Even as most leaders and founders of the firms surveyed by the bank for its annual Startup Outlook say conditions in the U.S. are better this year than last, the number of them who report hiring talent is their biggest challenge has grown. Nine out of 10 executives report finding and hiring the talent they need is their biggest challenge. (more…)

Nearly every survey on source of hire or use of social media by recruiters shows LinkedIn to be a key part of the mix; often it leads all the listed social media sites. The company itself reported adding 2,400 customers in just the last quarter of 2012, bringing the total to 16,400 organizations under contract.

Now comes a Bullhorn survey to report that of the 160,000 registered users on Bullhorn Reach, 97% use LinkedIn to source candidates. That’s not as surprising as it might seem at first glance. (more…)

European financial markets dropped sharply after the Labor Department released the numbers, hitting a one-month low. In the U.S., Dow Jones industrial average futures fell 143 points and S&P 500 futures were down nearly 17 points in the minutes after the 8:30 a.m. report.

Investors were poised to act quickly, put on the alert Wednesday when ADP’s monthly estimate of private sector job growth came in at 158,000, which was also significantly below what economists expected. “This is very weak labor market,” economist Martin Feldstein told CNBC after the report was issued. (more…)

The job board’s quarterly employment forecast says the U.S. should expect somewhat slower hiring through the end of June than it saw for the same period last year. That comes on the heels of a first quarter that was slightly better than what CareerBuilder’s survey foresaw three months ago, but which was still down from 2012. (more…)

PotentialPark, the Swedish recruitment market research firm, says college students and recent grads turn in large numbers to corporate career sites for information about companies for whom they may want to work. But they also expect those companies to have a presence elsewhere, especially on places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and on blogs, too.

The career site is fine for providing fundamental information about the company, but it’s one-way communication. Young adults want more interactivity, so they expect their future employer to talk with them on social media channels. (more…)

Those are findings from the most recent survey of IT security professionals conducted by (ISC)2, the world’s largest not-for-profit information security professional organization. More than 12,000 members and non-members took part in the biennial Global Information Security Workforce Study, reporting on matters ranging from salaries and workload to their views on the current state of information security and protection. (more…)

Jidia Gasana, an engineer, says strong perfume in the office is her pet peeve. “It is like people douse themselves with perfume overnight,” she says.

These folks work in Kigali, Rwanda, proving that no matter where you are or what you do, there’s always some annoying co-worker around.

A U.K. food company commissioned a study of office workers in the nation of stiff upper lips finding (a coincidence you suppose?) 57% of them agreeing noisy eating to be the most offensive trait of their co-workers. (The company, Ainsley Harriott Cup Soup, makes, yes indeed, soup, which can be noisily slurped.)

Next most annoying was messiness, followed by a failure to wash up. Ughhh. (more…)

Surveying 3,991 employed, full-time workers, CareerBuilder found 75% of those who applied for a job never heard from the company. So common is that silence that only 82% of the candidates actually expect to hear something, even just a perfunctory, “Got your application.”

Contrast that with the experience of the thousands of candidates surveyed as part of the CandE awards research. Almost 78% reported getting an acknowledgement after submitting an application. And more than half of the applicants to the 90 companies taking part in the evaluation said they got a note describing the next steps in the process.

While even among the 37 winning companies the process wasn’t without its issues, overall 53% of the candidates would apply again. A majority are willing to tell their friends about their experience; some are willing to post about it on Facebook, Twitter, a blog, or elsewhere. (more…)

Referrals and the company career site are the two leading sources for new workers hired by the 1,054 companies participating in SilkRoad’s just released study of recruitment marketing effectiveness.

Between them, they produced 40% of the more than 150,000 hires the companies made in 2012.

This is the second year the HR software provider has compiled ATS data from its customers to report on their source of hire. This year, the company included interviews as a measure of effectiveness.

