Coming up Friday is the monthly employment report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And if early indications are correct, it could confirm the hope raised by last week’s robust GDP numbers that not only is the economy recovering, but it is picking up steam.

As a barometer of the political economy, the employment report is closely watched, which will be especially true this week, coming on the heels of a State of the Union speech in which every other paragraph seemed to mention the word jobs. Friday’s release will offer the best indication yet of how much improvement there is in the jobs picture.

While many economists expect the report to show flat job growth — itself an improvement over the last two years of almost monthly job losses — there is a growing feeling of hope it might show the economy added jobs.

The Conference Board’s monthly report on job openings released today showed the number jumped 382,000 over December. According to the report, there were 4.024 million jobs advertised online in January. That’s the most since November 2008 and is the third month in a row that openings grew.

Contrast that with what happened in January 2009. That month the Help Wanted OnLine Data Series report showed openings dropped by 473,000 over December 2008, which itself had 509,000 fewer listings than the prior month.

It’s a positive sign that companies may be willing to finally fill some of the positions that have been frozen.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing index from the Institute for Supply Management rose in January for the sixth consecutive month. The 58.4 is the highest the index has been in five years, strong support for the GDP report from last week.

That’s good news, as is the ISM’s manufacturing jobs index, which came in at 53.3 in January, the highest in nearly four years.

Coming up Wednesday is ADP’s monthly jobs report, compiled from its payroll data. The ADP National Employment Report is a harbinger of the BLS release that comes two days later, though it often differs significantly from the numbers the government issues. (The ADP report counts only private payroll data, while the BLS includes public payrolls as well.)

By then the financial news services will be reporting their surveys of economist predictions of what the BLS report will show. The Wall Street Journal today took a first shot at it, reporting Morgan Stanley expects the report to show the economy added 75,000 jobs in January. The Journal also said the unemployment rate would edge up slightly to 10.1 percent.

Monster fired the first shot in the ad wars Sunday with a commercial during the AFC championship football game featuring the Boogeyman and a new tagline.

Bad at his job scaring children, the Boogeyman searches Monster and finds his perfect fit as an accountant. As he settles into his cubicle, the words “New precision job search” appear followed by the tagline, “Get a Monster advantage.” The new tagline replaces “Your calling is calling.”

Precision Job Search is the branded seeker product powered by Monster’s overhauled back-end search engine. Power Resume Search is the recruiter version. Both come out of beta on Feb. 2, the official launch date of 6Sense, the branding Monster is applying to the semantic search engine it built out of technology it acquired when it bought Trovix.

Over the last year+ Monster has been introducing new career-focused tools and features, like its career-mapping service and social communities organized around professional careers.  Over the summer, it tested its semantic resume search with a number of recruiter clients, then began offering it and the seeker search as options in the fall.

After a demo of the search tools in November, I wrote “Power Resume Search is stunning.” On the seeker side, I’ve found Precision Search (Or is it PrecisionSearch. Monster references it both ways.) to be an equally big improvement over “Standard Search.”

Now, Monster is making a full-court press (or should that be a blitz) to promote 6Sense and the other features. Monster will air a second commercial, this one featuring a beaver, during the Super Bowl, and will also announce its choice of a new Director of Fandemonium during the game. Print ads in tech and business magazines like HR Executive, Wired, and Fast Company have already started running.

“This isn’t just the launch of an advertising campaign. It represents a commitment to help people make clear progress in finding the right job,” says Ted Gilvar, executive vice president and global chief marketing officer at Monster. “We know that people want help — whether it’s a more efficient way to search for jobs or helping them connect with others through specialized career networks.”

CareerBuilder will make its sixth Super Bowl appearance with an ad selected from among those submitted in a contest. Three commercials were eventually picked out of some 1,000 entries and were each awarded grand prizes of $100,000.

The idea was that the public could then vote for their favorite, which might be selected as the one CareerBuilder airs as its second quarter commercial. However,  one of the three — Worst Seat — has been nixed by the network. The commercial is pretty gross, showing a cubicle worker entertaining (some) of his colleagues by passing gas. So, of course, that’s the video embedded here.

“CareerBuilder has had a very successful track record with advertising in the big game and we are confident that all three concepts selected would play well with the big game audience,” said Richard Castellini, the job board’s chief marketing officer. “We made a strategic decision to change our advertising approach and leverage the creative minds of consumers across the country. Our decision paid off when we were flooded with a large number of very high caliber ideas, which played a major role in our decision to pick not one, but three.”

