Yes dear reader, just in time for Valentine’s Day CareerBuilder tells us what you’ve been suspecting all along: your office mates are mating up. If the survey is to be believed — and why not?; they surveyed 7,780 people who all can’t be pranking us — then almost 4 in 10 workers have dated someone they met on the job.

Awkward, if one of them thinks it’s going places and the other one … you get the idea. Fortunately, 31 percent of those relationships lead to marriage. (Which is no guarantee things won’t get even more awkward a little down the road. But this is the season for love, so ignore our dose of ugly reality. Or read on to the part where we tell you how Challenger, Gray, & Christmas snuck in a warning about office violence.)

HR people out there, this stat’s for you: CareerBuilder says 18 percent of office dating is between boss and their report. Women were more likely to date up than men, 35 percent to 23 percent respectively.

Of the industries reported, you just had to know that hospitality by far (47 percent) has the most co-dating co-workers. Healthcare also made the top five list, which, considering how many parents hoped their offspring would marry a doctor, is no surprise. But financial services (40 percent)? And transportation and utilities (43 percent)? And IT (40 percent)? These also made the top five? Really?

Now moving on to that warning about workers pulling a Valentine’s Day Massacre  from Challenger, Gray & Christmas (hereinafter CG&C). “Some companies are facing an entirely different problem: their workers have lost that loving feeling and the consequences can be dire,” reads the press release we got from the global outplacement firm.

“Often in situations where managers are aware of a problem between two or more coworkers, they merely look the other way, letting the employees work it out amongst themselves.  This may work in some situations, but in others, this hands-off approach can have disastrous results,” says CGC CEO John Challenger.

The press release offers a whole bunch of ideas to increase civility and reduce animosity. Missing from the list, and very conspicuously considering Valentine’s Day started this whole thing, is the free supply of large amounts of chocolate.

A Vowel Please

From the “Can I buy a vowel?” department comes Goood Job, the latest in a long line of companies entering the employee-referral-social media business we’ve talked a lot about (and includes socialcruiter, socialreferral, and many others). In short, here’s how Goood Job works: Employees can opt-in to have their company’s job postings automatically show up on their Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages. Friends can express an interest, filling in short information about themselves on a landing page, and the employee can add a comment (like “Goood guy, worked with him for three years”).

The system tracks employees’ referrals through the hiring process. The employees build up points, like a loyalty program, however you want to set it up — x number of points for referring someone who sends in a resume, y number if it resulted in a hire, etc. — and earn dinners, movie tickets, trips to Paris, the spa, or perhaps even to a spa in Paris. HP and Microsoft in Israel are using the Tel Aviv company for referrals, and Goood Job says both are considering expanding their use globally. The sweetspot, though — or shall we say sweeet spot — are companies in the few-hundred to a few-thousand-employee range, who pay around $1,000-2,500 a month, depending on company size. One client has tripled its number of referrals since using the system. As we began an early-morning demo of the product, one company rep IM’d us to say “Goood Morning.” Cute.

Short Takes

BeKnown as you with a URL all your own. Just go claim your Beknown.com/your-name-here address. Yeah, yeah, we know there are a ton of places to get a vanity addy, but as our best friend’s mother used to say, “What can it hurt?”

Remember the SHRM Members for Transparency? That’s the group that’s taken issue with some of the goings-on at the top levels of the HR professional association. We were starting to unremember them ourselves until up pops an email from the group the other day saying they’re still trying to get a second meeting going with representatives of the big group’s board of directors. The first meeting took 102 days to schedule. The second took a little longer than that. It’s now scheduled for March 4. (Go here and read all about the last meeting.)

For being so out of fashion, so yesterday, job boards manage to come out on top or top-adjacent on nearly every source of hire study. In a Bersin & Associates survey this fall job boards tied for first with internal transfers as the leading source of all hires. CareerXroads says job boards produced 24.9 percent of all external hires in 2010, second only to employee referrals (27.5 percent).

The latest survey comes from tech vendor Talent Technology, which reports that job boards are the leading source of candidates, according to the 1,100 North American HR professionals who participated. Job boards account for 17 percent of the candidates, followed by employee referrals, which provide 15.8 percent.

What’s remarkable about the evidence is how few accept it. Even after reporting that “job boards remain popular and are used to fill 19 percent of open positions – making job boards the No. 1 source for candidates,” Bersin titled that section of the report “Job Boards: Not Dead, but Dying.”

Even more remarkable is how little the job board industry has done to promote itself. The major boards have their own, proprietary data, guarded more carefully than the U.S. does its diplomatic messages. Second tier and certainly mom-and-pop operations have little data beyond gross traffic counts. So for all practical purposes employers do their own market surveillance.

Now, finally, seven years after it’s founding by Peter Weddle, the International Association of Employment Web Sites has bestirred itself to do some serious research about the industry.

Financed by Jobg8, the job board industry’s candidate marketplace, 100 sites participated last summer in the first benchmarking survey of commercial employment sites. Before you get too hopeful about the prospects, know that none of the biggest job boards participated, the survey was designed for the benefit of the industry, and most of the results aren’t being shared publicly. Those that are may be helpful to some buyers; they’re certainly interesting. More important is that it gives individual sites a yardstick against which to measure their own results.

“It was,” confessed Matt Hoffner, president of Jobg8′s Americas operation (the company is HQd in the UK), “a lot harder than we thought … Just getting all the terms right was quite a challenge.”

Still, after struggling through some 65 questions and their accompanying 22 footnotes, the industry found:

• Three-quarters of a job board’s visitors are “window shoppers” who neither apply for a job nor register. That suggests there’s a high degree of self-selection that occurs, as the next point demonstrates.
• Job postings that direct to a company’s ATS get five applicants on average. Those with only an email address get 3.3 applications. Niche sites and those in business more than three years have slightly higher apply rates.
• Job aggregators (the Indeeds and SimplyHireds) provide about 22.8 percent of a U.S. site’s traffic and only 11.6 percent in Canada. Depending on the region, sizable percentages also came from the job board’s own search optimization efforts and their pay-per-click campaigns.
• The average site has 3.5 employees; 22 percent have one or less; 9 percent have 30 or more.
• Individual marketing expenses varied widely, ranging from 1 to 14 percent. The average is 6.7 percent of revenues spent marketing the site.

Hoffner observed that the industry is increasingly aware it needs to do a better job telling its story. From the survey discussions that took place at meetings in Ft. Lauderdale, during the IAEWS Congress in September, and in London, Hoffner said there was a “clear understanding that we can’t sit still.” The public part of the report says, “Job board owners are looking for new sales and marketing models and resources but expect that promotion and sales efforts will increase in 2012 and beyond.”