The data set came from companies as small as 100 employees and some larger than 10,000; 60% had under 2,000 employees, 30% fall between 2,000 and 10,000, and the remaining 10% are larger. A company spokesman said the employers represent “the entire scale. We have lots of technology, healthcare, higher education, and several other strong verticals.”

As it did last year, SilkRoad found that job boards collectively yielded more interviews and hires than did all other external sourcing efforts. (For the report, SilkRoad classified corporate career sites and inside recruiter efforts as internal, explaining “they are company resources.” Company sites were included because they are “internally controlled element of job advertising.”)

Among the job boards, Indeed yielded more interviews and hires than any other single site. CareerBuilder was second. (more…)

CareerBuilder says there’s a pretty good chance some of your co-workers are dating each other. Four in 10 workers have had — or are having — an office romance, according to the company’s annual survey of 4,216 workers. And 30% of them have married an office mate.

For human resource managers, such news is more heartache than heart throb.

“Relationships between co-workers can, and often do, end in breakups. And these breakups can be nasty,” says Mary Hladio, president of Ember Carriers Leadership Group.  “Worst-case scenario, these breakups lead the rejected partner to file a sexual harassment claim against the employer. Businesses still have to protect themselves and their employees through clearly defined company protocol.” (more…)

Economists were mostly expecting the numbers. Most estimates earlier in the week averaged out between about 160,000 and 165,000 new jobs. They had predicted December’s 7.8% unemployment rate would be unchanged. A Forbes survey suggested the rate might decrease to 7.7%.

In terms of actual numbers, 12.3 million Americans remain out of work, with 4.7 million of them unemployed for more than six months. Another 8 million are working at part-time jobs because they can’t find full time employment.

The January jobs gain is the smallest since September’s 138,000, but the report did up the jobs numbers for both December and November by a combined 127,000. (more…)

Hiring will be most aggressive in Brazil, India, and China where more than half the employers — almost three-quarters in Brazil — say they’ll be adding workers this year. Russia, where mining and energy exports are fueling growth, is more conservative in its hiring; just under half of employers expect to hire.

Elsewhere among the world’s 10 largest economies, far fewer employers expect to add workers. According to a CareerBuilder survey, in the U.S., Japan, and four European countries, the largest share of employers either expect to cut staff or make no change during the year. Even in the UK and the U.S., where more than half the employers surveyed report being better off financially than a year ago, not many of them plan to hire. (more…)

On the employee side, there’s a little less optimism now, with more workers than at any point during 2012  saying they don’t expect things to change much where they work in the next six months. As recently as the third quarter of last year, Glassdoor’s quarterly survey of workers found 48 percent of them expecting their company’s business performance to improve in the months ahead. Now, the fourth-quarter survey released this morning, says only 40 percent feel that way.

The findings of Glassdoor’s Employment Confidence Survey mirrors the monthly Consumer Confidence survey conducted by The Conference Board. The business organization’s much-watched Index declined by 6.4 points between November and December. While worries over the impact of the fiscal cliff accounted for a big part of the decline, The Conference Board said fewer consumers expect business conditions to improve in the next six months. In November 21.3 percent thought things would get better. In December only 17.6 percent said that, while those expecting business conditions to worsen increased to 21.5 percent from 15.8 percent. (more…)

Dice Holdings, parent company of the IT specialty job site Dice.com, and others in the financial service and energy sectors, says its most recent survey of tech recruiters and hiring managers found that 64 percent of them will add new tech workers next year. Compare that to a second survey of hiring professionals in all sectors, which found only 46 percent expecting to add new hires.

The results of the tech-only survey does show some softening of the market. In the spring, when Dice asked this same question, 73 percent of the respondents expected to make tech hires in the last half of 2012. That tracks with the general job survey in the spring when 51 percent of hiring managers planned second-half hiring. (more…)

Glassdoor’s annual list of the 50 best places to work, as determined by the scores awarded by employees and former employees, is out, and fully half the list is new. But among the top 10 for 2013, four companies remain from the 2012 list: Facebook, McKinsey & Co., Bain & Co., and Google. All four were in the top 10 last year.

