the whole company as it now stands.

“We’ve been known to do FHA loans,” Rahal says. “The market moved in that direction in the last two to three months. Banks had become more conservative. Ultimately things fell in our direction, frankly.”

Shore’s running a multimedia recruiting campaign: press releases, TV ads, print media, and online recruiting.

You’d think there’d be tons of people in struggling Michigan who fit the bill.

Maybe not.

“It’s skilled work,” Rahal says. “You have to have the experience, and the more experience you have, the better off. This is very labor-intensive work that requires hands-on knowledge. It’s not the automated type of loan process that people have become accustomed to.”

To recruits, Rahal plays up the private firm’s family atmosphere. “We’re not the type of institution that’s going to hire people and fire them,” he says. “That’s not our formula. We’re very conservative. We could probably grow double [our size], but we’re not looking to bulk up and lay off. That’s too arduous a process for us.”

Retail sales turnover, according to Rahal, is about 60%, which he says is “better than the national average” and puts him in the 26th percentile.” High turnover, he says, “is just the nature of sales.” Conversely, Shore turnover among the administration jobs runs in the single digits.

“Why not have all of them at FedEx?” asks FedEx’s John Leech, speaking at the ERE Expo right now in San Diego. Leech says an employee can do everything from IT to metereology to security to sports marketing (because of the company’s sponsorships) and more, all without quitting.

Indeed, the FedEx careers website (though not perfect … searching for the terms “CEO of large company marketing experience master’s degree” in the resume box at left apparently didn’t produce any results, and a few postings are on the drier side) sells you on the company, not just the job. Some postings play up a potpourri of good company benefits. Many other postings play up the ability to get a promotion.

“It’s not all planes, trains, and automobiles,” Leech says. “It takes a a whole company to ship one package.”

This is something Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has had to grapple with, and he stated his opinions publicly on Thursday. He sent a letter to all employees, a note he called his “most difficult communication to date” but necessary in order to improve the current state of the company and reinvigorate sales.

The gist of his open letter is that Starbucks is cutting about 600 positions, a move that is not surprising in some circles. This includes the elimination of existing positions and open headcount, as well as the reduction of its current workforce. Within this context, Schultz notes that approximately 220 partners have separated from the company, and that nearly all were U.S. partners serving in non-retail support roles.

In an attempt to “step up to the challenge of being strategic as well as nimble,” Schultz adds that the company will reorganize from two divisions to four (Western/Pacific, Northwest/Mountain, Southeast/Plains, and Northeast/Atlantic). Each division will be led by a senior vice president, reporting directly to the U.S. president. Within each division, partners supporting store development, marketing, partner resources, and finance will report directly to their respective functions while still being accountable for results at the divisional level.

In other Starbucks news, the company is doing away with its lackluster warmed breakfast sandwich idea, and is also offering free Wi-Fi in stores this spring.

The Peoria, Illinois-based manufacturer of iconic yellow tractors may hire hundreds of engineers and designers to work in a planned 100-acre research and development facility and manufacturing plant in Raleigh, North Carolina. The new facility would develop prototype products for the Caterpillar line of machines and engines.

The company may also boost its 700-strong North Carolina workforce by hiring at the Cary, Clayton, and Sanford locations.

In addition, Caterpillar has plans to open a parts distribution center in Waco, Texas, while closing two small distribution centers in Dallas and Kansas City by early 2009. The company will hire about 180 people to work in the new 500,000-square-foot Waco facility. According to Caterpillar spokesperson Rachel Potts, the company is moving the work to the Waco facility to meet warehouse and transportation needs.

Economic Soft Landing?

“The combination of what the Fed has done — a little late maybe, but very aggressively addressing the softening economy and what the federal government has just done with the stimulus package — kind of assures that we’re going to have a soft landing,” Caterpillar chairman and chief executive officer Jim Owens recently told Reuters.

“Whether it’s a mild recession or just a significant slowdown is not so important to me,” he said. “But the re-acceleration of growth later in the year going into ‘09, ‘10, I think, is a likely occurrence now.”

Owens pointed out that despite a soft U.S. economy, international growth matters most right now for the national economy.

Caterpillar, which manufactures construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, and industrial gas turbines, brought in over $44 billion in 2007. For 2007, Caterpillar exported more than $12.676 billion of products from the United States, a 20% increase compared to 2006 exports of $10.539 billion.

