Who is Hiring This Month -- Apply Till the End of December 2010

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent figures, 29 states and Washington, D.C., have lower unemployment rates than they did in 2010. And in the most recently released month-over-month figures, 41 states saw an increase in non-farm employment.

The year's winding down and even if the economy isn't as robust as it was a decade ago, it is certainly healthier than it was a year ago judging by these statistics. This progress, albeit slow, is welcomed by job seekers who remember how bleak the hiring outlook felt a couple of years ago.

And the companies that are hiring aren't necessarily putting their recruitment on hold in December just because it's a busy time of year. In fact, the end of the year presents several opportunities for job seekers. Some companies are preparing to spend their 2011 budgets and want to interview and extend offers to employees now so that they can begin in the new year. Other companies can't wait until next year and need to fill their vacancies now.

They need employees right now and you might never have a better opportunity to stand out than right now. While everyone else is pausing their job searches, you can stand out in a less crowded pool of applicants. Therefore, here are companies hiring in December:

Addus Healthcare, Inc.
Industry: In-home health care
Sample job titles: Nurses, therapists, regional managers, account executives, home care aides
Location: Nationwide

AkzoNobel
Industry: Manufacturing, specialty chemicals, performance coatings, paints, sales and retail operations
Sample job titles: Store associate, store manager, account manager, process engineer, chemist, field service representative
Location: Nationwide
 

Altec
Industry: Manufacturing
Sample job titles: Quality manager, field service technician, hydraulic field technicians, outside sales, trainer
Location: Nationwide

BBVA Compass
Industry: Banking / finance
Sample job titles: Bank teller, financial sales associate
Location: Texas, Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Colorado, New Mexico

Boehringer Ingelheim
Industry: Pharmaceutical
Sample job titles: Primary care sales representatives, R&D scientists, project managers, financial analysts, quality and validations
Location: Nationwide

CarMax
Industry: Automotive / retail
Sample job titles: Automotive technicians, detailers, sales consultants, management trainees
Location: Nationwide

Citi Trends
Industry: Retail
Sample job titles: Store manager, store associate, merchandiser, operations manager, manager in training
Location: Nationwide

Country Financial
Industry: Insurance and financial services
Sample job titles: Financial representative
Location: Chicago, Minneapolis, Iowa City, St. Louis, Atlanta, Nashville, Fort Collins, Tulsa, Kansas City, Phoenix, Portland, Bellevue, Wash., Brookfield, Wis.

DirecTV
Industry: Video technology
Sample job titles: Customer service representative
Location: Nationwide

General Dynamics Information Technology
Industry: Defense contractor
Sample job titles: Network engineers, IT security specialists, network administrators, IT specialists, intelligence analysts
Location: Washington, D.C., Virginia, Maryland, Arizona, Florida, Massachusetts, Texas

Global Experience Specialist (GES)
Industry: Professional services - convention and trade shows
Sample job titles: Sale coordinator, account managers, exhibit services coordinator
Location: Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Chicago, Dallas

Harbor Freight Tools
Industry: Transportation
Sample job titles: District manager, store sales associates, inventory, purchasing, supply chain
Location: Nationwide

Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG)
Industry: Hotel / hospitality
Sample job titles: Hotel sales manager, general manager, hospitality
Location: Worldwide

Millennium Pharmacy Systems, Inc
Industry: Health care
Sample job titles: Pharmacy technician, pharmacist, billing specialist, pharmacy manager, project manager, consultant pharmacist, customer service representatives
Location: Cranberry, Penn., Orlando, Gaithersburg, Md., Philadelphia

MV Transportation
Industry: Transit
Sample job titles: General managers, fleet maintenance managers, fleet technicians, CDL drivers, safety managers, operations managers, director of accounting, proposal writer
Location: Nationwide

Northern Virginia Community College
Industry: Education
Sample job titles: Computer graphics and Web design teacher, political science teacher, development writing teacher, early childhood development teacher
Location: Annandale, Va.
 

