ReadWriteWeb

The United States is getting a new Chief Information Officer. Steven VanRoekel will steps into the shoes vacated by former federal CIO Vivek Kundra who is leaving the post to take a position at Harvard. VanRoekel worked for Microsoft for 15 years and was once an assistant to Bill Gates, according to the New York Times.

VanRoekel is leaving his position as the managing director of the Federal Communications Commission. He joined the FCC shortly after president Obama's inauguration in 2009 and has helped the FCC become perhaps the most forward thinking departments in the federal government in how it uses the Web.

Former PARC visiting social software researcher and startup trobairitz Brynn Evans announced today that she has joined the social product group of the UX design team at Google. Evans says she was encouraged to interview by former collaborator and PARC Principal Scientist Ed Chi, who joined Google earlier this year. (Google Hires Twitter-Hacking PARC Scientist)

If Google is ever to effectively challenge Facebook and Twitter in social software, which is expected to be a key battleground in a world no longer dominated by atomized search experiences online, then hiring leading thinkers could be an important part of the company's strategy.

Doug Dennerline spent ten years at Cisco and was most recently Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Collaboration Software Group, making him the man in charge of WebEx and other popular offerings. He was also the one spearheading a rumored move by Cisco to make an online competitor to Microsoft Office and other Web-based collaboration suites.

But today Dennerline is departing the company for CRM- and platform-as-a-service company Salesforce, where he's becoming its head of enterprise sales in the Americas. Before heading up the SaaS wing at Cisco, he was a senior VP at the commercial and enterprise sales groups.

Rapleaf's Auren Hoffman says that hiring is harder in a downturn because the noise goes up but the quality stays the same. That's a pretty strong statement to make, but if it's true then it's all the more remarkable to see which companies are making hires now.

Our site ReadWriteHire covers new hires in tech and new media. Today we're publishing our aggregate numbers for the first 3 months of 2009. Who's hiring? Software and IT companies, social media and social networking companies and marketing and advertising firms.

AdHocnium, a new network of affiliated social media marketing consultants, is announcing today that Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls has joined the organization. AdHocnium is a corporate body that facilitates ad-hoc contracting for a list of some of the most high-profile "old school" social media marketing consultants on the web.

The company calls the addition of Searls a major validation of its business model, an experimental arrangement intended to facilitate flexible project-specific collaboration of allied consultants with experience navigating large corporations. "It's a project economy," founder Chris Heuer says, and AdHocnium is structured to respond to that.

What does the new media pro of the future look like? One snapshot can be seen in Boston marketing firm HubSpot's newest hire Dan Zarrella. Zarrella is the creator of publishing tools like Tweetbacks, a script for displaying Twitter mentions below any blog post, and a collection of plug-ins that provides instant odds of a blog post hitting Digg's front page based on the keywords in its title.

HubSpot used the new submission form on Jobwire, our site tracking new hires, to tell us about the move this morning.