What’s old is new again, as companies rediscover retiree re-staffing as a way of retaining the experience and skills of their Baby Boomer workers.

“Companies are losing way too much experience with the retirement of the Baby Boomers,” says Greg Doersching, founder of Bullseye Recruiting Process. “Some companies are sucking that experience back in on contract. They don’t have enough people to replace all of that experience.”

Doersching told Top Echelon that retirees will be the “contract candidate pool for the next five to 10 years, especially in areas like IT and Engineering.”

Cathy George, owner and founder of C.G. & Company in Odessa, Texas, says retiree re-staffing has been picking up steam in West Texas as the pace of hiring there has quickened. Previously it was mostly smaller firms that would rehire their retirees, but now, she says, the big service providers have entered the picture.

Besides simply finding enough talent to fill all the jobs, George says an almost even bigger challenge is housing the new workers. “There’s plenty of work, but no place to live,” she says, which is another reason the petroleum industry in the area is rehiring retirees.

Nationally, older workers are expressing a desire to re-employ after they retire. A survey by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder polled 878 employed, full-time 60+ year old workers, finding that 57 percent of them planned to look for another job once they retired. And that retirement is not far off. Almost half (49 percent) plan on leaving within four years.

While the median age of the U.S. workforce is now a bit over 42, some industries have a workforce much older. The average age of employed chemists, for instance, is 49. CENG, an owner and operator of nuclear power plants, says right on its careers page that the average age of energy workers is 50, with perhaps half of them likely to retire by 2020. Even the restaurant industry workforce is getting older. Ten years ago, the average age of managers was about 29; today it’s 37.

The Great Recession, which was thought by many — including Boomers themselves — to have so depleted their retirements funds and savings as to require them to delay retirement for years, now appears to not have had as big an impact. A new MetLife study found that 45 percent of the 65-year-olds are fully retired; 14 percent are retired, but work part-time or occasionally. “On average,” says the study, “Boomers who have not yet retired plan to do so by age 68.5.”

With 10,000 Americans turning 65 every single day, the potential impact on employers is significant, and, in some industries, critical. The Society for Human Resource Management, in a joint study it did with AARP, found 72 percent of HR professionals describing the impending brain drain as a problem or a potential problem. But only 5 percent have implemented specific steps to address the talent loss.

Many companies have taken some actions to prepare. Training and succession planning are the most common, though fewer than half the surveyed employers have done at least that much. But 30 percent have hired their retirees as consultants or temps; 24 percent have extended offers to work part-time to their retirees.

Short of an economic disaster, the march out the shop door is going to accelerate, which explains the growing interest by staffing companies and some independent recruiters in attracting retirees. Their pitch is appealing: flexible schedules, temporary and part-time work, variety, and no impact on any retiree benefits.

“They can work six months on a contract, and then cruise around in their RVs to the local casinos,” says Doersching. “Their houses are already paid for, and their contract assignments provide them with income.”

The pitch to employers is similar: no long-term commitment, flexibility, and, as more than a few staffing firms point out, by going through a third party to rehire their retirees, a company can retain experienced workers without jeopardizing their retirement benefits. (These rehires are legally employed by the staffing firm, and not their former company, thus avoiding complications with pensions and benefits.)

Cathy George, whose firm is mostly executive search, said some of the bigger petroleum and industry servicers have policies or benefit plans that prompt them to use staffing firms to rehire their retirees. “A lot of the majors out here are doing that,” she says.

Debbie Fledderjohann has been blogging about this developing trend for more than a year now. Writes the president of Top Echelon Contracting, “By bringing older workers in a on part-time, consulting or contract basis, employers can gain or retain these workers’ knowledge, while the workers can supplement their income and remain active on a more flexible basis so they can enjoy other activities and time with family.”

Regular readers of this roundup, and of ERE, will be so very not shocked to know that there is a new website calls itself the “eHarmony of talent.”

But before we get to the love, we turn to the latest installment in the epic saga we call .JOBS, or, if you prefer, Dot JOBS.