A company spokesman told me, “We have not announced any plans for our marketing past the big game.”

Every year I try and predict what trends and topics will dominate our thinking, conversations, and technology in the coming year. Last year my three predictions were pretty much on target: Simplicity in sourcing, the rise of social networks, and internal redeployment. I am not sure how much redeployment actually took place, but it must have been significant as key positions remained filled even when external hiring was slow.

Sourcing remains a topic that I am interested in. It seems to me that the need to conduct in-depth Internet searches and apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases. Cold calling and other traditional methods of locating people will never go away, but are less significant. Two occurrences have changed the game. The first is social networks whose mass adoption, personalization, and ease of use have put them first in the sourcer’s toolkit. Second, jobs are being redefined and replaced with an emphasis on broader skills and on the ability of candiates to take on a variety of roles. This opens the door to more candidates, except in narrow technical areas where specific skills and training are required. A third minor factor is the recession and the short-term surplus of candidates. This will evaporate as Baby Boomers retire and more people start to work for themselves, but this will be an evolution over the next five years.

I don’t need to comment too much on the importance of social networks. This past year has proved their efficacy as sourcing tools as well as sales tools to motivate and engage candidates. What is going to change this year is the emergence of proprietary networks for specific industries or even for specific organizations, if they are large and employ a lot of people. The Facebook’s and LinkedIn’s will face competition, in a way, from networks that are designed for a specific type of person, role, industry, or geography. These more general networks are already offering this, in a way, through interest groups and pages for specific organizations.

As I wrote last year, I think that over time candidates will find that they are better treated and more completely able to present themselves via social networks than they can with a resume. This is huge as candidate dissatisfaction with recruiting and employee dissatisfaction with employers is at an all-time peak. Social networking offers some hope as a way to alleviate some of this.

The emerging trends I see for 2010:

Non-Traditional Employment

We are going to see a steady and continuing rise in temporary, part-time, contract, and consulting work. This will replace a large portion of traditional employment over this year and continue on for the foreseeable future. Employers are and will remain reluctant to hire regular employees given the economy, the constantly-changing consumer and marketplace, as well as new government regulations. I believe that new labor laws, more enforcement, and higher costs for health and disability will also pressure employers to hire people as temporaries or contractors.

This is in line, as well, with worker sentiment. Recent Conference Board research shows a record level of job dissatisfaction among current workers, with a significant number of Gen Y saying they are highly dissatisfied. More young people are opting to downsize their lives and find ways to earn a living on their own. They offer a variety of skills from programming, writing, tutoring, teaching, or doing manual labor on a part-time or temporary basis.

I predict no upsurge in regular employment. There will be hiring, but primarily for critical positions and to protect intellectual property.

Mobility Plus

We are living in a time when where we work is no longer the most important consideration. Again, young people are leading the way in demanding the opportunity to work wherever, whenever, and however they want. The most leading-edge organizations are adapting to this and allowing lots of flexibility in employment terms. These firms will prosper.

But this trend means recruiting will have to go virtual and recruiters, as I have said many times before, will need to become skilled at video interviewing, online testing, and the other components of a complete virtual recruiting process. Hiring managers may never meet face-to-face with a candidate, and once hired, the employee may work alone in some remote place with no face-to-face contact with any other employee. Others may work in small clusters located regionally, and others may choose to work this way on a part-time basis. The key will be flexibility in everything.

Visa issues will become less important because people can work from their home country. Travel is cheap and fast and, while security may be an issue, people are more mobile than ever. If there is a need to meet, it can happen easily. This mobility may make a temporary or part-time workforce even more attractive as that will eliminate the complex issues of health coverage and other benefits for a distributed workforce.

As mobile phones get even more connected to the Internet and offer more capabilities, work can take place literally anywhere: in airplanes, cars, or trains, and at all times and places. The concept of work being something done at a specific place is ending.

Fewer Recruiters: More RPOs

I see the need for far fewer recruiters as the number of employees continues to drop and there is more focus on part-time and temporary workers. The recruiters who remain will be highly skilled in using social networks, in living and working virtually, in influencing and selling, and in learning their trade more thoroughly than ever. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the internal recruiters who survive will have to have the skills of successful third-party recruiters, plus more.

