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Sears Holdings Corp. just announced they posted thousands of jobs on Twitter via the Twitter-based job board service, TweetMyJOBS.com. The parent company of retail stores like Sears and Kmart and home to brands like Kenmore, Craftsman, DieHard, Lands' End, Jaclyn Smith, Joe Boxer, Apostrophe and Covington, Sears Holdings posted over 500,000 job openings last year via traditional recruiting channels like job search sites and newspapers. Now those same jobs will be on Twitter, too. Says Lance Brolin, Director, Talent & Human Capital Services Operations for Sears Holdings, of the decision to engage on Twitter, "we're quickly realizing that we needed to broaden our employment marketing to include social media."

While the government in Washington slowly inches their way toward a bill to create jobs for Americans, tech corporations and venture capital firms across the nation are teaming up in a private sector effort to create more companies and more jobs in the tech space. Led by Intel, the Invest in America Alliance, consisting of 17 companies and 24 VC firms, announced Tuesday that it has pledged to provide $3.5 billion in tech startup funding and jobs for over 10,000 new grads in the next two years.

Driving the enterprise this year is a quest for efficiency and flexibility. To determine the actual direction, one needs quantifiable information that proves certain trends have merit.

The want ads are a great resource for seeing what types of investments are being made by companies. This year, people with virtualization skills are in big demand, followed by -you guessed it - cloud computing.

Apple recently countered against the Electronic Frontiers Foundation's request to the US Copyright Office to make an exemption to the DMCA and permit iPhone jail breaking. Apple claims an exemption would leave a phone's baseband processor (BBP) open to malicious hackers. From here, hackers could then circumvent data and call payments, make anonymous phone calls "desirable to drug dealers" and even initiate commands to render cell towers inoperable. The argument that phone hacking is particularly "desirable to drug dealers" and corporate terrorists is an amusing one given that Apple's co-founders are themselves known to have experimented with phone phreaking in their youth.

Individuals often have to sacrifice their livelihood for a cause. It's not fair, but it happens. But what happens when they're forced to volunteer at a corporate job? This morning CNBC and Web Guild published articles on how some individuals are "volunteering" to defer pay to maintain their positions or fill time between job interviews.

As "volunteering" is defined as "working on behalf of others without being motivated by financial or material gain," this seems like a strange use of the word. In the case of employees deferring pay, this seems more like an unfortunate burden rather than an act of volunteerism. If you're an experienced professional looking to stay sharp and you've got the freedom to contribute to actual volunteer-driven efforts or you'd like to try working for a cause-based organization, below are some great resources:

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.

Hirewall was created to simplify the hiring process for small to medium businesses from end to end. Especially now, with the current economy where you might have double or triple the number of candidates for a job, this can become a scheduling nightmare for an overworked HR department. Hirewall is an online tool that ensures the best candidates for a job are not only invited to interview, but seen by the right people every time.

Even with the economy in its current state, many companies are still hiring. ReadWriteWeb Jobwire is living proof of that. But when it comes to hiring in a down market, supply always exceeds demand, because there are always more people looking than jobs available. That can make it harder than ever for companies - especially small companies without a great deal of Human Resources infrastructure - to find that needle-in-the-haystack candidate they're seeking. Two new Web-based applicant management apps - Choosy and The Resumator - promise better management of job listings and candidate selection at a price that's affordable for any company.

In the midst of the current US economic slowdown it is clear that the good old days are over. At least for some chunk of 2008, more likely for the whole year, we are in for some gloomy times.

Companies are being forced to cut costs and let people go. Some smart people aren't sitting around waiting to be downsized - instead they're jumping ship and hopping aboard another.

We recently launched a new product, Jobwire, to track who has been hired for new jobs in tech and new media. In this week's episode of RWW Live, to be broadcast live at 3.30pm PST Monday (6.30pm EST), we will discuss the state of online tools for career discovery and job searching. We have executives from Path 101, Indeed and Simply Hired joining us.

You can tune into the show, and interact with us via the chat, by clicking here. You can also use the Calliflower Facebook app to tune in and participate.

The media world is changing and its jobs are changing too. The rise of the blogger is an often-told story, but are the lucky few bloggers who do it for a living well paid? We did a survey to find out.

We asked 20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants to tell us how much they get paid, by the post, by the hour or by the month - however their rates are set. Half of them told us, on the condition that we wouldn't disclose who they were or where they worked.

At DEMO08, a new type of job web site launches today: PaidInterviews. Unlike today's traditional (ahem, boring) job sites like Monster.com or HotJobs, PaidInterviews combines social networking with a more sophisticated job matching algorithm to deliver a Web 2.0-style web site that will appeal to today's youngest career-seekers: Generations X and Y.

You know what little startup companies need these days? They need to hire more people! It may be a frightening thought, but in an increasingly social world - being social is becoming an important full time job.

"Community Manager" is a position being hired for at a good number of large corporations (see Jeremiah Owyang's growing list of people with that kind of job) but what about smaller companies? We asked a number of people what they thought and the following discussion offers some great things to think about, pro and con.

The British government is telling press that there is a growing trend in online organized crime rings hiring college students to do their dirty work and solve difficult technical problems - often under pretense that the work is legal security consulting. Here at RWW we're seeing, even participating in, a related trend of hiring college students for online work blogging.

Hiring college students to work online is desirable for a number of reasons. Below we discuss some of those reasons and offer a short list of alternatives to working on the dark side online.

ReadWriteWeb is looking for a new blogger to join our team. Ideally we're after a blogger based in Silicon Valley, who can attend the local events on our behalf and meet with startups. However we'll consider non-Valley bloggers too. The role description is basically: cover breaking web tech news and product reviews. So don't worry, you won't have to write long, analytical posts like many RWW writers do :-) If this sounds like you, email the editor with the subject line 'RWW Writer Position'.

In the midst of the current US economic slowdown it is clear that the good old days are over. At least for some chunk of 2008, more likely for the whole year, we are in for some gloomy times.

Companies are being forced to cut costs and let people go. Some smart people aren't sitting around waiting to be downsized - instead they're jumping ship and hopping aboard another.