One powerful motivator for putting more effort into promotion, besides simply to stand out from the huge number of job boards in the world, is that organic traffic produces better results than that from aggregators. Says the published report: “Many participants stated that aggregator traffic was expensive and may not yield the same rate of applications or registered users as traffic from other sources.”

Board operators are also looking at a changing pricing model. Most sites still charge a fee to post a job; a few charge employers for each click. Hoffner says a “pay per applicant model came in for discussion. It’s an evolving pricing model that has the operator share risk with the customer. That’s a direction they seem to be heading toward.”

Indeed the January number came in below the average of 182,000, which is what economists in a Bloomberg survey were expecting. A Dow Jones Newswires survey however put the number right at 170,000.

The ADP report also adjusted down the December numbers from the initial 325,000 to 292,000.  Nearly all the January gain, says ADP, came from companies with fewer than 500 workers, and all but 18,000 of the new jobs were in the service sector. Manufacturing added 10,000 workers during the month.

A year ago, ADP said 190,000 private sector jobs were created in January.

This morning’s report, says Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at Miller Tabak, “compares to the 2011 monthly average of 160,000 and thus points to a continued recovery but the mediocre pace this far into a recovery still remains frustrating,” He estimates that Friday’s official report from the U.S. Department of Labor will show 165,000 non-farm jobs created in January.

The ADP National Employment Report, produced jointly with Macroeconomic Advisers, is closely watched by economists as an indication of what the official U.S. Labor Department jobs report will show. The government report is usually released on the first Friday of every month.

The two reports rarely match, largely due to differences in methodology. The government report also includes public sector employment. ADP’s report does not. However, as the Globe and Mail (Canada) said in reporting this morning’s report, “Take the number with a large pinch of salt, but pay attention to the trend.”

That trend, though, is hard to read. While there hasn’t been a negative month since September 2010 (when census layoffs influenced the numbers), job gains have hovered around 100,000 for most of last year. Only in four months did the official numbers break 200,000. In three months, they were well below 100,000.

Like the job numbers, other signs are positive, if tepid. The Conference Board last week said its Leading Economic Index improved slightly in December  to 94.3. It was the third consecutive monthly increase in the index. (The Board also announced changes in how the index is calculated.) This morning, the Board’s monthly count of jobs posted online showed 61,300 more jobs in January than the month before. It’s only the second increase in job postings in eight months.

Economists, now, are not expecting any surprises in Friday’s government report. The Wall Street Journal says economists are expecting it to show 125,000 new jobs and no change in the current 8.5 percent unemployment rate.  Reuters puts the number at 150,000. And Bloomberg, which wrote a long piece this morning about growing optimism in the financial markets and among economists, says the Friday jobs report will come in at 145,000.

Over the years it has come to be accepted that the average number of new hires coming from employee referral programs is somewhere between SHRM’s 24 percent (for non-exempt positions) to about a third. Some programs do much better.

From CareerXroads now comes evidence that the hires from employee referrals are undercounted.

“Referrals permeate the recruiting process more than we think,” says recruiting consultant Gerry Crispin, a CareerXroads principal.

He and his partner, Mark Mehler, surveyed their clients and others about employee referral programs and found that most of the 50 respondents have a referral program, most pay a bonus of some kind, and on average 28 percent of their external hires are referrals.

Most of the results, says Crispin, were expected. However, in comparing data from that admittedly limited, and unscientific survey with the early results of the consultancy’s annual Source of Hire study, “we’re finding referrals are a part of every source or almost every.”

For instance, rehires, a small, but steady source of hires, include a sizable percentage of individuals referred by employees. The rehires may first come to the attention of recruiters through a referral, but when they’re onboarded, the source of hire tends to get reported as a rehire.

It’s a “classification issue,” explains Crispin. A similar situation occurs with sourcers. They will be reported as the source of a hire even when they identified a candidate as a result of a referral from an employee.

Crispin and Mehler included an early indication of the pervasiveness of employee referrals in their survey results, posted online here at SlideShare. The numbers are still being crunched for the forthcoming source of hire survey (tentatively to be titled “Channels of Influence”), so there’s no data cited for the contribution referrals make to these other sources.

However, the share of the pie that referrals make to the total hires attributed to these other sources is labeled. As Crispin observed, “With just what we can count, referral programs make a big contribution.”

Much of the other data in the survey report will be useful to recruiters for comparing their own results. The surveyed companies, the report preface notes, are “large, highly-competitive firms.” Some make upwards of 10,000 hires a year. More, though, make 1,000 or less.

Big or small, two-thirds of the respondents offer a bonus for every referral hire. Most common (44 percent) is $500 for a non-exempt hire. One-in-five will pay $1,000 and a few more (28 percent) will pay that for difficult to fill non-exempt positions.

It takes about 10.4 referrals on average to make a hire. Some companies are either so picky or get so many referrals that only one referral in 25 or more results in a hire.

One other significant stat coming out of the survey is that the majority of employers don’t give the referred candidate any special treatment. Of the 39 percent that do, the comments cited in the results suggest that many don’t do much more than review the resume or application.

On the other hand, 85 percent of the employees who made a referral will get a thank you whether or not a hire is made.

One of the survey’s only surprises, Crispin said, it that employers that don’t dedicate staff to managing and promoting the referral program actually do better than those with staff assigned.

The 53.6 percent of companies that divvy up the work among the recruiting staff average about 33 percent of hires from referrals. Those with some dedicated support average about 24 percent.

“It’s counterintuitive,” Crispin agreed. The result could be just an aberration. Or, he speculated, it could be spreading the work means there’s more overall time invested in the program. Or, it could be the “silo effect” effect, that is when one person is tasked with a job, everyone else leaves things up to them.

“Now that I’ve seen that,” Crispin notes, “I’d be curious to see if someone could replicate it … for now, it’s just an artifact.”

That’s a remarkable number, which, even if is skewed by respondents with very in-demand skills, would still go a long way to explaining why you’re not getting calls back. In fact, the survey shows that IT professionals are picky about whose call they will return.

The best thing a recruiter can do when leaving a message or speaking with a potential candidate is to be as detailed about the job as possible. Hearing details about the specific job, the team, the nature of the work, and the company culture is the kind of information that would lead 88 percent of the survey respondents to return the call.

Less important, but still high on the list for the IT professionals surveyed, is the professionalism of the recruiter and the reputation of the company.

