Not surprisingly given the grim jobs report issued earlier today by the Department of Labor, LinkUp’s September jobs report showed that the U.S. jobs market continues to struggle badly. New job listings on LinkUp fell by 14% during the month and total job listings dropped by 7%. On a state by state basis, 38 of 50 states reported a decrease in new job listings (39 of 51 counting Washington, D.C.) and, even more alarmingly, 47 states showed a decrease in total job listings.

The Department of Labor reported this morning that the U.S. economy shed 263,000 jobs in September, far worse than the 175,000 that most economists were predicting. The nation’s unemployment rate rose to 9.8% and more than 15 million Americans are currently out of work. Since the recession began in late 2007, 7.2 million jobs have been lost.

LinkUp, the fastest growing job search engine on the web according to recent ComScore data, only indexes job listings that are found on company websites. The September jobs report was based on a comparison between August and September job listings from 16,861 corporate websites around the U.S. As a result of this unique data source, LinkUp’s job listing data includes no duplicate job listings, no classifieds from recruiters or headhunters, and no phishing or scam ads. Even more importantly, the jobs data is based on actual job openings that companies list on their own company website rather than the openings that companies are advertising for on other job boards or in newspapers.

In terms of the best and worst performing states, Minnesota, Arkansas, and Nevada reported the largest percentage declines in job losses, while Texas, California, and Minnesota experienced the largest declines in the actual number of new and total job listings.

Go see No Impact Man.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 17, 2009

LinkUp Announces New iPhone Application

Minneapolis, MN – LinkUp, the fastest growing job search engine on the web today, announced the release of its free iPhone application for job seekers. Exactly like the LinkUp.com website itself, LinkUp’s new iPhone app allows job seekers to search job listings that are found exclusively on company websites. LinkUp’s job search engine indexes over 22,000 company and employer websites and updates those job listings every night. As a result, jobs on LinkUp.com and its iPhone app are always current, often unadvertised anywhere else, and contain no fake jobs or scam listings.

LinkUp’s iPhone application, called ‘Job Search Engine,’ allows job seekers to search for relevant job listings by keyword, location, company, or industry. Users can also save jobs to a Favorites list and access their Favorite jobs on their computer at a later time via a web browser or RSS feed reader. Job seekers can also save specific search queries as job alerts and be notified via email of all new matching jobs.

Commented LinkUp’s CEO, Toby Dayton, “Our goal with LinkUp is to offer employers and job seekers alike the best job site on the web today, and extending LinkUp onto our first mobile platform is just another step for us in accomplishing that goal.”

Additional features of LinkUp’s free iPhone app, which also works on the iPod Touch, include email alerts when Favorite jobs are closed by the employer, the ability to instantly email relevant jobs to any email address, and the ability to apply to job openings directly from the iPhone. Finally, the LinkUp app utilizes sophisticated compression technology and is capable of delivering extremely fast search results on Edge, 3G, or WiFi networks.

About LinkUp

LinkUp is owned and operated by JobDig, an employment-focused media, technology, and advertising company that has been serving employers and job seekers since 2001. With LinkUp, the company continues its history of innovation in the industry with completely unique paid search advertising solutions for employers and the highest quality job listings available on the web today for job seekers.

LinkUp just released a new Facebook application that allows companies to fully and effectively leverage the power of the world’s largest social network in their recruiting strategies. The app (which can be found here), called ‘Current Jobs At Our Company,’ allows companies to publish jobs from their corporate website to their company’s Facebook page. The app is easy to install and works automatically behind the scenes, requiring no additional work because the job listings on Facebook are updated automatically to reflect any changes to the jobs on the company’s website itself.

Most importantly, when a job seeker clicks on a job on Facebook, they are brought straight to that exact job listing on the company’s own website. The other critical aspect to LinkUp’s Facebook application is that it adds a specific ‘Jobs’ tab across the top of the company’s Faceebook page, so in effect companies and organizations can extend their exact corporate career portal from their company website onto Facebook.