The company has more than 100,000 workers worldwide. It also has plants in Lafayette, Indiana; Aurora, Illinois; and China.

Take the workers at perennial boxed-chocolate favorite Russell Stover Candies. The company has announced plans to eliminate the second shift and lay off about 150 workers at a production facility that staffs 480 people in Montrose, Colorado, effective April 1. These workers include maintenance staff, packaging staff, and supervisors. Russell Stover’s three other U.S. manufacturing plants will also see layoffs, according to the company.

Although its biggest competitor, Hershey provides some raw materials to Russell Stover. With Hershey’s plan to move some production to a plant in Monterrey, Mexico, along with inflation and increasing dairy costs, Russell Stover says these cuts – albeit “temporary” according to executives – are necessary to stay afloat.

Meanwhile, Hershey is gearing up for its move to Mexico and will close six plants in the United States and Canada and lay off more than 3,000 workers. The layoffs were first announced in April 2007. The first and second round of layoffs hit the company’s Oakdale, California, plant in July and September. The final cut will happen on Friday, February 15. The facility, which once made Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Hershey’s Kisses, will be vacant by the end of the month. The company’s Connecticut plant will lose 200 workers, while another 1,300 will be let go in Pennsylvania. Hershey’s Canadian plants will lose about 1,400 workers.

William Dreher, a Deutsche Bank research analyst, wrote in a report last week that as the economy begins to improve in the second half of 2008, “we expect several of our department store shares could do very well, including Kohl’s and Macy’s, though we are not pounding the table here yet.” In fact, the report upgraded the department store and mass merchant sector to neutral from cautious.

But on Wednesday, Macy’s Inc. announced its plans to slash 2,300 management jobs across three regional divisions to reduce costs and boost sales while adding 250 in-store positions to enhance product offerings in specific regions. The company will cut approximately 950 positions at the Macy’s North headquarters offices in Minneapolis, 850 positions at the Macy’s Midwest headquarters offices in St. Louis, and 750 positions at the Macy’s Northwest headquarters offices in Seattle. It is also consolidating several divisions, though all current store locations will remain in place. The company’s Miami-based Macy’s Florida and New-York based Bloomingdale’s divisions are not affected. The Cincinnati-based retailer said the consolidation will be complete in the second quarter of 2008.

This layoff news comes on the heels of the announcement by women’s retailer Ann Taylor Stores that it will close 117 of its 921 stores over the next three years. In addition, the company is eliminating 180 jobs, or 13% of its corporate staff.

What other companies are losing their shirts? Clothing stalwart J.C. Penney is planning 200 layoffs; Talbots is laying off 800, or 5% of the company, as it exits the men’s and boys’ wear markets; Wet Seal is laying off 41 and will leave 10 other posts vacant in a cost-cutting move amid a “difficult” retail environment (49 corporate jobs, two field positions); and Goody’s Family Clothing is laying off 5% of workers.

Also this week, clothing retailer Eddie Bauer said it is laying off 123 workers at its headquarters, though no layoffs are expected at its 432 retail stores. Even Wal-Mart is fraying at the retail seams, announcing layoff plans due to closing two clothing divisions at its main offices in Arkansas.

The country’s largest retailer of plus-size women’s apparel, Charming Shoppes, Inc. says its round of store closures and layoffs is “in response to the continuing weak retail and economic environment.” The corporate parent of Lane Bryant and Catherine’s stores will close 100 stores, lay off 150 employees (13% of its management staff), and trim the amount of stores it will open in fiscal 2009.

The use of holiday gift cards helped some retailers rebound in January, but analysts suspect post-holiday sales were slowed by a weaker economy overall.

But is it the economy or a shift in recruitment and training strategies that are hurting major retailers?

According to Karen Harvey, president of the Karen Harvey Consulting Group, an executive recruitment company, the problem is a lack of executive training programs.

“One of the major things we face in interviewing talent, if they came through the industry more recently, their training is more siloed,” said Harvey. “When we interview these people, we find they are missing the full 360-degree view of the business.”

Some “tell-tale signs” of this problem, according to Women’s Wear Daily, include an increasing number of high-level outside hires, not to mention disappointing comps and earnings.