To  refresh your memory and bring you up-to-date, this is the story of how .jobs, an Internet extension like .com or .net, became the focus of an international legal dispute when the wholesaler of .jobs addresses began to lend it out to DirectEmployers Association, which uses it today for its job board universe. That wasn’t the intent back in 2005 when SHRM and Employ Media (the for-profit registrar/wholesaler) when they partnered up to convince the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to create the new extension.

After much controversy, ICANN issued a notice of breach of contract, and the legal battle began. The .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition, a party of interested job boards, industry groups, and others opposed to how the .Jobs extension is being used, has been pushing ICANN to move along the process of resolving the issue.

In March, the International Court of Arbitration finally appointed a third, and final, member of the hearing panel. So far though, no hearing schedule has been posted.

This lack of public information and slow posting of documents prompted the coalition to demand of ICANN that it comply with its own transparency policies and make available on its websites emails, correspondence, and legal briefs, exhibits and the like connected. And the Coalition wants to know when and where the arbitration hearing will take place, and a few other things, too.

In a parting note, the Coalition asked that its letter be posted online. So far, ICANN hasn’t, so we have here.

Never Say Never

If you’ve never seen “Never Work” before, it’s because it’s brand new. The team is still rolling out features and tweaking the front end of the site. Check out the site and you get the gist — candidates are asked questions about whether they have a wild imagination, get upset easily, prefer order or disorder, are creative, and more. That’s all matched to the personalities of successful employees in high-growth jobs.

The project is currently self-funded by two co-founders, but they will look at other sources of money later.

Love Is in the Air

OK, back to that “eHarmony of talent” we mentioned above — it’s called Whitetruffle. Right now, it’s focusing on engineers in San Francisco and New York. About 5,000 engineers and about 200 employers are signed up. The two parties are matched using a special algorithm, and like eHarmony, it’s anonymous at first. When a candidate is told someone want to “get to know them better,” the candidate can agree to share their identifying info with the prospective employer. If a candidate has a special type that turns them on, they can put the word out. Romantic, eh?

More Harmony

Speaking of eHarmony, the makers of that site, perhaps enamored with everyone saying they want to be the eHarmony of talent, is apparently creating … drum roll please … an eHarmony of talent. The eHarmony folks are calling it Tidepool; they also say they are “working hard to launch a new site that’s going to revolutionize the working world.” Forbes says this:

There are 60 work types, each with a unique title (i.e. Sagoo is “The Maverick;” Buckwalter is a “Freeverse Poet”). The assessment works like a game in which users choose certain photographs over others and activities they would prefer over others (i.e. a biology class versus painting, working outside versus inside).

Tidepool’s creators told Forbes they “are hoping that Tidepool will help companies hire employees that fit within their culture … better teams, better workplaces, better one-one-ones.”

Employee engagement ranks high on the list of human resource challenges, yet fewer than half the companies in a survey by SHRM and Globoforce said they track it.

Of those that do, more of their HR professionals say workers are rewarded according to their performance, that managers are effective in acknowledging and appreciating employees, and employees are satisfied with the level of recognition they get.

These are some of the findings of a twice-yearly survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management in collaboration with  employee recognition vendor, Globoforce. The most recent survey looked at:

• What engagement practices and strategies are implemented in today’s leading companies.
• How the alignment of company core values with employee recognition impacts engagement
  and appreciation levels.
• What HR strategies are most effective in delivering maximum return on investment and bottom-line results.

Although engagement ranked highest on the list of concerns among the 770 HR leaders who participated, performance management and retention were close behind. Effective performance management was a particular concern, as only 55 percent agreed that the usual annual reviews are an accurate appraisal. That’s down five points from the 61 percent who said that in the June survey.

In a section headed “Performance Management Remains Stuck in Neutral,” the report says, “Conducting ongoing performance assessments with real-time feedback remains an opportunity for companies to manage and improve engagement, motivation, and productivity throughout the year.”

Formal recognition programs, notes the report, add value by “providing a new wisdom of crowds approach to performance reviews.”