As an aside, LinkUp is the fastest growing job search engine on the web according to Comscore data. We only index jobs that are found exclusively on company websites, and as a result, there are no garbage job listings, no phishing scam ads, no work-at-home scams, and no ads from 3rd party intermediaries. The site is update every day to reflect any changes on the company websites we index, so the jobs on LinkUp are always current. Equally as important, most companies do not advertise all of their jobs, so LinkUp contains a ton of jobs that cannot be found anywhere else on the web. And because we only index jobs from a single source (the company’s website itself), there are no duplicate job listings. Unlike other job search engines that primarily serve other job boards, LinkUp’s mission is to serve job seekers and employers. We are currently indexing over 21,000 company websites, and the site contains 392,436 jobs (as of today). Companies that choose to can run paid search campaigns on their job listings and pay for candidate traffic to their company website on a per-click basis.

LinkUp – always current, often unadvertised, and never fake.

For more details on LinkUp’s Facebook app for employers, click here.

I am very curious to know if Apple is generating any revenue from app developers to promote their iPhone applications. I have to imagine that some apps are paying a large fee to be included in Apple’s full-page newspaper ads promoting the app store and the iPhone. If anyone has seen any articles or commentary on this, please post a comment.

Along those same lines, are apps paying any fees to be promoted in Apple stores? Again, the exposure for free and paid apps is extraordinary, and certainly worth a lot of money to the lucky few who are included in Apple’s prominent in-store promotion.

This is a recent picture from the Apple store on 5th avenue in New York. On a random Thursday night, there were at least 200 people in the store, and daily traffic has to be off the charts. Careerbuilder’s iPhone app is the only job board featured anywhere in the store.

I had the great pleasure of hearing Jim Grant of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer speak at a conference last week. In his incredibly entertaining, enlightening, and frightening remarks, he noted that in the previous 10 post-war recessions, the peak-to-trough decline in GDP averaged 1.7%. The average stimulus response during those 10 recessions averaged 2.9% of GDP.

In this current ‘Great Recession,’ the decline in GDP has been only 1.8% to date, and the stimulus response so far has been equal to 29% of GDP. This is 10 times the normal stimulus for a recession that so far is just slightly above average in terms of GDP decline. As a result, Grant is forecasting massive inflation sooner and to a significantly larger degree than mainstream economists are predicting at the moment.

At the same conference, other economists made some interesting remarks about unemployment figures. The first was that in the 5 months between November and March, the average monthly job losses have exceeded 600,000. In April, the job losses were 539,000 and everyone cheered the positive news and claimed that the worst of the recessions was over. While that may be the case, in neither of the past 2 receessions was there ever a single month where job losses were greater than 300,000.

The other point that was made was that even once the economy starts adding jobs, whenever that might occur, the pace of net job gains initially will not be enough to surpass the number of new entrants into the job market. This means that even once there are months with jobs being added in the economy, the unemployment rate will continue to rise until monthly job gais outpace the growth of the labor market. Kind of frightening to think about.

Sorry for the grim post but the stats and information are worth keeping in mind as the economy muddles through into a recovery at some point.

My fascination with lego creations continues…

I had to post the following picture as it combines my obsession with legos (here and here and here) and the most enjoyable and memorable inauguration I’ll ever see in my lifetime. Thanks, Berna, for the photo.

Coosje van Bruggen, the artist (or at least half of the collaborative team along with husband Claes Oldenburg) that created one of Minneapolis’ most identifiable landmarks, died yesterday. If Minneapolis is any indication, she had a significant impact on the civic aesthetic of many communities around the world.

…this guy. Darnell Frazier (pictured above) and another guy were stopped by an officer in St. Paul in December. Darnell was evasive about giving his name, claiming he had never had a photo ID. When pressed, Darnell gave the name Darnell Lewis. Then the officer noticed that the word ‘Frazier’ was tattooed on Darnell’s neck. He was arrested for 4 misdemeanor warrants including driving after license revocation, driving after suspension, and no proof of insurance. He also had 2 felony warrants for his arrest including probation in violation Jackson County for bringing a stolen vehicle into Minnesota and failure to appear in court for a drug charge. Prior felony convictions include receiving stolen property, theft, and possession of dangerous weapons on school grounds. What a guy. With that kind of record, Darnell, you might want to remove the tattoo of your name on your neck.

To read about the 2007 Moron of the Year award recipient, cleck here.