According to the Boston Business Journal, biotechnology recruiters have noticed an increase in calls from non-executive staff planning for the worst.

Pearl Freier, an executive search consultant, told the Journal that the callers are “anxious” and hoping to avoid becoming one of the thousands who Biogen may fire.

About 1,400 of the company’s 3,900-strong workforce are located at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based headquarters.

The biotechnology company announced in October that it would seek a potential acquisition after a major shareholder pushed for a sale. Pharma giants Pfizer and Novartis are both considered potential bidders, with a sale valued at $23 billion.

Biogen, however, is still hiring across many departments. In fact, the company has plans to attend the “Genetown Career Fair” in Boston on November 7. That event features companies such as Abbott Laboratories, Kelly Scientific Resources, Novartis, and Siemens, among many others.

Many of Biogen’s workers who are fearing the worst might be safe after all, even if their company is sold. Just last week, for example, Amgen laid off 300 employees in Rhode Island — 150 fewer employees than expected. Amgen previously had 1,600 workers at two factories that manufacture arthritis drugs; only one plant will remain in the Ocean State by the end of the year.

Still, the Thousand Oaks, California-based company has plans to eliminate close to 2,600 jobs worldwide — including 1,500 through layoffs and others through attrition and voluntary departures — to save about $1.9 billion.

How the news shakes out at Chrysler, by the numbers:

• 59,000. The number of employees expected to be working for Chrysler at the end of 2009.
• 12,000. The number of North American workers out of a job at Chrysler, the third-largest U.S.-based automaker. Affecting approximately 15% of its workforce, close to 10,000 hourly jobs and 2,100 salaried jobs will be eliminated.
• 1,100. The number of temporary workers the company announced it was letting go earlier this week. None of the contract workers will receive a severance package, though most full-time workers will be offered buyout or early retirement packages (though the company has not released the details of those packages yet).
• 80.1%. The percentage Chrysler sold to private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP in August 2007, making the switch from DaimlerChrysler AG to separate private companies known as Chrysler and Daimler AG.
• 8.9%. The percentage of Chrysler’s sales loss in October, compared to the same time last year. This was the fifth straight monthly decline and biggest of 2007.
• 5.1. The salary, reportedly $5.1 million, for former Chrysler chief executive officer Tom LaSorda.
• 5. The number of North American assembly plants that will see shifts eliminated. It was announced Thursday that Chrysler will cut shifts at vehicle assembly plants in Belvidere, Illinois; Toledo, Ohio; Brampton, Ontario; Jefferson North in Detroit, and Sterling Heights, Michigan. Also, Chrysler will cut jobs at the company’s Detroit-area Mack Avenue engine plant.
• 4. The number of vehicle models that are being phased out of its lineup. The Auburn Hills, Michigan-based company is ending production for the PT Cruiser convertible, Crossfire sedan, Dodge Magnum wagon, and Pacifica SUV.
• 3.5%. The percentage of Chrysler’s sales loss during the first nine months of this year.
• 2. The second time this year Chrysler has cut more than 10,000 jobs. The cuts announced Thursday are in addition to the slashing from February 2007, when 13,000 layoffs (11,000 production jobs and 2,000 salaried jobs) were announced.
• 1. New CEO Bob Nardelli earns just $1 a year in salary, with his bonus tied to the company’s performance. (Though Nardelli did leave Home Depot, where he worked as CEO until January 2007, with a controversial $210 million severance package.)

James Cayne, chief executive of Bear Stearns, wrote in a company memo that the goal is to “deploy our resources in today’s challenging environment where growth opportunities are greatest and to reduce costs in areas that can no longer justify their current level of infrastructure.”

The investment bank has not specified which exact units are affected, and says in the memo that it will continue to add jobs as needed.

The layoffs this week followed a cautionary report by Swiss bank UBS on a potential further downward shift in the U.S. mortgage markets.

Since the beginning of 2007, Bear Stearns has reduced its mortgage origination related workforce by 40%. On October 3, for example, 310 positions at the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank were cut, affecting staff in its mortgage-origination businesses.

Tom Marano, global head of mortgages, explained the business move as a “hallmark of our franchise” that would help Bear Stearns adapt to changes in the market environment and product demand.