Plymouth Auctioneering
Industry: Fine art sales / travel / entertainment
Sample job titles: International fine art sales and marketing
Location: Nationwide

REI Systems, Inc.
Industry: Software Development and Design
Sample job titles: Applications mockup developers, business analysts, database engineers, enterprise report writers, Java developers, Linux system administrators, .Net software engineers
Locations: Virginia, Washington D.C.

Saber Healthcare
Industry: Health care
Sample job titles: Director of nursing, physical therapist, occupational therapist, speech language pathologist
Location: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Carrabelle, Fla.

ServiceMaster
Industry: Home and commercial maintenance, repair and care
Sample job titles: Sales agent, collection agent, lawncare specialist, outbound sales supervisor
Location: Nationwide

Target
Industry: Retail
Sample job titles: Cashier, sales-floor team members, logistics team members, food team members
Location: Nationwide

University of Utah Health Care
Industry: Health care
Sample job titles: Electrophysiology lab manager, health information coder, outpatient coding manager, inpatient coding educator, inpatient and acute care pharmacists, medical unit and oncology unit
Location: Salt Lake City

Volkswagen Group of America
Industry: Automotive
Sample job titles: Quality engineering specialist, area after sales manager, industrial engineer, assistant manager (assembly, production control specialist), manager (sales and distribution)
Location: Nationwide

Wireless Advocates
Industry: Wireless technology / retail
Sample job titles: Sales manager, retail sales associate
Location: Nationwide

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By Anthony Balderrama, CareerBuilder.com writer

The New New Best Careers/Jobs in the Hottest Markets (with salary range & who’s hiring?) – according to CNN Money

The United States may keep shedding jobs to foreign countries, but it cranks out new occupations like no one else. Here are just five of the hottest you can get into now.

Disease Mapper
 

Salary range:$40,000-$150,000
 
Experience/skills: A Ph.D. or master's in a tech field, plus expertise in a particular disease.

Perks: Flexible hours and travel to exotic locales

Who's hiring? Universities, governments, the United Nations, some consultancies

Early in his career, Andy Tatem became so proficient at analyzing fuzzy satellite images of English farms that he could tell wheat crops from turnip fields by studying the way the sun reflected off each.

Interesting stuff if you're a farmer, but not sufficiently inspiring for Tatem. Then came a call last year from Simon Hays, an Oxford University researcher who was developing a global map of malaria that could explain current outbreaks and help predict future ones.

Today Tatem, a 29-year-old Ph.D., is among a new class of researchers using the latest satellite imagery, cheap computing, big databases, and free tools like Google Earth to show how epidemics spread around the globe.

It's a new twist on a very old concept. When cholera and yellow fever spread during the 18th century, "medical geographers" drew maps to show infected areas but had no way of knowing where an epidemic would strike next. Tatem pulls data from NASA satellites to plot a picture of rainfall, temperature, vegetation, and other variables in regions where malaria has struck. He correlates it with infection rates and hospital reports to create a map of the disease and its projected spread.


Robot Programmer
 

Salary range: $40,000-$100,000

Experience/skills: Associate degree in a technical field and extensive training. People skills also come in handy.

Perks: Lots of travel, helping clients customize each machine to a particular task

Who's hiring? ABB, Fanuc, Motoman, Panasonic, Toyota

Back in 1990, Matt Zeigler was pulling 12-hour shifts as an arc welder for a forklift manufacturing firm in Indiana when a technician in a white lab coat came into the factory to work on a new $85,000 robotic welder. "I said, 'Why aren't I doing that?'" Zeigler recalls. Self-training eventually got him out of blue-collar work and into a top robot programming position at Motoman in Dayton, Ohio, one of a growing number of industrial robot manufacturers that train humans to make sure their products perform as advertised.

Industrial robots, once a fixture in the auto industry, now are doing everything from analyzing blood samples to mixing cocktails. The latest innovations include multi-armed robots with vision systems and enough machine intelligence to read labels and pick out the parts they need from nearby bins.