“The best recruiters take the time to get to know the client and the candidate in detail. He or she with the most intelligence wins the matchmaking process,” says TEKsystems Director, Rachel Russell.

The findings come from the company’s quarterly IT Professional Perspectives Survey, which surveyed 2,424 IT workers last quarter about how they look for jobs. First, when a tech worker begins to consider a new job, they take stock of their skills, goals, and interests. Then, 96 percent say they hit the job boards.

“Job boards are the quickest way for IT professionals to feel like they’re getting out there and searching for a job,” says Russell. “But given that so many people are on the job boards, it’s a hard place to stand out.”

Perhaps knowing that, once a tech job seeker finds interesting opportunities, the next step for 72 percent of them is to network with other professionals. At some point, many will work with a recruiter. According to the survey, 59 percent say a recruiter is the main resource; 54 percent say colleagues; 53 percent say friends; and, 46 percent rely on their networks.

Recruiters who help job seekers, even if they don’t end up placing them, may still reap rewards. With 45 percent of the survey respondents saying they have 10 or more top professionals in their network, recruiters who remain accessible, helpful, and professional may be able to get a referral. The survey found 65 percent of IT professionals willing to share names if they had a positive experience with the recruiter.

That’s because it’s no easy feat to win a spot in the top 100, which Fortune released today. Many companies compete — 1,000 typically start the process. They’re put through the wringer by The Great Place to Work Institute, which requires each to undertake employee and management surveys, examines employee engagement, and develops a Trust Index. The Index measures what the Institute believes are the cornerstones of a great place to work: Credibility, Respect, Fairness and Pride, and Camaraderie.

While economic and financial conditions influence the rankings, the Trust Index is the cornerstone of the ranking. Building a high Trust Index takes time and commitment from every part of the company, beginning with the CEO and C-suite. The culture that creates endures.

It doesn’t hurt, though, to offer great pay and great benefits. Fortune notes Google’s “free gourmet food, on-site laundry, dry-cleaning, and alterations, an outdoor sports complex, (and) the star-studded lineup of speakers.”

But even for perk-heavy Silicon Valley, three-time first-place winner Google offers an unrivaled assortment of benefits and perks, including custom workstations. Says Fortune, “One option that became increasingly popular last year was swapping out the standard sit-down desk for a standing desk. Googlers place an order with the company’s Ergolab, choose from a number of desk models, and have their desk measured to their height.”

Google isn’t alone in providing unusual perks. GoDaddy, #93 on the list, holds off-site activities that have included “whitewater rafting, gold panning, competitive cooking courses, and trapeze classes.” Zappos gives every employee $50 to award as a bonus to a co-worker. From those getting a bonus, the company picks a winner who gets a parade, special parking, a $150 gift card, and a cape.

For the complete list of this year’s best 100 companies and their 2011 rankings, click here.

Data out this morning from a study of Facebook’s Gen Y members (18-29) shows that, on average, each has 16 co-workers as friends. While the average is skewed by those who have many more, the study found that half have more than five workers as Facebook friends.

What’s the significance?

“When they go home,” says Gen Y branding guru Dan Schwabel, “they are still connected to the workplace… Their co-workers are their friends. And because people change jobs so often and have so many friends, their friends become co-workers.”

Ironically, Schwabel says, most Gen Yers aren’t intending for Facebook to be a business tool; 64 percent of them don’t bother to list a single employer in their profile.

That’s why, he says, Facebook is “inadvertently a part of their business life.”

His company, Millenial Branding, analyzed data from Identified.com uncovering the inadvertent consequence of friending co-workers. While BranchOut and Monster’s BeKnown are intentional business networks for Facebook users, at least for Gen Y business networking is occurring on the mainstage.

Another key discovery, says Schwabel, is how few Gen Yers work at large companies. Only 7 percent of those listing a job currently work for a Fortune 500 firm.The largest share (7.2 percent) work in the hospitality and travel industry, and 2.9 percent give their job title as “server.”

However, ranking 5th among titles is “owner,” suggesting, says Schwabel, that Gen Y workers are entrepreneurial. For recruiters looking to hire Gen Yers, the implication is clear. “Large corporations need to rethink their corporate recruiting strategy,” he says. ” Companies have to be more flexible and give Gen Y more control over schedules, and their work.”

The best way to reach a Gen Yer, he says, is through their friends or by friending them directly. Don’t message them until you are a friend, he recommends. “They don’t think of Facebook that way.” Referrals by friends are the best way to reach out. “They trust their friends. They listen to their friends.”

Schwabel also had some counsel for his Gen Y peers — advice anyone with a workplace friend should keep in mind: “Be careful what (you) say. It could be the office gossip next morning.”

• You may remember CodeEval from a year ago, and from an update we did when part of its service became free. The company has opened up its database for searching by employers. So if you want to look up one of the thousands of developers who’ve solved programming challenges, you can view their solutions, and contact info. It’s $500 a month, though you can search free to see how many matches you get, before spending the money to get identifying information.
• CareerBuilder says the staffing industry is in for a strong few months as companies ramp-up their temporary hiring. A survey commissioned by the careers publisher found 36 percent of companies plan to hire temp or contract workers this year. The first quarter may well be the easiest, as 27 percent of companies say they’ll be adding temp staff in the first three months of the year.

• Speaking of matchmaking, would you believe there’s another new site aimed at matching employer and employee online profiles? This one’s called StreetID, and it’s focused on financial careers.

• SelectMinds has announced something called “Referral Communities.” Basically this is an addition to SelectMinds’ product which we have mentioned before, called TalentVine. Referral Communities allows referred job candidates to get into a talent community if they’re not ready to apply for a job or not ready to send in a resume; with the old system, the person your employees referred would need to go through the full Taleo application process. Clients like eBay and McGraw-Hill can use the system to “drip market” to job candidates who have been referred employees have referred.
• Google is always looking for the best and the brightest coming out of colleges and universities around the world. To encourage interest (and this extends all the way to high schoolers), it has Google Student Blog. It’s about as soft a sell as you’ll see. Of course, career information is among the potpourri of offerings. Next week begins a series of video chats (on Googe+ Hangouts, naturally) with lead engineering recruiter Jeff Moore. He just wrapped up a Recruiter Tips & Tricks series. You can use Hangouts for your own recruiting chats.

