When military veterans complete their service, they shouldn’t have to struggle to find jobs. That’s why Jobvite and The White House’s Joining Forces initiative are teaming up to release “Apps For Heroes”. The new feature set allows Jobvite’s recruiting platform clients to check a box and flag the job openings they post to be automatically included in Veterans Job Bank. Clients can also easily add a Veterans Affairs Blue Button to their job application submission forms to allow vets to upload their military service history.

Apps For Heroes will be unveiled later today at a San Francisco event promoting First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden’s Joining Forces initiative to support veterans. Held at the Code For America office, Biden and US CTO Aneesh Chopra will be on hand to discuss how technology can help reduce unemployment, especially for those who’ve served their country.

Jobvite will now give its clients the option to include Apps For Heroes features on their job openings. If they check the box indicating an opportunity is targeted towards veterans, metadata will be added to the job listing so it can be scraped and syndicated on the Veterans Job Bank. Employers are incentivized to participate in Apps For Heroes, as they can receive up to $9,600 per veteran hired thanks to the Returning Heroes and Wounded Warriors Tax Credits.

Launch partner LivingSocial will be one of the first companies to flag openings for vets through Apps For Heroes. Beth Mensinger, Head of Global Recruiting for LivingSocial tell me veterans make great employees because they’re “fast-acting, quick on their feet, strong, and dedicated.”

Apps For Heroes is great example of how the tech industry is banding together help the US bounce back from the recession. Today’s event at Code For America follows yesterday’s event with CTO Chopra at Twilio, where Codecademy and Mitch Kapor announced new and expanded programs to teach kids engineering and entrepreneurship.

Editor’s note: Guest contributor Jon Bischke is a founder of RG Labs and an advisor to Altius Education, Fatminds and Udemy. You can follow him @jonbischke.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. 

-Charles Dickens from A Tale of Two Cities

For people who spend most of their days within a few blocks of tech start-up epicenters such as South Park in San Francisco, University Avenue in Palo Alto or the Flatiron district in New York, last week’s jobs report must have created some cognitive dissonance. After all, we’re in a boom/bubble right? It’s really hard to hire good people isn’t it? But take a moment to step outside the world of high technology and a dramatically different picture emerges of what’s going on in America.

The number of unemployed now eclipses 14 million nationwide. Underemployment is scary too with U-6, the government’s official measure of under-utilization,rising to 16.2% in June from 15.8% in May. But the worst number of them all might be mean duration of employment (the length of time that the average unemployed person has been out of work) which has spiked to 40 weeks. As a Wall Street Journal article this week pointed out, if you factored in those who’ve dropped out of the labor market (and therefore aren’t counted in unemployment numbers), the situation would appear even worse.

Which bring us to an important question: Should Silicon Valley (and other tech clusters throughout the country) care? After all, as long as people in Nebraska or the Central Valley of California have enough money to buy virtual tractors to tend their crops in Farmville, should the tech community be worried about whether those same people are getting paid to do work in the real world? Is what’s best for Silicon Valley also good for America?

On one hand, a thriving tech sector is a beacon of hope for America and perhaps one of a shrinking number of things keeping the country from slipping from its perch as the world’s foremost economic superpower. Fast-growth companies like Facebook, Groupon and Twitter create jobs, attract foreign investment (see Sarah Lacy’s article “How We All Missed Web 2.0′s “Netscape Moment”) and generate tremendous amounts of wealth for employees and shareholders which circulates throughout the economy.

In addition, a host of technology companies enable people around the country to make money. Etsy empowers people anywhere to make money selling handmade goods. AirBnB allows anyone with a house or apartment to make money renting it out. And whether you’re talking about design communities like 99designs, crowdsourcing platforms like CrowdFlower, outsourcing sites like oDesk or an artisan food marketplace like Foodzie, tech-enabled marketplaces allow millions of dollars to flow from consumers to producers every year. (Check out Semil Shah’s article “The P2P Evolution” for more great examples of this in action.)

Furthermore, tech companies are helping to reshape how people train for and ultimately find employment. It’s easier than ever to pick up new skills online with the explosion in blogs, tutorials, screencasts and online video. For a self-motivated individual of at least average intelligence there is a shrinking number of excuses for not possessing in-demand skills. And jobs and recruiting platforms like Branchout, Jobvite, LinkedIn and Monster.com certainly help job seekers to smooth the path to employment.

But there’s a flip side to the argument that this technological innovation is good for the country. Books like A Whole New Mind,  The Great Stagnation and The Lights in the Tunnel make arguments that automation and outsourcing are increasingly pushing jobs outside the country and in many cases, doing away with them altogether (you did see that crazy video of the Diapers.com warehouses didn’t you?). The rate of increasing technological innovation certainly produces new jobs but does it produce jobs at a rate great enough to replace those it might be eliminating?

In a similar vein, many of the companies in Silicon Valley are succeeding precisely because they’re disrupting existing players in their industries. Amazon is doing really well right now (almost $10 billion in revenue in the last quarter alone). Borders…not so much. Go iTunes and Spotify. RIP Tower Records. Creative destruction is alive and well but how many people in Silicon Valley are thinking about what happens to that displaced worker at the record store or bookstore?

Maybe something is missing in the Valley and surrounding tech communities and that’s a stronger sense of responsibility to make sure that the vast majority of the country isn’t left behind by all this cool technology that we’re building. In Paul Graham’s essay Great Hackers he points out that the more sophisticated tools become, the greater variation there is in productivity. He writes:

In a low-tech society you don’t see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.

If accumulation of wealth correlates with productivity then, in Graham’s view, increasing variation of wealth might actually be a sign of good things. But could this increase in variation lead to the creation of two almost completely distinct countries in America, one which continues to boom and create enormous wealth for those who reside in it and another for which long-term unemployment and underemployment and the corresponding frustration that accompanies those states becomes the norm?