Facebook is a double winner; it ranks #1 for 2013, and also took the top spot for 2011. In the 2012 survey, it ranked third, right behind Bain and McKinsey, where were one and two respectively.

“We’re honored to receive this award from Glassdoor,” said Lori Goler, Facebook’s vice president of people and recruiting. “We strive to make Facebook a place where everyone is able to have an impact doing what they love. Receiving this award is a testament to the culture of builders we’ve worked hard to create.” (more…)

The 2012 Survey of Registered Nurses found 91 percent of responding nurses satisfied with nursing as a career and almost three-quarters of them (73 percent) said they were satisfied with their current job. That job and career satisfaction — the highest in the three years of the survey — may explain why 66 percent of the nurses intend to “continue working as I am.”

As the survey report itself says, “The 2012 survey results show a much improved sense of satisfaction with both career and job.”

Last year, only 74 percent of the nurses in the survey said they were satisfied with their choice of profession and only 55 percent of the nurses said they intended to “continue working as I am”; 24 percent planned to look for another job. In the 2012 survey, the percentage of nurses intending to change employers dropped to 17 percent. (more…)

In its just-issued “Beige Book” report on the economic condition of the country, the Fed says that in more than half the districts, which carve the nation into 12 financial geographies, it’s seeing “modest gains in hiring.” However even in these areas, the Fed got mixed signals from the employers and staffing firms it contacts for insights on economic conditions.

For example in the Chicago district, covering the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the fed said “a number of firms were putting hiring on hold and had delayed temp-to-perm conversion decisions until next year.” In Richmond, the Fed found the employment market less positive than it did when it published its last report on October 10.

The one common thread running through each District’s report on its employment market is a reference to the shortage of skilled labor. While different skills are at issue, depending on the District, almost every one says employers and staffing firms mention shortages. (more…)

Most abandon those youthful dreams as they get older, says LinkedIn. The company surveyed some 8,000 of its 187 million members, asking them about their early career dreams and how they compared to the job they now have. Only 30 percent went on to become what they dreamed about as a child or at least work in a closely related field.

What happened to those early dreams? The professionals working in other jobs were most likely — by 44 percent — to explain,  ”As I got older, I became interested in a different career path.”

Fulfilling their childhood hopes, especially for those U.S. boys dreaming of becoming the next Kobe Bryant or Eli Manning, paled as they realized that taking pleasure in work was more important. At least that’s what 70 percent of the respondents said. (more…)

This survey from Monster offers the first full-year comparison of attitudes and job-seeking challenges from both veterans and employers. Launched a year ago, the survey results are rolled up into what Monster calls the Veterans Talent Index. It paints a sometimes discouraging look at the difficulties and obstacles veterans, particularly those who served since 9/11, face in finding work.

That group of veterans have the highest unemployment among America’s 21 million military veterans. As a group, the so-called Gulf War-era II veterans had an unemployment rate of 10 percent last month. Women veterans in that group had an unemployment rate of 15.5 percent, nearly twice the 7.9 percent national rate. (more…)

The unemployment rate among veterans of what the government calls Gulf War II is the highest of all veterans.

Collectively, veterans have an unemployment rate of 6.3 percent, well below the national rate of 7.9 percent. However, post-9/11 veterans have an unemployment rate of 10 percent.

A year ago in October (the most recent month for the data), the unemployment rate for those veterans was 12.1 percent. That month the national rate was 8.9 percent. The gap between the national unemployment rate and that for veterans is still wide, but it has closed considerably in 12 months, narrowing from 3.2 points to the current 2.1.

What’s helped is the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, and in particular the Vow to Hire Heroes Act, which gives employers a tax credit of up to $9,600 for hiring unemployed and/or disabled veterans. That program, like so many other tax programs and rate reductions, will end on December 31 unless Congress acts to extend it. (more…)