• Anthony Knierim, who works for Aon Hewitt’s outsourcing business and used to be with Accenture’s outsourcing business, is starting a company called RadMatter, which he says is a “social gaming place” launching this quarter. It’s going to do a free or low-cost beta with 10 companies (it already has five “yesses” and one “maybe”; he told us some of the beta companies and they are well-known). He says a couple of them are “gaga” over the tool, which will first focus on games to engage college or early-career job candidates. Companies will buy licenses that will allow them to host 5, 10, or 30 challenges annually. Venture capitalists are approaching RadMatter, Kneirim says, but right now it’s holding off on giving up control to a big VC firm, particularly to a firm, he says, that doesn’t understand the recruiting industry and might not realize how big gaming, challenges, and similar assessments can be in attracting people. RadMatter also will offer two-hour workshops for business leaders on the power of games and on best practices with games in the workplace and in recruiting, for about $7,500 for up to 12 participants (and is doing an abbreviated one this January 23 in Milwaukee for more than 30 C-level executives). In addition, it’ll offer three-week, $75,000 “culture audits” for companies on “readiness and recommendations for engaging Millenials.”

Consumer confidence is at the highest level in months. The U.S. economy has been adding jobs now for more than a year. When the December report is released Friday, the expectation is that it, too, will show job growth. ADP’s monthly job numbers will be out Thursday morning, offering a preview of what the official U.S. Labor Department employment data may show.

Today, the stock market is up decisively up on reports of strong growth in manufacturing, and increased construction spending. There’s even a cautious willingness among employers to add even more staff this year.

CareerBuilder says that one in four employers plans to add permanent staff this year, about the same number the job board reported for 2011. The 11 percent unsure what they’ll be doing can be read to mean that if the economy improves — as the rising consumer confidence measures suggest the country expects — then even more hiring could be coming.

Manpower’s quarterly employment survey was even a bit more positive. It found that 14 percent of employers intend to add jobs in the first three months of the year, its strongest hiring outlook since 2008.

Consumers, too, are more hopeful. The venerable Consumer Confidence Index has climbed almost 25 points since October. At 64.5, the Index is at its highest point in eight months. The holiday spirit may account for some of that, but there’s also evidence that employment prospects are brightening. The Conference Board’s employment trends index was up 6.4 percent in November compared to the year before. (December’s result will be released next week.)

Last week, Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that 30 percent of the callers to its annual free, phone-in job help line were optimistic they would land a job within three months. In 2010, only 18 percent thought that was the case.

Since June the number of new jobs created each month has been above 100,000. It’s still a slow growth rate, but it’s a significant improvement over 2010 when six out of the 12 months showed job cuts.

“We continue to hear people say that the U.S. recovery is fragile, and that’s the wrong word,” says Michael Gapen, an economist with Barclays Capital. “It’s durable. It’s just not robust. It’s a moderate expansion.”

That’s one reason companies have been hesitant to add permanent staff. It’s also likely that employers recall that after a strong start to 2011, the recovery stalled as the financial markets began recognizing the seriousness of the European debt crises. In the first four months of 2011, some 714,000 jobs were created. Less than half that were created in the next four months.

World economic conditions are still far from stable. Iran is threatening to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, which is starting to send oil futures up. Bank lending hasn’t loosened much and a Presidential election creates more uncertainty about future U.S. economic policy.

With that baggage causing employers to be especially cautious, Monster says that temp hiring is likely to be strong well into 2012. Indeed, in its December report, the American Staffing Association reported that the staffing index has been climbing, slowly, but steadily, since February 2011. The index is now pretty much where it was at the end of last year.

No wonder, then, that job seekers are tempering their expectations about finding permanent work. That Challenger, Gray & Christmas survey also found that many more job seekers this year expect their job search to last a year. In 2010, 4 percent thought that. This year, 10 percent do.

“There was a lot more uncertainty a year ago. Almost half of last year’s callers had no idea how long the job search would take. This year, callers were either certain of the job market’s improvement or certain of its continued weakness,” said John A. Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, referring to the increase in both optimistic and pessimistic callers.

Among the unemployed callers, 37 percent have been out of work for one to six months. Another 14 percent have been jobless for 7 to 12 months. As an indication of how tight the job market remains, the remaining 50 percent of callers had been jobless for a year or more, with 60 percent of these long-time job seekers out of work for two years or longer.

CareerBuilder’s CEO Matt Ferguson predicts a somewhat brighter employment picture for 2012 than the numbers — or the job seeker survey might — imply.

“Historically, our surveys have shown that employers are more conservative in their predictions than actual hiring,” says Ferguson. “Barring any major economic upsets, we expect 2012 to bring a better hiring picture than 2011, especially in the second half of the year.”

Where social media sources register a barely discernible 1 percent of all hires, job boards produced 19 percent. That was matched only by internal transfers; even referrals came in lower — 16 percent.

These are among the surprising, and not so surprising, bits of data developed from a survey of 414 employers conducted by HR consultants Bersin & Associates. Compiled into the Talent Acquisition Factbook 2011, and authored by principal analyst Karen O’Leonard, the 100 page volume offers details on the recruiting metrics from employers as small as 100  workers to those with more than 10,000.

Josh Bersin, founder of the eponymous firm, said the genesis of the factbook came from the company’s clients and conversations with many others since Bersin launched his talent acquisition practice a few years ago.

Employers, he said, “are anxious for a lot of information.” But there wasn’t much detailed bench-marking generally available. It wasn’t easy for employers to get answers to questions like: Are my recruiting costs in line with other companies? Am I spending my money effectively Am I getting the kind of results others are?

Now they can.

Some of the data — such as cost per hire, source of hire, time to fill — is widely available and in more detail.  The Society for Human Resource Management has data on a number of important recruiting metrics, including cost per hire and time to fill, the traditional recruiting effectiveness measures. The Prinzo Group offers a series of reports on talent acquisition metrics. Annually, CareerXroads publishes a source of hire survey, based on responses from the firm’s roster of mostly Fortune 500 companies.

Bersin’s factbook includes those types of metrics, but breaks down the responses by company size, and industry. In other areas, such as the report’s section on quality of hire metrics being used by employers, offers insights not readily available.

The report also draws conclusions and makes recommendations based on the data. Regarding job boards, for instance, authoir O’Leonard writes:

While the landscape is changing, job boards certainly are not dead. To the contrary, 81 percent of organizations say they will spend on job boards this year. However, we expect that organizations will use job boards more selectively, for certain types of positions and in certain geographies…

(Incidentally, CareerXroads found job boards accounted for 24.95 percent of new hires in 2010. Referrals represented 27.5 percent in the CareerXroads report. The data, however, is not directly comparable since the report separated new hires from internal transfers, while Bersin’s survey asked about how all open positions were filled.)