Megan McArdle wrote a poignant article entitled “Why Unemployment Matters” in last week’s Atlantic where she detailed some of the crushing residual effects of being out of work. It’s worth reading and asking the questions: Can we be doing more about this? Should we even be doing anything about it? The answers to these questions matter a lot.  Please share your thoughts in comments.

Image via Getty

The socialization of the Web has brought about changes to how, when and where we communicate with each other over the Internet. The same goes for companies who now look for and hire new staff by using online software, social networks and whatnot, although that shift – to what is often referred to as ‘social recruiting’ – is perhaps far less visible.

Jobvite, a developer of software that enables companies to leverage the social Web for finding and hiring new employees, was one of the first to spot this trend a few years ago, and the startup is today growing faster than ever. We’ve learned that the company has raised $15 million in Series C funding, underscoring its momentum.

The financing round, which brings the total of capital raised by Jobvite to over $30 million, was led by Trident Capital and joined by previous backers CMEA Capital and ATA Ventures.

John Moragne, co-founder of Trident Capital, will join the company’s board.

Jobvite offers social recruiting applications used by over 500 companies today – its customer base has grown to 600 percent the size it was just two years ago – and counts well-known Internet companies such as Zappos, Yelp, Groupon and Twitter among its clients. Other notable customers include WholeFoods and Starbucks.

The company offers its Web-based social recruiting apps and an applicant tracking platform on a subscription basis, which center around driving referral hires by leveraging dozens of social networks and other digital communication platforms. Notably, the software isn’t designed to be used exclusively by recruiters or hiring managers, but can easily be used by all employees.

Jobvite also provides realtime analytics, allowing managers to see the status of searches, identify areas for improvement and optimize recruiting spend.

The company claims its customers hire 10 percent of referral applicants compared to 1 percent of general applicants. Jobvite cites examples from its customers TiVo, whose referral hires have risen from 23 percent to 39 percent in three years, and Shutterfly, who it says hires referral candidates at 12 times the rate of applicants from other sources.

Jobvite competitors include Firefish, Sendouts and Taleo, among many others.

Also read: The Resumator Raises $700,000 For Social Recruiting Solution

Monster’s acquisition of Yahoo HotJobs signals a significant landscape change for a job board industry facing significant economic pressure and I believe the deal also marks a “new normal” in how companies are hiring talent. Online recruiting is transitioning away from “the Big Three” job boards. The Internet is becoming the job board.

Of course, unloading and closing properties that are not part of Yahoo’s strategy going forward is smart. (Though selling a job advertising board smack in the middle of this downturn and extreme unemployment must have been as hard as selling an empty, foreclosed home in Las Vegas right now.)

But more importantly, this acquisition is an indicator of a rapid evolution as more hiring takes place online. Venture-backed startups are transforming this industry as new technologies begin to change how companies find and attract talent.  The elephant in the room is that the economic jolt of September 2008 has permanently altered the job market and dramatically accelerated labor trends underway for many years, such as the growth in job turnover throughout a person’s career.

Increases in unemployment, under-employment and turnover are boosting traffic to nearly all job boards and job search engines – and the number of online applications to resource-depleted recruiting departments. Companies are spending more money sifting through unqualified applications, so they are naturally spending less on job boards and taking advantage of free sites, like Indeed, to post and distribute their jobs.

To combat the influx of poor-fit applications, companies are turning to new technologies and online services to target talent and search across the open Web for people who may not be actively searching for a job on a board. This is possible because 42% of working adults in the US now maintain a profile somewhere online—most notably on LinkedIn and Facebook, but also on Twitter and services like Jigsaw, an SF-based, user-generated database of professionals. And the downturn is growing this number.

The more innovative recruiters at growing companies like Zappos and Dell are now are using social media to engage prospective candidates in a genuine and inexpensive way: building candidate communities in their career site and blogs, search engine optimizing job listings, distributing jobs through social networks to dramatically drive referrals, and tracking web analytics by job to determine their best sources of talent.

To me, the more interesting acquisition was Monster’s purchase 18 months ago of Trovix, a Bay Area startup that built a behavioral algorithm for matching jobs and resumes to help recruiters sift through applicants and jobseekers through jobs. But, the irony is that they will be “unveiling” this new technology, dubbed 6Sense, on this weekend’s (expensive) Super Bowl, the annual marketing battleground of the big, horizontal job boards.

As funny as those ads can be, they are not likely to solve the job boards’ bigger marketing challenge: how to convince companies to spend more money “posting and praying” that the best person applies for their job when the broader, open Internet is fast becoming the new, cost-effective “job board” of talent.  This week’s combination of Monster and Hotjobs isn’t going to solve that problem either.

Image via Flickr/Frank Gruber.

Adam Hyder, Yahoo’s Senior Director of Engineering for its Advertising Management Platform (AMP), has joined the flood of recent departures from the search giant in hopes of greener pastures. Hyder has joined Jobvite, an online recruiting service, as the company’s CTO.

Last month, Jobvite hired Yahoo HotJobs boss Dan Finnigan as its CEO. It’s likely that Finnigan had something to do with Hyder’s choice of relocation – the two worked together at HotJobs before Hyder moved to AMP.

The loss to Yahoo’s AMP platform is significant – the service was only announced in April, and has yet to launch (it is supposed to launch some time this summer). AMP is supposed to “help marketers buy across search, display, local, mobile, and video inventory – all from a single, integrated interface.” During the Yahoo conference call last June, the company said that AMP would be available within a week. Six weeks later, the platform’s homepage still displays a teaser trailer. We haven’t heard what the status of the AMP platform is at this point, but it’s never a good sign when your Director of Engineering jumps ship weeks (or less) before release.