“Through a more frequent and informal assessment in the form of recognition from managers and peers alike, managers and employees both gain a more collective approach to feedback. This results in higher levels of employee engagement and appreciation due to more fairness and transparency,” says the report.

HR leaders at the 76 percent of companies with a formal recognition program in place reported the same kind of results as did those where employee engagement was tracked: they said their employees were satisfied with their level of recognition for a job well done; thought managers and supervisors effectively acknowledged employees; and, that employees are rewarded according to performance. Those respondents at companies without a recognition program agreed with each of those statements at much lower rates.

While only 15 percent of the responding leaders track the return on investment of their recognition program, the majority of those who do say they have observed increases in productivity, engagement, return on profit margins, and employee and customer retention.

From the survey, the report details these conclusions:

1. Engagement continues to be the top HR challenge. However, only a minority of companies actively make it an active part of their HR program. The majority are missing out on higher employee satisfaction levels.
2. Traditional performance management processes are still keeping HR professionals behind. The once-a-year review lacks the ongoing feedback mechanism that employees crave.
3. Employee recognition fills this feedback need by providing a new wisdom of crowds approach to performance reviews.
4. Recognition helps HR leaders justify its cost by making a quantifiable impact on key business metrics.
5. Aligning recognition with core values helps managers be more effective by showing them the right way to appreciate employees’ work and reinforce desired behaviors.

While all eyes last week were focused on the disappointing March job numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the report contained a curious blip that might be nothing more than a statistical aberration. Or it could be an early signal of employment trouble ahead.

The usually robust growth in temp jobs took a breather in March. Temp jobs dipped by 7,500 during the month, the first time since June the monthly employment report registered a decline. Out of a temp workforce of some 2.5 million, the drop is practically unnoticeable. But considering that staffing jobs grew by 91,300 in January and February, a reduction of any size is significant.

Recent history is also a factor. Looking at April 2011, the monthly jobs report said 251,000 jobs were created, the biggest rise since the census hiring of 12 months earlier. But that same report also showed the first decline in temp jobs in 19 months. Then in May, the economy added a mere 54,000 jobs. It was months before the pace of hiring returned to what it was in the first quarter of the year when 662,000 jobs were created.

Cautious employers can be forgiven therefore if they react as if last week’s Labor Department report were an omen.

Here, though, is where reading the economic tea leaves gets dicey: There were 8 percent more temp and contract jobs in March than a year ago. That’s well ahead of the overall jobs growth rate, which, in a year-over-year comparison comes to just under 1.4 percent. And then there’s the non-seasonally adjusted numbers to consider. While the headlines and most economists focus on the seasonally adjusted numbers, the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics issues a second set of numbers that are the raw results of its job counts. (A detailed explanation of the differences between the two is available here. The short version is that the adjustment removes some of the effects of seasonal events like weather, and holidays, and school years from the numbers.)

Using the unadjusted numbers, the staffing industry added 29,400 jobs in March. Year-over-year, the increase in temp and contract staffing hit 8.5 percent. For comparison, the unadjusted numbers put the total new jobs count at 81,100 last month.

“For the most part, staffing firms continued to see healthy demand in March, as was reflected by the nonseasonally adjusted BLS employment numbers,” says Richard Wahlquist, president and chief executive officer of the American Staffing Association. “In the current environment, businesses are understandably cautious about when and how to add additional flexible and permanent staff.”

While temp hiring is one of the early indicators of a job recovery, and the pace of temp hiring offers insights into what the future may hold, other signs offer a little more optimistic view than does a single month of data. Before last week’s report, CareerBuilder offered an upbeat view of employment in the current quarter. After surveying some 2,300 HR professionals and hiring managers, CareerBuilder says 30 percent of employers plan to increase their full-time, permanent workforce. Even more — 34 percent — expect they’ll bring on more temps and contract workers.

In Q1, 37 percent of employers hired more temps, an eight-point increase over the 29 percent who hired temps in Q1 last year. The company also says 31 percent of employers report not being to find qualified employees to fill open jobs. That’s up from the 24 percent who said that last year.