Some of the more telling points in the factbook deal with the use of social media. Despite all the chatter about social recruiting, most companies spend next to nothing on that strategy and, not surprisingly, make few hires from all their friends and fans and followers. “General social media,” as the factbook describes sites not principally intended for professional networking, produced 1 percent of hires. Only the largest employers hired more — 2 percent.

O’Leonard notes that the reason for the low spend — 1 percent of the recruiting budget — is that social media’s costs “are negligible”, and that when money is spent there it typically comes out of a centralized marketing budget. “Converting candidates reached on social media to hires,” O’Leonard writes, “can be a time consuming-process.”

On the other hand professional networking sites like LinkedIn account for 10 percent of the hires, but companies only spend 3 percent of their external recruiting budgets there.

With all the energy being put into social media, the results reported by the surveyed companies seems meager at best. “A lot more hype than reality,” is   Bersin’s assessment. However, when companies use sites like Facebook and Twitter as a marketing and brand building tool, they get results, he said. Social media, he says, “is being used effectively to build pipelines.” But when candidates decide to apply, they go to the company career site, he said.

One important, and oft-ignored area that the Bersin factbook to its credit takes a stab at addressing is quality of hire. More than a few companies attempt to close the loop and track the performance of new hires back to the source of their application, as well as the recruiter who presented them.

“Recruiting teams can look at a number of measurements to determine new-hire quality, including new-hire performance assessments, hiring manager satisfaction, candidate satisfaction and new-hire retention,” O’Leonard writes. However, more than 25 percent of companies do nothing, she adds.

This section of the report details the kind of measurements companies do use, though the data here is limited to just a few charts specifically regarding use of performance reviews and turnover data.  Still, it offers guidance to companies who want to become more data-driven, but aren’t sure what to measure or where they stand.

That’s exactly how Bersin hopes employers make use of the factbook. “First,” he says, “Are they in the right ballpark?” The data can be used to analyze their own spending, source of hire, and basic productivity measures.

Second, he says, the factbook can help recruiting leaders determine how to allocate their sourcing dollars.

“Really, Bersin, says, “what this is about is where do they fit. It gives them something to compare (to).”

Taking a broader look at the survey results, Bersin said, “It tells me that (recruiting) is expensive. It is not cheap to do it well.

“It tells me that companies are spending more right now… It may be even harder because there are so many candidates.

“It shows that there is a pretty substantial change in using social networks.

“It tells me that the recruiting industry is very complicated.”

The global management consulting firm with 6,000 employees ranked 3rd last year, just behind Facebook and Southwest Airlines. This year, Facebook fell to third and Southwest came in seventeenth.

This is the fourth year that Glassdoor has compiled a list of the 50 best places to work. (Officially, it’s the Employees’ Choice Awards for the 50 Best Places to Work for 2012.)

Scores are based on at least 25 responses to a multi-question survey. The responses are aggregated and the top 50 scoring companies make the list.

Bain & Co. has made the list since its inception, as have 12 other companies including Apple (1oth), Chevron (16th), Google (5th), and Proctor & Gamble (25th).

Russ Hagey, chief talent officer at Bain & Company, said, “We consistently hear from our current and former employees that the challenging and supportive environment that Bain provides make us not only the best place to work, but a great launching pad to a successful career, whether it’s within the business, social or entrepreneurial sectors.”

Some companies have earned spots on other top lists. Google, Salesforce, Intel, and Starbucks, among others, are also on the Fortune list of 100 Best Companies  to Work For. Bain is on Vault’s Consulting 50 list, where it also ranked #1. McKinsey & Company, another global consulting firm, is second on the Glassdoor list and also on the Vault list.

While methodologies and scoring systems for the various lists are all different, the Glassdoor list is different because it is solely based on employee ratings.

“There are consistent themes that surface among these top-rated employers,” says Robert Hohman, co-founder and CEO of Glassdoor, “including company culture, competitive pay and benefits packages, open communication practices, and high opinions of the chief executive.”

Besides rating the company, CEOs are rated too. Their scores are included with the company’s on the top 50 list. Six CEOs got 100 percent ratings.

The quarterly Manpower survey of hiring intentions released today shows 14 percent of employers expect to add to their workforce in the first three months of 2012. Nine percent expect a decline; 7 percent don’t know; and, 70 percent predict no change. With Manpower’s seasonal adjustment, the net result is nine percent overall increase in job growth intentions.

Intentions, of course, don’t necessarily translate into actual hiring. But next quarter’s employer plans at least show the first improvement in a year. Throughout this year, Manpower’s survey of hiring intent stayed at a consistent 8 percent. It’s also the ninth constitutive quarter of positive hiring intentions.

“Slow, but steady momentum has improved employer confidence, which is likely why more employers are planning to hire in the first quarter,” said Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup president of the Americas.

However, there’s an unusually large number of employers who don’t know what they’ll be doing next quarter. The 7 percent uncertain employers i  the highest since 2005 and the jump between the current fourth quarter, where 3 percent of employers were unsure, to next quarter is the largest since 1977.

“This uptick is encouraging,” Prising, said, “but the historically high proportion of employers that are unsure of their hiring plans indicates continued uncertainty about the future and ongoing caution when it comes to staffing plans.”

Adding to the uncertainty is the continuing debate in the U.S. Congress about extending a payroll tax cut, which expires in less than three weeks, as well as the European bailout and the future of the Euro.

As if to underscore the uncertainty, a survey by Dice Holdings, owner of eFinancialCareers and the IT specialty job board Dice.com, found 47 percent of hiring managers and recruiters saying they expected to increase hiring in the first half of 2012 compared to their hiring in the second half of 2011.

While the Dice results are more optimistic than what Manpower found, both surveys found a majority of companies plan no additional hiring. Dice said 53 percent of the respondents expect no new hiring in the first half of next year; Manpower put the number at 70 percent for the first three months.

Manpower’s survey also found that the most robust hiring will be in the mining sector (which include oil and gas), which is projected to see a seasonally adjusted 16 percent hiring boost. Leisure and hospitality is just behind with a 14 percent net employment outlook. Only construction is expected to see a net jobs decrease. It’s employment outlook is -7 percent.

It’s the largest number of  “job-leavers,” as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, in more than a decade. Included in the count are workers who took buyouts, some who quit ahead of a dismissal, and others who may be taking time off before starting a new job. The bulk, however, are those who decided to leave a job without having another lined up.

There’s no way of telling what kind of workers these job-leavers are. However, any number of surveys over the last few years show there’s a gathering wave of intentions about leaving, if not actual departures.