Zeigler, 35, spends most of his time behind a PC and a custom hand-held controller, calibrating the robots' moving parts to be in just the right place at just the right time. He is also on the road a lot, acting as salesman, engineer, and installer for Motoman's customers. "I wear a lot of hats," he says.

Far from eliminating jobs, Zeigler says robots are "creating better jobs and better-paying jobs. They're just more technical and not as repetitive."

 
Information Engineer
 

Salary range: $70,000-$120,000

Experience/skills: Data analytics, network administrator experience, writing skills

Perks: Stock options, free food

Who's hiring? PayPal, Slide, and other Web 2.0 startups unable to stay on top of the data

Every Sunday the three 20-something founders of Meebo, an instant-messaging startup based in San Francisco, meet to talk strategy and almost always end up wanting new data before making any decision. "We'd walk away wanting to know things like where is our churn rate the greatest, or how are the users in Brazil different from those in India with regard to how they navigate the site," says CEO Seth Sternberg.

So Sternberg created a new position "information engineer" dedicated exclusively to digging up the answers. The first person to fill it: Bob Lee, 34, a former network engineer at Apple, who now sits in front of three monitors poring over an estimated 200 gigabytes of data every day from more than 5 million users. It's Lee's job, using a combination of networking chops and statistical analysis, to point out trends, explain network hiccups, and reveal what new features are hits or duds.

Other Web 2.0 companies, like PayPal and Slide, have begun adding similar positions to answer queries that off-the-shelf analytics tools can't handle, such as calculating churn rates. "There's all this data available to help make decisions," Sternberg says. "But it takes someone really focusing on it to get the benefit."

Radiosurgeon
 

Salary range: $200,000-$800,000

Experience/skills: Certified radiation oncologists must take three-week training course.

Perks: A broader base of patients and a long-term source of high-margin revenue

Who's hiring? Large hospitals, universities, pioneering small medical practices

For years San Diego radiation oncologist Donald Fuller relied on the standard tools of cancer therapy: radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery. But late last year, Fuller and several partners invested $4 million in a high-energy linear accelerator fixed to a robotic arm. The CyberKnife zaps radiation beams with submillimeter precision at tumors inside patients' bodies. After as many as five, one-hour treatments, tumors can disappear in a matter of days.

So-called radiosurgery has been used for years to treat cancer in the brain, where conventional operations are usually too risky. The CyberKnife manufactured by Accuray and approved by the FDA in 2001 to treat tumors anywhere in the body is only now reaching a broad population of patients with early-stage lung cancer, spinal tumors, and other cancers.

But it's turned Fuller, 49, into an entrepreneur. If he can treat 150 patients a year for the average insurance reimbursement of $19,000 each, he'll break even on his radiosurgery business by the end of 2008. Afterward, he could be looking at as much as $2.6 million a year in new revenue. "This is the way we are heading in medicine," Fuller says. "It's the way technology is taking us."



Second Life Lawyer
 

Salary range: Too early to say

Experience/skills: Software and intellectual property law expertise

Perks: The freedom to be talking to a client while getting a beer out of your home fridge

Who's hiring? Programmers looking to patent their code

Of the 2 million or so Second Life members, more than 25,000 are aspiring entrepreneurs. Most are buying and selling land, designing homes and clothes, or creating products, from jewelry to virtual pets. The stakes are small, but they're rising fast: According to Linden Lab, creator of Second Life, only 116 members made more than $5,000 in February, but that number is triple what it was six months earlier.

Count Stevan Lieberman among the virtual world's earning elite. Instead of trying to practice purely virtual law which few if any lawyers have turned into real money Lieberman has taken a hybrid approach, using Second Life as a meet-and-greet area for new clients, who then take their real-world legal needs offline. And since he took in $7,000 in fees in the first two weeks after hanging up his virtual shingle, he's optimistic: "I fully expect to keep getting more business this way."

So bullish is Lieberman that he's helping to set up the site's first "law island," a place for other members' practices and legal entities to do business. The American Bar Association and the FBI have asked him to help them set up their outposts too.

By Michael Copeland and Kevin Kelleher  For CNN Money