Two other bits of government recruiting industry data are worth noting. One is the month-to-month count of workers employed in executive search; the other is the count of those working at placement agencies. Counted in this latter category are employees of chauffeur services, nurse registries, employment firms, state job service offices, casting agencies, and the like.

Unlike staffing hires, the changes in these industry segments are of dubious predictive value. However, the number of workers employed in both categories has been going up. In February, there were 31,500 workers employed by search firms. That’s 700 more than the average for all of last year. (The data for these sectors runs a month behind the national jobs numbers.)

The challenge in looking at employment in search firms is to decide how much of the change is impacted by corporate in-sourcing of search, versus economic belt-tightening, versus business expansion. In that light, it probably is of significance to note there are more jobs at executive search firms today than at almost any other time in the last 10 years. From that, it seems safe to say that whatever trend there is for corporations to in-source their executive and other hard-to-fill positions, it hasn’t impacted search firms as much as some thought.

Placement agencies have also added workers, though divining the significance is tricky because some placement services — government offices, for instance — added workers to assist the unemployed as the economy was tanking. That said, there is evidence that employment in this category does move in some rhythm with general economic conditions. In 2007, just before the official start of the recession, there were an average of 277,400 workers. Two years later, the average fell to 200,200 workers.

Jobs began returning early in 2010 and the growth continued in all but two months of last year. As of February, there were 240,800 workers employed in the employment placement agencies category.

Calling all tech industry recruiters. Get ready to pounce. Yahoo, as we presume you’ve heard, is about to dump thousands of its employees.

Exactly who is going isn’t known publicly, though reports (all stemming from the original article on All Things D) say CEO Scott Thompson has targeted “public relations and marketing, research, marginal businesses and weaker regional efforts.” Will engineers be among those laid off? Very likely, since they’ve been a part of each of the preceding five layoffs.

Get busy reaching out now, before everyone else does. And you do know how to find these people, right?  You could start here.

Happy City; Sad City

Never let it be said that we can’t be suckered by a little PR stunt. This one, though, got our attention with lists of the happiest and unhappiest U.S. cities in which to work.

On our silly stuff meter, this “top list” from CareerBliss swings the needle toward the “Super Silly” side.

That’s just our opinion, mostly because any list that puts Syracuse, New York and Oklahoma City  in the top 10 happiest cities, and ranks San Diego twenty-second has got to be a bubble or two off level.

We’re feeling a little better about the unhappiest city rankings. Hard to argue with Buffalo in seventh place (unless you think it should be firsst) or with Tulsa, Oklahoma in fourth. (But why Oklahoma City is happy and Tulsa is not and they’re only 100 miles apart is a mystery.)

Then we find Austin, Texas is eighth unhappy, Boulder, Colorado, a great college and outdoorsy city, is eleventh unhappy, and we give up. So we move on.

Digging Up Dirt

Todd Raphael, using expertise garnered when he got his Harvard MBA at age 20 (OK, that’s a lie) found a new background checking report to be quite interesting, as it said that “the majority of respondents estimate that up to 40 percent of candidates distort or exaggerate information on their resumes.” And, “83 percent say fabricating educational qualifications is the most egregious resume lie.”

The nerve of some people.

Fifty-two percent of respondents say their screening process never incorporates social networking websites. Thirty-nine percent of respondents say they sometimes check social media sites, and 9 percent always do. Well, 9 percent admit they always do.

A Job Board Indeed

Resumes — truthful, exaggerated, or wild lies –are all over the Internet. Now, add one more place. Indeed, the job search site, has gone commercial with the resume database it launched several months ago.

You can search all you like for free. Getting the contact info will cost you $1.

The U.S. created 227,000 new jobs in February, exceeding what economists predicted, and adding to the optimism that the economy is on the mend. The unemployment, as expected, held steady at 8.3 percent.

Surveys conducted before the numbers were released this morning by the U.S. Department of Labor showed economists expected somewhere between about 210,000 and 220,000 new jobs last month. Few individual economists expected as strong a showing as this for a month of 29 days.