There will also be a steady rise in recruiting firms who can fill all the hiring needs of an organization. The so-called one-stop-shop will become more popular to fill the needs for temporary and part-time workers. These recruitment process outsourcing centers will reduce the need for internal recruiters. And, the successful RPOs will heavily use technology to reduce their need for recruiters and keep costs low. Perhaps a fourth trend should be the rise of recruiting technology that will really improve recruiting. But I still believe that technology is only a tool that well-trained and seasoned recruiters can employ to handle more open positions, do more with less, and lower costs.

Let’s see how I do this year and let me wish you all a very happy and a prosperous new year!

Today brings news of the U.S. Army’s $38 million recruiting video games, a recruiting marketing video that is surprisingly fresh and entertaining and should be required watching for anyone considering an HR career as a recruiter, and a change at Vault.

America’s Army

When you’re recruiting for an organization where the expression “taking potshots” is no mere idiom, you have to be innovative in your approach, not to mention cutting edge to reach the 17-25 year olds who are your (pardon the expression) target.

No wonder, therefore, that the U.S. Army has been using video games as a recruiting tool for years.

Now comes a report from GameSpot, a site for news about the digital games industry, that puts the 10-year-cost cost of developing and managing the Army’s free PC games called America’s Army at $32.8 million. The original cost to develop the first version of the games was budgeted at $7 million.

An entirely new version — America’s Army 3 — was released in June, and almost immediately the Army cut ties with the game’s developer. GameSpot reported earlier the Army will take over future development and game management.That will be handled by an Army unit formed in 2005 specifically to oversee development of the game.

Head2Head

This Canadian RPO and headhunter has a new video out that will make no friends with newspapers or job boards. Who cares, though. It’s a lot of fun and, ironically perhaps, it may be the most honest career video ever made.

“Stop putting in print ads. Stop posting on job boards. You may as well set fire to your money,” says an aggressive, sharply dressed gent who at first look might be an arms dealer or a central casting FBI agent.

That’s the opening scene of “What Can 60 Hours Do For You?” For the next 4 1/2 minutes you’re treated to snapshots of a 60-hour recruiting marathon to fill a req for a client where “failure is not an option.”

The credits claim that Head2Head staff wrote and produced the video. The parts were also played by staff members who should all get Oscars for their acting. (Or was it acting?)

Take the 4 minutes and 53 seconds to watch and enjoy. And then you tell me if it doesn’t nail headhunting. Still want to be a recruiter?

Vault.com

Vault, the venerable career information site that was an early leader in providing job seekers help in researching a company and building a personal network, has been struggling this year.

Erik Sorenson called it “stiff headwinds” driven by the faltering U.S. economy. In a memo earlier this month to the remaining staff at Vault, he described 2009 as a “period of right-sizing the company.”

Sorenson, the former president of MSNBC who became CEO in 2007 when Vault was acquired by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, has now stepped aside. His replacement is Claude Sheer.

In looking toward 2010, Sorenson said in the memo, “We need to beef up our senior management and strengthen our strategic efforts by bringing on someone with different knowledge, skills, and interests whose experience and passion is in growth platforms, strategic partnerships, and Internet deal-making.”

The change was effective on Dec. 7th. Sorenson is now Vault chairman and a consultant.

Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi, who was in a breakout session at the recent White House jobs summit, is telling the Administration that employers should get help to mitigate the expense of bringing on a new employee.

While such help could vary, Iannuzzi gives the example of a job candidate currently getting $15,000 annually in unemployment benefits. If the government instead contributed that $15,000 to an employer who could provide, say, a $50,000-a-year job, it would, he says, reduce the cost and risk for employers. “Onboarding is very expensive, and employees come with heavy costs,” he says. “No one wants to hire and let people go. That’s one of the worst things a company can do from an economic and from a morale standpoint. Grants or tax credits, in some way, shape, or form, mitigage risks to companies for training or onboarding people — government picking up part of the tab of that training.”

The White House divided summit-goers into breakout sessions. Iannuzzi’s track (a bit over an hour, which, ideally, he said, would have been much longer) was mainly about training, education, community colleges, and other hands-on hiring issues. Toward the end of the session, to take one example, the subject of the lack of nursing educators came up.