“Top performers have had it with stagnant opportunities and rewards, and are starting to jump ship now that the job market is a bit looser,” says Dr. Pat Sikor, TNS Employee Insights Senior Researcher. Pointing to declining scores on employee engagement surveys, she says it “reflects the pent-up demand of employees to want more than what they have.”

TNS Employee Insights conducts surveys and research into the effect of employee engagement on business performance. Its recent research shows a dramatic drop in some key measures of engagement. Between 2006 and 2011, TNS found a 17.6 percent reduction in employees who feel their company rewards them according to the value of their performance. There has been a nearly 13 percent decline in their feelings about the company when it comes to personal development and growth.

Other surveys have found similar results. What this suggests is that employees are disengaging, with most choosing not to become job-leavers, but ready to bolt should an opportunity come along.

BlessingWhite, which conducts a periodic broad, global study of engagement, found last year that 13 percent of North American workers planned to leave their current job in a year. That was almost twice the 7 percent who planned to quit in the 2008 survey. While workers were about as engaged last year as in 2008 (57 percent v. 56 percent), the less engaged the worker, the more likely they said they were to leave. Older workers were more likely to be engaged; millennials, the least engaged.

Disengaged and disengaging workers aren’t necessarily minimum performers. There is a correlation between engagement and performance, as the BlessingWhite report details. However, for any number of reasons (many of them referenced in these reports), top performers can grow disenchanted.

Why did workers want to leave? The BlessingWhite survey found 28 percent of North Americans cited lack of career opportunities. That was also an area where the TNS Employee Insights survey saw a decline from 2006. In the 2010 survey, worker satisfaction with career opportunities within their current company had declined 14.3 percent; 48 percent said they were satisfied in the most recent survey.

With the economic malaise continuing and job creation barely keeping up with population growth, most workers aren’t too likely to simply walk out the door with no place to go, although obviously tens of thousands do. Fewer will go out in Joey style, producing a video of his musical resignation seen now by 3 million. But top talent that grows disenchanted has opportunities. Whether they call that headhunter who left them a message or put out the word to their network, they will find another job.

However, as TNS’ Sikor says, “The key to retaining top talent therefore is simple: move the needle and increase employee engagement.” She’ll be one of the speakers at a free TNS webinar on Dec. 6 — “How to Retain Top Talent – Moving the Needle in Employee Engagement,” which is HRCI approved.

No, seriously, I am — at least, that’s what www.humanforsale.com told me. I took their survey and the resulting value on my person was nearly $2 million. Of course, I’d like to think that I am priceless. (Waiting while you all vomit…) Try it for yourself and see what you’d go for on eBay…

But getting serious (and because that site doesn’t take into account the fact that I’m a sourcer) — let’s talk about what sourcing is worth. What are you, as a professional people-hunter/sourcer/search ninja actually worth?

If we knew the answer to this question, we wouldn’t be asking you, our readers. It’s a question that comes up often and almost never receives the same answer. Some people think that sourcing is only worth about $6/hr. Others command a hefty $100+/hr billing rate for sourcing projects. Regardless of how you approach this question, the answer will almost never be accurate and I believe that is because there is no cookie-cutter framework in which “sourcing” fits. For instance:

• Some sourcers do lead generation
• Some sourcers do lead generation + initial outreach
• Some sourcers do lead generation + initial outreach + pre-screening
• Some sourcers do all of the above as well as strategic initiatives, including pipeline development and employment branding projects

…yet they are all “sourcers.” To say that each of these types of individuals should be paid the same since they are all classified as “sourcer” would be as incorrect as saying a person working in sales at a retail storefront should be making the same as a person working in sales at a multi-national ERP software manufacturer, because they both carry the same title.

In my personal opinion, sourcers’ compensation should be determined based on two main items and one sub-item:

• Level of expertise (usually determined by years of experience, but not always)
• Scope of function

If you want experience, you must pay for it. If you want more work to be done, you have to pay for that, too. And if you are not willing to pay for either (translated — you are looking for a “top-notch sourcer” at at $13/hr) then you will engage in a never-ending search — either because you’ll never find a sourcer willing to take your job, or you’ll end up hiring all the wrong ones.

Geography also plays a role in determining a sourcer’s compensation. Where you are in the world makes a big difference — for example, sourcers in the United States and Australia typically get paid more than sourcers in Asia. Cost of living in a given location makes a big difference in what a sourcer could/should earn.

With this in mind, I invite all of you who are sourcers to participate in our Salary Survey so we can get a snapshot of what the actual compensation of sourcers is today. Please follow this link and take a few moments to anonymously fill out the survey. Once we get a good sampling we will share this information on SourceCon.com to give everyone a better idea of how sourcing is compensated.

Only 7 percent of corporate career sites are optimized for mobile devices, according to a Potentialpark survey. However, 19 percent of job seekers reported using their mobile device for career activities; 50 percent “could imagine” themselves doing so.

The usage data comes from Potentialpark’s massive annual global survey of students, graduates, and early career professionals. It’s Online Talent Communication Study was completed in June and now, with the 2012 survey underway, the recruitment marketing and research firm says the number of mobile job seekers is already showing “a significant rise.”

“Job seekers are using their mobile devices for job search whether employers like it or not,” explained Julian Ziesing, a spokeman for Potentialpark. “Much like the employer brand, refusing to create a mobile recruiting strategy doesn’t stop employers from having one. It simply becomes one they don’t control.”

Internet-accessible mobile devices can connect to most career sites, whether or not they are mobile-optimized. However, if you’ve ever tried to search for a job on a typical corporate career site, you quickly discovered that it is clunky at best, and at worst, some or all of the search features don’t work. Even where you can search, applying for a job from a mobile device may be impossible.

That becomes a major hurdle for mobile using job seekers, 30 percent of whom say they want to be able to apply for a job while on the go. More important to the mobile job seekers is the ability to search for jobs (57 percent) and get notified of openings (51 percent).

The latter is one of the few things companies can do almost painlessly. All but the most basic career sites allow users to opt-in for email notifications of jobs matching their interests. Far fewer send text messages. But here’s where a mobile strategy would suggest text over email. Text messages have a read rate approaching 100 percent. The open rate for emails on mobile devices may be no better than 30 percent, though the data is fuzzy.

Says the Potentialpark report:

Having a well implemented mobile recruiting strategy can greatly improve the overall candidate experience — giving the job seeker a convenient and location-independent approach to job search, and (2) not having any mobile recruiting strategy can erode the employer brand and limit the number of quality applicants received overall.

That said, recruiting consultant and blogger John Sumser has a wholly different and contrarian opinion about mobile recruiting:

Mobile Recruiting is a great way to engineer a flood of ill considered applications that are of lower quality that people are already complaining about? Why? The tool (a phone) is ill suited for the rigors of job hunting. Research is impractical. Cover letters would have to include apologies for the implicit typos.