It was the third consecutive month in which jobs grew by more than 200,000. In addition to the February numbers, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics adjusted up the numbers for January and December by 61,000.

“The labor market has found its legs in the last few months,” said Julia Coronado, chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas in New York. She told MarketWatch, “it looks like there’s enough of a broad base that the momentum can be sustained.”

The news moved stock futures up as Wall Street prepared for what analysts expect will be an up day.

With the improving jobs picture over the last few months, more people are looking for work, one reason the unemployment rate was unchanged. Its also helps explain why the total number of unemployed ticked up slightly during the month. Overall, there were 12.8 million workers officially counted as unemployed. Another almost 11 million are working part time because they can’t find other jobs or are seeking work, but not included in the official count.

However, the Monster Economic Index, a measure of the number of jobs being advertised online, jumped by 10 points. And earlier this week, The Conference Board’s own job counts showed an increase of almost 40,000 online job ads.

The job growth, according to the Labor Department report, is nearly across the board. The private sector created 233,000 jobs (which was offset by 6,000 job losses in government). Only in construction, down 13,000 jobs, and retail, down 7,400, were there significant private sector losses.

Some of the biggest gains came in manufacturing, leisure, professional services and healthcare, which is the one sector that consistently has grown throughout the recession. Healthcare industry employers created 61,100 new jobs last month.

That was matched by the continued hiring of temporary and other workers in the employment services sector. Here, employers hesitant about adding permanent workers have been hiring ever-more temps to handle growing workloads. In February, 45,200 new temporaries were added to payrolls.

Leisure and hospitality jobs grew by 44,000, most of that in the restaurant industry. Manufacturing added 31,000 new positions, with slightly more than a third of the workers hired for metal fabrication jobs.

Among the biggest losers were retail jobs in department stores. Some 25,000 jobs were cut there, not unexpectedly however, as stores completed inventory. That number was counterbalanced by a nearly identical growth in retail jobs in January.

Other signs of strength were an increase in the manufacturing workweek by .1 hour to 41 hours and an increase of 3 cents per hour in the average hourly wage. It now stands at $23.31.

New Zealand talent management vendor Sonar6 has been acquired by Cornerstone On Demand in a deal valued at $14 million.

Cornerstone’s stock closed up 6.19 percent to $22.12.

Sonar6 serves the small- to mid-sized market, while Cornerstone serves mostly larger employers with a full lifecycle software suite that is especially strong in the performance management and learning areas.

Both companies are SaaS provisoned, so the acquisition, unlike that of SuccessFactors and SAP, and, to a lesser extent, the recent Oracle deal to buy Taleo,  appears to be for just the reason Cornerstone says: “The acquisition will accelerate the company’s momentum in the small business (SMB) market.”

The SuccessFactors deal was primarily to give SAP a fully cloud-based capability. The German company had been developing its own SaaS suite, but it was plagued by delays. Buying SuccessFactors gave it an instant SaaS product line, which SAP said would remain independent of its on-premises enterprises systems.

Taleo is not entirely cloud-based, though it has SaaS services for most or all of its products. Oracle, like SAP, has been moving to a cloud-based architecture, but is further ahead with products already brought to market. Acquiring Taleo not only accelerates that process, it also removes a strong competitor.

Cornerstone said it won’t try to integrate Sonar6′s performance management and succession planning tools. “Following the acquisition, Sonar6 will be rebranded as a Cornerstone solution specifically for small businesses,” says the announcement issued by Cornerstone. However, Sonar6 solutions will continue as separate products, “to preserve Cornerstone’s 100 percent organically developed solution for enterprise and mid-market clients.”

In a barely veiled reference to the recent acquisitions, Cornerstone CEO and President Adam Miller said, “ERP vendors are now engrossed with integrating disparate enterprise systems, and we saw a clear opening to accelerate our growth strategy and penetrate the SMB market. Sonar6 has built a reputation as the leading talent management solution for small businesses. Together, we plan to expand Cornerstone’s global market opportunity.”

