According to a CareerBuilder survey, approximately 75 percent of jobseekers who applied to jobs last year using a variety of sources didn’t end up hearing from the potential employer. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

While February’s gains are the latest in a string of monthly job additions that stretches back years, the numbers aren’t as large as they could be, as some estimates say that the recession wiped out nearly 8 million jobs. Adding 200,000 jobs per month would mean we’d be back to pre-recession levels in…more than 3 years. Who’s got the time?

ADP, citing a Moody’s report, called the job market “sturdy,” however, as the report beat analysts’ expectations.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

That’s slightly higher than the revised job growth for December (185,000 jobs) but well in line with the sort of numbers we’ve been seeing month in and month out for what feels like forever.

ADP says that most of the job growth took place at small companies (1-49 employees), while the largest companies (+1,000 employees) even shed some jobs.

The biggest gains among industries tracked by ADP were in professional/business services and trade/transportation/utilities.

Here’s a slightly encouraging chart. Hopefully the official U.S. numbers on Friday will be just as encouraging.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

According to CareerBliss’ new report, 2013 Best and Worst Cities to Find a Job, happiness data was examined. In addition to factoring in employment trends and job openings, happiness data was collected via employee reviews of their employer. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Although the top of the list seems full of tech and healthcare positions, we noticed a few media-friendly jobs made the top 100.

As for the overall score, it was calculated by looking at several facets and weights associated with each one: Year growth volume (10%), year growth percentage (10%), median salary (30%), employment rate (20%), future job prospects (20%), stress level (5%) and work-life balance (5%).     continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

That and 146,000 jobs were added to the economy, an unimpressive gain.

The good news: The unemployment rate edged down to 7.7 percent as companies hired in retail, health care, and hospitality. And for the first time we recall, also in motion picture and sound recording (+15,000 jobs). Hey, that’s kind of like media.

The bad news: 12 million people are still unemployed, plus another 8.2 million underemployed and just under 1 million discouraged workers–those who were not officially counted as unemployed because they had given up looking for work.

Two days ago, payroll giant ADP projected a smaller increase in private-sector jobs (118,000) and said that that number would have been much, much higher if not for Sandy: “Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on the job market in November, slicing an estimated 86,000 jobs from payrolls,” a Moodys analyst said in the report. “The manufacturing, retailing, leisure and hospitality, and temporary help industries were hit particularly hard by the storm.”

Not only that, but when offices are closed, they can’t report data, leading to an artificially lower estimate.

But the Bureau says that on that second point, you can rest easy: “Our survey response rates in the affected states were within normal ranges. Our analysis suggests that Hurricane Sandy did not substantively impact the national employment and unemployment estimates for November.”

We kind of wish the response rates were lower. That would mean more jobs. Ah well.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The five states where unemployment increased were Rhode Island, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Mississippi, and New Mexico. (Maine’s unemployment rate remained static.)

Meanwhile, only two states, California and Nevada, had unemployment rates higher than 9.9 percent.

Texas, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia added a total of 52,000 jobs in the past month.

The following image shows state-by-state unemployment rates for September; darker shading means a higher unemployment rate.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The increase is the smallest in three months but it was enough to lower the unemployment rate from the 8.1-8.3 percent rate it was hovering at for the first eight months of the year.

Now, it’s not all good news. The number of people “working part-time for economic reasons” (a fancy way for the BLS to describe underemployed people who would rather have a full-time job) rose from 8 million in August to 8.6 million in September. And the number of people not working but not counted as unemployed remained steady at 2.5 million–that includes people who dropped out of the workforce for school or family responsibilities, but also includes 802,000 people who just gave up looking for work.

The industries that added the most jobs were healthcare (+44,000), transportation and warehousing (+17,000) and financial activities (+13,000).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Donna Farrugia, executive director of staffing firm the Creative Group, told Workforce she has seen an “unreal” increase in the amount of job orders for Web designers. Demand for these professionals hit a 13-year high during the second quarter of 2012, she said. And according to the government’s Occupational Outlook Handbook, openings for Web designers are expected to increase another 13 percent through 2020.

To land one of these plum positions, assuming you’ve got the skills, you’ll need a killer portfolio. Lori Richmond, director of creative services for XO Group (formerly TheKnot), says she looks for portfolios that display not just professional work, but side businesses, “like if they have a craft business on the side or a photography blog. All of that gives us insight on their level of design sensibility. Their outside interest piques our interest.”