LinkedIn ran a distant second, with 46 percent of job seekers attributing their job to that business-oriented network. Twitter, the short messaging network, got a thumbs-up for its job help from 36 percent.

Those are among the findings of Jobvite’s Social Job Seeker Survey 2011 released this morning. The survey doesn’t say how the social networking helped the job-seekers. Other data suggests it may mean seekers researched the companies on social networks, reached out to their contacts for information, got a referral, or were contacted directly. Since most job seekers use more than one social network, the numbers add up to more than 100 percent.

In terms of sheer numbers, the results are not too surprising. Facebook has in excess of 800 million members, while LinkedIn has about 135 million. What is surprising, however, is that by an even larger margin recruiters in an earlier Jobvite survey reported making hires through LinkedIn.

Nevertheless, regardless of which social network they prefer, job seekers with the most contacts do more job hunting and get better results than their counterparts with fewer than 150 connections, friends, or followers. Of these “super social” job seekers as Jobvite calls them, 28 percent found a job directly through their online social networking.

As you might expect, Facebook has the largest percentage of super social job seekers — 37 percent — compared to LinkedIn’s 10 percent and Twitter’s 11 percent. Super socials, as the Jobvite survey discovered, are young and strong earners: 62% percent are under 40; 42 percent earn over $75,0;0, and 40 percent have a college degree. They divide almost evenly on gender with 49 percent female.

“Our new national survey shows that socially savvy job seekers have an advantage over their fellow job hunters and it’s paying off,” said Dan Finnigan, Jobvite president and CEO. “While referrals are still the top source of new jobs, online social networks play an increasingly important role in job hunting today.”

One curious data point is the number of workers who, Jobvite reports, say they find their job through social networking. Jobvite puts the count at more than 22 million, an increase of 7.6 million since its 2010 survey. If that’s accurate, then 15.8 percent of the 48 million jobs filled in the year ending Sept. 30 would be the result of social networks.

The survey was released this morning by Monster Worldwide, which, in addition to its flagship job board, also operates Military.com, the largest career and information site for veterans, transitioning military and their families. The survey introduced Monster’s new Veteran Talent Index. Separate indices score veterans’ confidence in their career opportunities, their job search activity level, and an employer measure of how they perceive the veterans they’ve hired measure up to other workers.

On the latter score, employers are much more gung-ho about hiring veterans than are the vets themselves. Almost every employer who has hired a vet (99 percent) would hire another. That’s due in large measure to their performance. Sixty nine percent of employers say the veterans they’ve hired do their job “much better” than their non-vet workers.

Speaking during an online news conference this morning,  Jesse Harriott, Monster’s chief knowledge officer, said the survey makes clear that employers are more optimistic than the vets themselves are about their career transition.

Where the Employer Veteran Hiring Index came in at 70 out of 100, the  Veteran Career Confidence scored only a 50. It’s “not as high as we would like it,” Harriott said.

Veterans may lack confidence in their ability to translate their military skills and experience for the civilian workplace. Nearly half (47%) of the surveyed vets feel challenged getting employers to understand what they did in the military. 45 percent say applying those military skills in a civilian environment is also affecting their confidence.

That’s an area where employers and veterans share the same concern. Seventy percent of the nearly 500 employers in the survey agree “Veterans or those with prior military experience are prepared for a career transition out of the military.” However, by the same percent, employers say vets need to do a better job explaining how their military experience applies to the job they’re after.

Communication appears to be the biggest problem, according to the survey. Three of the four issues deal with providing prospective employers more information about their military experience and helping them understand its relevance in the civilian world.

In his introductory comments this morning, Harriott noted that there is a broad difference between veterans who served prior to Iraq and Afghanistan, and those who have served since 9/11 and the subsequent invasions. This latter group is officially referred to as Gulf War-era II veterans.

While the unemployment rate for all veterans is below the national average, for Gulf War II vets, it’s 12.1 percent (not seasonally adjusted). For the youngest veterans, those 18-24, the unemployment rate was 20.9 percent in 2010, according to the latest release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Older veterans, especially those with college degrees, fare significantly better. For those Gulf War-II vets older than 24 with a college degree, the unemployment rate in 2010 was 3.9 percent. Those who only had a high school degree had an unemployment rate of 12.7 percent.

That suggests that despite their military training, young vets without a college degree are struggling. Monster’s survey found that some 60 percent of the job postings on its site called for a bachelor’s degree or better. However, its study of Gulf War II veteran resumes found only 26 percent listed a college degree.

“It is apparent that veterans need additional training and education in order to be strong candidates for available roles,” the survey report notes.

Monster will issue its new Veteran Talent Index twice annually. The next one, Harriott said, will be out near Memorial Day.

A little harder to see is that they are better educated than most of the population, and far better off financially.

Catbert notwithstanding, human resources is a pink-collar profession that looks very different from the rest of the corporate workforce, let alone the U.S. as a whole.

More than a few surveys have noted the gender imbalance in human resources. A dozen years ago the federal Office of Personnel Management reported the dramatic change in its own workforce. In 1969, 30 percent of the HR jobs were held by women. By 1998, the percentages were reversed, with men holding 29 percent of the jobs. A SHRM survey from 2007 came up with similar numbers.

Now, one of the most extensive profiles of HR professionals ever conducted not only confirms that what the OPM found in the federal workforce applies to the private sector, but the diversity there is just what you would expect from eyeballing conference attendees.

What HR Thinks and Feels: The 2011 HRxAnalysts Psychographic Survey of HR Professionals is a collaborative effort between The Starr Conspiracy (formerly, Starr Tincup) and John Sumser’s HRExaminer. The report is available for sale at HRxAnalysts. Primarily a tool for vendors, the report offers a view of the denizens of the HR world right down to their political leanings (evenly split between liberal and conservative) and their leisure time activities.

The psychographic makeup of the profession is gold to marketers and salespeople, helping them understand their potential customers and how to better talk to them. (“Given that HR professionals are generally older than other departments, your sales folks should be experienced in the market,” is one of the many vendor tips in the report.)

For those working in the field, however, the report exposes the uncomfortable homogeneity of a profession charged with promoting diversity in the workforce, even as it celebrates the strides that women have made.  (“HR is a paragon of success for women who dominate the ranks at every level,” Sumser writes.)