Sonar6 has some 375 customers, and a handful of accolades including being named a top 10 HR product by HR Executive magazine. The acquisition, which is expected to be completed next month, will leave the Sonar6 team in place and still based in Auckland.

CEO and co-founder Michael Carden will be appointed as Cornerstone’s newly-created position of vice president of small business operations. In addition, co-founder Mark Hellier will continue his role driving innovation as head of products for small business operations.

ERE’s Recruiting Innovation Summit is hosting a first-of-its-kind $10,000 startup competition for new recruiting products and technology at our May 17-18 event being held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. For those companies interested in applying to be considered, you can read more about it and apply on the contest portion of the RIS website. All entries are due by March 31.

It’s just one of the additions we’ve made to the program to focus more broadly on where innovation occurs in recruiting.

Startup Competition

One of the ways we’ve wanted to highlight innovation is to figure out how to best feature some of the companies on the leading edge of innovation, building the products that will be used in the future for recruiting. We focused in on a tight startup competition with live demos of the actual products along with a portion for Q&A. Many of you already know our MC for the startup competition Master Burnett, director of strategy at BraveNewTalent and former managing director of Dr. John Sullivan and Associates, and he is certain to run an entertaining highlight of some of the newest technologies in recruiting.

Some have also asked about requirements for startups. Since this is our first time out doing a competition, we are hesitant to set hard and fast rules as to who does and doesn’t qualify as a startup. That being said, we’ll certainly be open about the fact that we are most attracted to companies who have been around for 18 months or less and have a new product that will have launched near (or even at) the event. For the people in attendance, we want to make it an interesting showcase of products that most have not seen yet.

Other Additions to Agenda

Our chairperson this spring is Jenny DeVaughn, manager of social media at Waste Management. DeVaughn is one of only a few people who have made it out to every single one of our Social Recruiting and Recruiting Innovation Summits, so she is eminently qualified to lead our event.

In order to add the startup competition, we also decided to expand the event to one and a half days. We heard from some of our attendees in the past that it was hard to get approval for a single day event, especially if they were traveling far.

While there is still one speaker detail to be confirmed, we have already added George Anders (author of The Rare Find and contributor to Forbes), Brad Cook (VP global talent acquisition at Informatica), Lars Schmidt (director of talent acquisition at NPR), Mike Junge (leadership recruiter at Google and author of Purple Squirrel) as well as a panel featuring BranchOut, HireVue, and JIBE.

Those interested in registering have until next Friday to get the early bird discounted price of $395.

Job board operator Monster, which CNN says is officially up for sale, got little help today from a positive jobs employment report that buoyed the rest of the market, helping it regain some of Tuesday’s triple-digit loss.

Payroll processor ADP said 216,000 private sector jobs were created in February. The company’s closely watched National Employment Report offers clues to what the official jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor will show when it is released Friday. (ADP counts only private-sector jobs, while the Labor Department report includes all levels of government workers, a sector that has seen deep cuts in its workforce.)

Even though the ADP report rarely synchs with the government numbers, it reliably predicts whether job growth has been positive or negative and often accurately reflects the magnitude of the change. That’s why when the company and its partner, Macroeconomic Advisers, reported across-the-board increases in all sectors and among companies of all sizes, the market reacted by bidding up the Dow some 75 points by early afternoon in New York.

Alas for Monster, it opened at $8.29, a few pennies under its Tuesday close, where it is now. The company saw its stock jump last week after CEO and board Chairman Sal Iannuzzi all but said the company was for sale. The stock took another bounce Tuesday after Monster said it had hired Stone Key Partners LLC and BofA Merrill Lynch as financial consultants to help it consider “strategic alternatives.”

Tuesday, CNN said it had confirmed that a company sale was high on the list of those alternatives.

Among the potential buyers, CNN mentions Google. It was once strongly rumored to be interested in the job board, but its ardor has cooled along with its interest in the broader classified advertising market. More likely is CNN’s speculation that an equity investment firm could buy the company. A Bloomberg report from Monday suggests that a takeover could immediately save $100 million annually in administrative and other expenses.