Richmond added that she likes to try out designers as freelancers before offering them a full-time gig. In fact, her two most recent hires were former freelancers. “I would much rather someone come in and freelance for us for a day or a couple of weeks and get a sense of what they can do,” she told Workforce. “Personality, professionalism and being responsive to feedback is really important.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

And the temp industry has regained 87 percent of the jobs it lost during the recession, says U.S. News & World Report. Private employers as a whole have only recovered half the jobs shed in the recession.

Temporary hiring is supposed to precede full-time hiring, as cautious employers get back into hiring with employees who are easy to let go in case of another sudden downturn. But so far what we’ve seen during this “recovery” has not followed the usual pattern.

“The current economic situation is also one of unusual uncertainty. Temporary staffing may continue to see steady growth as employers put off hiring in the face of weak global demand and fiscal uncertainty at home,” as U.S. News put it.

Overall, temp workers make up 2.3 percent of the nation’s workforce, up from half a percent 30 years ago.

Professor of sociology Arne Kalleberg told U.S. News that the change was significant, despite the small numbers. (That is, after all, a more than 400 percent increase.) “I can’t see the end of it,” he said.

There are about 2.5 million temporary and contract workers in the U.S.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In Mediabistro’s latest AvantGuild feature, seasoned journo Ben Goldstein recapped his own resume and shared some valuable tips for writers in the online world. For example…

If you’re not fending off job offers, you’re doing something wrong.

To give yourself some leverage, start networking and learning new skills while you’re still employed. ”Classes and workshops related to your profession are great places to meet people,” said Charles Purdy, senior editor of Monster.com. “The teachers are often experts who are still working in the field, and the other students and attendees will be professionals like you. And, of course, there’s the side benefit of learning something new.”

Read more in 4 Lessons for Writing in the Digital Age. [subscription required]

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

That said, as indicated by JimRomenesko, graduates from 2011 still encountered more challenges with job opportunities than their peers did in 2007.

Graduates who have landed full-time jobs indicated their salaries were higher than graduates from 12 months ago.

So, what’s the overall breakdown aside from salary? The survey looked at the job market within journalism and communications broken down by field: continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The best thing you can do? Have an open mind.

Shannon Wong, editor-in-chief of Fitness, told Folio: that it’s important her hires “are as excited about creating content for the digital properties at Fitness as they are about getting a byline in the magazine.” And Dan Shannon, publisher of Durham Magazine and Chapel Hill Magazine, said that editors shouldn’t do things “the old way,” with a big wall between editorial and advertising. “I insist that editors, salespeople and operations staff interact constantly. They share ideas, critique story choices and layouts and have a cup of coffee together. When we bump into a virtual or metaphorical wall in our company, we try to tear it down,” he said.

Beyond versatility, what else are bosses looking for these days? According to Wong, passion is crucial (“Even if…you end up covering a subject that bores you”) as is “roll-up-your-sleeves pluck and persistence.” Editors need to be the ones calling the shots even on things beyond the magazine, she said. That includes apps, mobile products, and even events. “Editors know their readers better than any developer or HTML coder ever could,” she said.

Sound tough? Yeah, it’s getting tougher every day to be an editor, it seems. Your skillset needs to be continually improving. Keep your head up, though. We’re here for you.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Dorian Benkoil argues that tech companies are turning to editorially-minded staff to help “identify and stoke conversations across the digisphere” rather than using algorithms because humans are still better. Examples: Say Media acquired ReadWriteWeb; Flipboard hired a magazine editor, and BuzzFeed has hired away staffers from Rolling Stone, Gawker and Politico.

“If that’s a trend, I hope it continues,” Tumblr Editor-in-Chief Chris Mohney told Benkoil. Mohney says that the value of an editorial person at a tech company is that they can “help them cohere a public-facing sensibility beyond simple functionality and service.”

In other words, humans are still smarter at the kinds of things that humans value. (Makes sense.) Steve Rosenbaum, author of “Curation Nation” and founder of the Magnify.net video network, told Benkoil that humans “can provide context and judgment that machines can’t.”Machines can only see literal connections. They’re solving math problems. So if your friend likes James Bond, and you like your friend, then you’ll like James Bond — or so the logic goes.”

Give it time, though.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Where once they were places for quick updates (because they allowed you to make changes to content without rebuilding your whole site), they’re now homes to long, thoughtful pieces (because social media is now the home of quick updates).

A Photo Editor points out on his blog that this new care taken with blog posts extends to images too. Example? Mashable is hiring a photo editor “to help take its on-site images to the next level.” A blog hiring a photo editor. This is a far cry from blogging’s beginnings where blog owners were entrepreneurial, jack-of-all-trade powerhouses, doing the writing, photography (or stock image sourcing), and backend management all themselves.

By the way if you want to apply for the Mashable position, it’s posted here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.