The survey is not a statistically perfect profile of the profession. Survey participants tended to be from mid-sized employers, leaving the smallest and the largest companies under-represented. And some industries are either over-represented or under-represented. Yet as a look at the kind of people who populate the profession, the report manages to confirm some of the conventional wisdom, while contradicting other.

For instance, two-thirds of the profession is female; 92 percent is white; the average age is 47. On the other hand, the survey found, “While the stereotype is that only generalist experience is foundational in HR, the data suggests that a large majority of HR workers have spent time in recruiting and staffing.” The survey found 88 percent of HR professionals worked in recruiting and staffing early in their career, compared to 68 percent who spent time as generalists.

Rarest are those with experience in diversity (34 percent), executive education and development (27 percent), and labor negotiations (17 percent). Notes the report,

Diversity, for example, is a controversial practice area often seen as offering more obstacles than solutions. Given the overwhelming lack of diversity within the HR department, diversity professionals (who, as a group, are more ethnically and racially diverse than their colleagues) have a difficult trajectory in internal career paths. Given the specificity of their role, diversity experts are more likely to find career mobility by staying in the practice area and moving between companies.

One of the other unexpected findings of the survey is that 82 percent of HR workers have experience in other areas. On average, they spent eight years working in departments other than HR, with the top three being customer service (38 percent), sales (35 percent), and general management (31 percent).

“It’s worth noting,” says the report, “That these are people-oriented and extroverted practice areas. Given the amount and type of cross-functional experience, it is clear that the predominant HR personality suggests a high level of emotional intelligence.”

These details are just a sampling of what’s in the report. There are specifics about the professional certifications (48 percent have at least one), education (46 percent have at least some post grad; 16 percent hold and MBA), affluence (72 percent have a household income greater than $90,000), and longevity (15 years HR experience, on average).

Its 96 pages go well beyond the demographics of the profession, not only providing vendors a clearer picture of who will be buying and using their products, but describing the lifestyle, professional competencies, and more of a profession that touches every worker from entry-level clerk to CEO in every industry and in nearly every business.

So says Mid-Market Perspectives: America‘s Economic Engine – Competing in Uncertain Times, a Deloitte survey of almost 700 executives at companies with revenue of $50 million to $1 billion.

A majority of the executives expect both revenue (61.2 percent) and profitability (52.6 percent) to increase next year, despite limited faith in any significant improvement in the national economy. What drives their optimism is a continued focus on cost controls and increased productivity.

Of the 70 percent of executives reporting an increase in productivity, the average saw a 6.1 percent improvement since the beginning of the recession. The majority of executives credit the rise to improvements in business processes (62.2 percent) and technology (50.3 percent), especially the automation of business operations and increased use of data analytics for business intelligence.

Less than 30 percent of the respondents attributed improved productivity to making better hires (29.7 percent) or better workforce training (28.6 percent). As the report declares, “if a job can be automated — if it can be reduced to an algorithm, an application, or a set of instructions — it probably will be.”

While 44 percent of the respondents expect to increase headcount of full-time employees next year, hiring is being restrained, 45 percent say, by the need to wring more productivity out of the company. Labor, say 49.3 percent, is the cost the company is most focused on controlling.

Another problem, survey respondents identified, was the challenge in finding new workers who can hit the ground running. The Deloitte report says 47 percent of mid-market business leaders report difficulty finding employees with the skills and education to become productive immediately.

This is becoming a hotly argued issue at ERE’s sister site, TLNT. A post by editor John Hollon asks, “Are We Short of Skilled Workers, or Is it Just a Training Problem?” The post amplifies the discussion that began here with a reference to an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal by Dr. Peter Capelli.

He argued that employers are wrongly blaming schools for failing to train workers. “The real culprits,” Capelli says,” are the employers themselves.”

What’s interesting to note in the Deloitte survey are the responses to the question, “What organizational changes, if any, has your company attempted to implement since the onset of the U.S. recession?” Of the eight options, 60.8 percent chose “Improved business processes.” That would be where streamlining workflow and automation fit in — essentially the tech over talent decision.

“Improving training” was selected by 37.8 percent. “Higher standards, in terms of skills or education, for hiring new employees” was the choice of 35.2 percent.

Healthcare is expected to create 248,500 jobs this year, leading all other sectors including tech. But even as go-go as healthcare is, the pace of job creation there has subsided some.

Nothing surprising there, except that this is India we’re talking about, and not the U.S.

Ma Foi Randstad, the international HR service provider, says India’s torrid jobs growth is slowing up, though the numbers are still at a pace much of the world would envy. According to a Randstad survey of 13 industry sectors, 3rd quarter employment in those sectors was projected to grow by 353,900 workers. But a survey at the end of the quarter estimated the actual hires at 331,200, leading the company to headline its economic summary ”Indian Economy: sluggish but not panicky.“

Randstad’s quarterly surveys cover only a fraction of the country’s 478 million workers, more than half of whom work in agriculture. However the so-called “organized sectors” in the survey contribute a disproportionate share of the nation’s GDP, employing about 35.2 million workers.

As in the U.S., healthcare is the fastest growing of the 13 sectors in the Randstad survey. The company estimated employers would add some 63,800 workers in the 3rd quarter. It now estimates that 60,400 jobs were added.

Only two sectors showed above expected growth: Pharmaceuticals, where 1,300 more jobs than the original 11,300 are believed to have been added, and real estate and construction, which added 1,110 more jobs than the initial 29,600 estimate.

The tech sector, employing about 2 million workers, fell 9,000 jobs short of the 55,500 estimate.

Notes the Randstad survey, “many IT firms (are) becoming cautious in their hiring. This has been further accentuated by the decline in attrition rates since the economic downturn, which has come down to 15% from 25% in the last couple of quarters. Many of the firms are hiring based on their immediate project needs.”

One positive for U.S. and Canadian tech recruiters is that a slowdown in India should make recruiting overseas candidates a little easier. That should be especially true for companies hiring in-country workers to staff their overseas operations.

It should also lessen some of the impetus for H-1 engineers in the U.S. to return to India. Though U.S. companies have seen some Indian expats leave for jobs in their home country paying not much less than they were earning in the U.S., the exodus has been small. Now, with the declining value of the rupee, and the slower pace of hiring, that’s one less issue.

Despite the slower than expected job growth, and a slowdown in the growth of the GDP, from a high a few years ago of 9 percent annually to this year’s projected 7.5 percent, Randstad’s report says “the long term growth story of India is still intact.”

Adds Randstad, “even though a deceleration in job growth rates is now being experienced, in the longer term the economy still retains the wherewithal to jump back — the numbers may be sluggish, but there is no need to press the panic button as yet.”