Despite Monster’s troubles, today’s ADP report offers more support for the cautious optimism among business leaders and economists that the jobs market is improving. The 216,000 new jobs created by the private sector was better than the 208,000 average expected by economists. It fuels hope that Friday’s government report will come in at the upper end of forecasts, most of which are in the range of 210,000 to 220,000.

“This does suggest we are moving in the right direction,” Beth Ann Bovino, senior U.S. economist at Standard & Poor’s told the New York Times. “It supports the expectations of another 200,000-plus in Friday’s payroll report. The jobs numbers are looking healthier.”

The ADP report said the service sector added 170,000 jobs. Manufacturing added 21,000 new jobs. Even the construction industry, one of the hardest hit sectors of the economy, added 16,000 jobs, in part because of the generally good weather the country has been experiencing this winter.

The report also adjusted up the initial job numbers for January. They increased from 170,000 to 173,000.

“February’s increase marks the twenty-fifth consecutive monthly gain in private employment as measured in the ADP Report and suggests that the national unemployment rate may have declined slightly last month,” said Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Adviser. “Conditions continue to improve at a moderate pace and are consistent with other indicators suggesting some firming of the labor market.”

On Wednesday one of the newest startups to focus on internships will host one of the largest, if not the biggest, online workshops to be held on Google+.

In a sign of maturity for the social network Google launched last summer, as well as for InternMatch, a “names” group of companies have signed on to host one-hour segments for college students hoping to land an internship.

For instance, hiring managers from Nestle Purina will discuss the ins and outs of building connections and using social media in searching and landing internships. Google’s engineering recruiting lead, Jeff Moore, will do a segment on “Hacking the Engineering Internship Application,” which, presumably, won’t involve any actual hacking, but advice on how to get through the process and stand out from the crowd.

After seven hours of sessions, InternMatch will throw open the doors, so to speak, for 17 hours of online, interactive help for students. The 24-hour marathon, which begins Wednesday at 9:50 a.m. Pacific time, will end Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific.

The event makes use of Hangouts, the video chat and conferencing service that is part of Google+. Hangouts is interactive for up to 10 participants, but it has a broadcast feature that’s essentially a video stream for hundreds or thousands of viewers. The seven segments will be recorded for later viewing.

Nathan Parcells, InternMatch’s co-founder and CMO, said the event is no career fair. “These companies are going to be talking about how their internship program works and what they look for,” he explained. “They’re going to be giving a lot of great information about the process and how someone can improve their chance of getting an internship.”

These types of events are still new enough to be “firsts.” Last year the CareerArc Group presented a day-long jobs conference entirely on Twitter. Pepsi jumped on Google+ with a recruiting program just as soon as the network opened up its site to brands and companies. Even President Obama got into the recruiting act when he asked a participant to send him a resume during his first Hangouts town hall last month.

The InternMatch Internship Hangouts will allow those watching the stream to message questions to the presenters. In addition, each segment will include 10 live participants who will be able to interact.

After the seven hours of sessions, InternMatch will conduct a marathon 17-hour online clinic. The company says it will be “collaborating with a variety of resume professionals and career gurus to offer one-on-one help for students looking to improve their internship applications and prepare for interviews.”

For InternMatch, this is sort of its debut onto the national stage. The site launched in 2009, after its founders themselves graduated, and since has concentrated on campus marketing. The site’s focus is on small and mid-sized companies, especially startups, that don’t have the ability to reach students because of limited budgets and only a few intern jobs.

It’s got plenty of competition for the student market. Sites like Internships.com, CollegeRecruiter, AfterCollege, and the leading campus network, NACELink, all have sizeable audiences with thousands of jobs, many of them entry-level, fulltime work.

However InternMatch now has a presence on more than 200 college campuses, an expansion that was fueled by an infusion in September of $500,000 in angel financing. To date, the company, incubated by 500 Startups, has gotten $900,000 in funding.