In addition to Iannuzzi’s suggestion for some sort of onboarding assistance, he also believes that some TARP money should be used to get banks to loan more money, especially to small businesses, with the U.S. government guaranteeing the loans. “An extremely critical thing is to free up credit markets to get them to invest and hire,” he says. “Getting credit out there which has been very hard to come by is very, very critical.”

Iannuzzi is collecting additional economic ideas from Monster employees and will be submitting them to the Administration.

Pro-Stimuli

Yesterday on CNBC, Alcoa CEO-turned-Bush-Treasury-Secretary-turned-Bush-critic Paul O’Neill said that he “never hired a single person because of a government program” and that only demand for a product creates more hiring. “I’m pretty dubious about the government’s ability to actual create more employment,” O’Neill said.

It’s a sentiment that Iannuzzi understands. Sort of. On a spectrum where on one side you have liberal bigger-government Keynesians and on the other side the economic conservatives who miss the Simon Le Bon days of big tax cuts and the Reagan economic boom, the Monster CEO seems somewhere in between to me. Obama stacked a lot of the summit deck with his supporters — like any president would do. From what I can tell, though, Iannuzzi had no previous affiliation with the administration; indeed, he says he was “surprised to be on the docket.”

Iannuzzi agrees with my December 4 comment that America’s corporate taxes, among the world’s highest, are a big problem. On the other hand, he supported the first Obama stimulus. “The economy was in extremely bad shape,” he says. “There was a lot of damage, a lot of concern out there, and I think the stimulus certainly helped. We can always argue about this much vs. that much [spending and tax cuts] but it gave people something to hope for, that there was hope on the way. You can never underestimate the psychological impact. It has provided the stabilization or the creation of some jobs. And a lot of the money has yet to make it out of the system — they wanted to sort of drip it in over time.”

After the conference, an assistant to the president sent Iannuzzi (and others) a copy of President Obama’s recent speech proposing a second stimulus, asking for feedback. Though Iannuzzi doesn’t necessarily agree with every detail, he’s generally supportive. “We can argue about this point or that point,” he says, “but overwhelmingly the things in that speech — the things he said need to be done — are very much on target. The direction is certainly right. If we get it 80% right, it’s definitely the right thing to do.”

Freefall Over

It’s hard to figure out what’s going on with jobs. You’ve already read about some of the good signs. There are more trickling in daily. At LinkUp, for one, new job listings rose 9% in November. And temp hiring, Adecco says, seems to be growing steadily.

On the other hand — the glass-half-empty hand — there’s some re-thinking about the jobs data, with the bottom line being that if you look more closely at the government numbers, unemployment may look a little better, but hiring has not picked up. On top of that, some say a coming commercial real estate implosion and consumers’ newfound love of value will re-doom the U.S. economy.

Iannuzzi’s view is that “things have stabilized,” pointing to the recent Wall Street Journal story saying that Fedex is becoming more optimistic. “Fedex is a great indicator, a great barometer,” he says, adding that U.S. productivity data is, too. Companies will need to hire more folks, as they can’t squeeze their existing staff much more.

“I spend a lot of time talking to my sales force, the people really in the trenches,” he says. “What we hear is a much more positive attitude. Companies are planning to hire, they’re planning to do things, they’re thinking about expansion. They’re still hesitant to pull the trigger, but the conversation is a lot more positive than it had been. I’m hoping we’re sort of at the bottom. I would have to say that if what we are seeing right now is sustained, we are through the worst of it. But there are still an awful lot of people who don’t have jobs.”

Iannuzzi, in fact, believes unemployment is really worse than it appears, if you add on farm workers and young people who aren’t being included in the tallies.

Naturally, Iannuzzi mentions that he “spent over $100,000,000 in the middle of a very sharp recession, creating a match technology in order to connect and match people most accurately to the opportunities out there.” A half a billion has been spent, he says, over the last 2 1/2 years to improve Monster’s products. His point is not that his 6,000-employee outfit is going to save the world, but rather that, going back to the point I made earlier about him not being a full-on big-government guy, the private sector and not the government is ultimately the job creator. “The government can’t fix this all this on its own,” he says.

Iannuzzi mentions the terrrorist attacks on the U.S., and how so many companies in New York came together, regardless of politics and ideology, to help rebuild. He hopes this happens again, and sounds optimistic that the various business, government, and education reps he met in Washington are committed to such a pragmatic approach.