15 companies hiring in December

December is filled with making lists -- grocery lists for holiday parties, lists of gifts for family and friends. And of course there's the naughty and nice list, but that one might just be for Santa.If you're a job seeker, create one more list with everything you should do for your job search throughout the month. Items to add include updating your résumé, sending holiday cards to professional contacts and researching companies that are hiring.To help you cross that last one off your list, here are 15 companies hiring in December:

1. BASF Corp.
Industry: Chemical/engineering
Sample job titles: Scientist, chemist, supply chain, sales, engineering, production
Location: Nationwide

2. Civil & Environmental Consultants Inc.
Industry: Engineering
Sample job titles: Civil engineer, project manager, landfill gas field technician, wastewater engineer
Location: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Arizona, West Virginia

3. Comfort Keepers
Industry: In-home care services/senior care
Sample job titles: State tested nursing assistant, caregiver/companion, certified nurse's aide
Location: Nationwide

4.  EZCorp
Industry: Retail/finance
Sample job titles: Customer service, manager trainee, Amazon e-commerce sales
Location: Nationwide

5. Gold Buyers at the Mall
Industry: Retail
Sample job titles: Retail sales, sales associate
Location: Nationwide

6. Heartland Dental Care
Industry: Dental
Sample job titles: Dentist, dental assistant, dental hygienist, business assistant, administrative assistant
Location: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin

7. OnHealthcare
Industry: Health care
Sample job titles: Certified nursing assistant, dental assistant, optometrist, dentist, podiatrist, audiologist, nurse practitioner, ophthalmic technician
Location: Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania

8. Portfolio Recovery Associates
Industry: Financial services
Sample job titles: Account representative, systems analyst, applications developer, human resources business partner, operations manager
Location: Las Vegas; Norfolk, Va.; Rosemont, Ill.; Birmingham, Ala.; Hutchinson, Kan.

9. Scotts Miracle-Gro
Industry: Retail/professional services/sales
Sample job titles: Door-to-door sales, agriculture sales, inside sales
Location: Across the U.S., including Tampa, Fla.; Chicago; Denver; Dallas; Columbus, Ohio

10. Senior Life Insurance Co.
Industry: Insurance
Sample job titles: Outside sales representative -- insurance agent (senior market)
Location: Nationwide

11. Total Quality Logistics
Industry: Sales
Sample job titles: Logistics sales account executive
Location: Chicago; Tampa, Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, Fla.; Denver; Indianapolis; Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus and Dayton, Ohio; Erlanger, Lexington and Louisville, Ky.; Charlotte, N.C.; Charleston, S.C.; Austin, Texas

12. Vanity Shops
Industry: Retail
Sample job titles: Director of sourcing, buyer, sales consultant, team lead, assistant store manager, store manager
Location: Nationwide

13. Visiting Angels
Industry: Home health care
Sample job titles: Caregiver/companion, certified nursing assistant, home health aide, scheduler, registered nurse
Location: Nationwide

14. Westfield Insurance
Industry: Insurance
Sample job titles: Graduate development program, insurance internship (all entry level)
Location: Westfield/Cleveland, Ohio

15. Youth Villages
Industry: Nonprofit/social services
Sample job titles: Foster care counselor, teacher assistant, administrative assistant, behavioral youth counselor, bilingual transitional living specialist -- Spanish, youth counselor, registered nurse
Location: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, Washington, D.C.

More Whites Believe 'Reverse Racism' Is Costing Them Jobs

Whether you're in a minority or a majority, it seems that here in America we all feel discriminated against. A recent study conducted at a couple of very prestigious schools found that now whites believe they have replaced blacks as the primary victims of racial discrimination in America. This is mostly exhibited in the workplace, they say, but many believe it can be found in legal, social and educational situations as well.

The study, conducted by researchers at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School, shows that America has not achieved the "post-racial" society that some predicted in the wake of Barack Obama's election, according to the authors of the study.

At least whites and blacks agree on one thing: Both feel that anti-black racism has decreased over the last 60 years. However, whites believe that anti-white racism has increased and is now a bigger problem than anti-black racism.

"It's a pretty surprising finding when you think of the wide range of disparities that still exist in society, most of which show black Americans with worse outcomes than whites in areas such as income, homeownership, health and employment," said Tufts Associate Professor of Psychology Samuel Sommers, Ph.D. He's co-author with Michael I. Norton of Harvard of the article, "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing," which appears in the May 2011 issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Researchers were surprised to find that whites believed that racism against whites has increased significantly as racism against blacks has decreased. On average, whites rated anti-white bias as more prevalent in the 2000s than anti-black bias by more than a full point on the 10-point scale. Moreover, some 11 percent of whites gave anti-white bias the maximum rating of 10 compared to only 2 percent of whites who rated anti-black bias a 10. Blacks, however, reported only a modest increase in their perceptions of "reverse racism."

"These data are the first to demonstrate that not only do whites think more progress has been made toward equality than do blacks, but whites also now believe that this progress is linked to a new inequality -- at their expense," note Norton and Sommers. Whites see racial equality as a zero-sum game, in which gains for one group mean losses for the other.

Although these findings might take some by surprise, you can find hints of it in the U.S. legal system. The authors of the survey note that claims of so-called reverse racism, while not new, have been at the core of an increasing number of high-profile Supreme Court cases.

By Lisa Johnson Mandell for Career Builder

Fast Company's Top 100 Creative Business Geniuses

What does it take to be named among the Top 100 most creative people in business today? In examining the latest list issued today by Fast Company it appears agility and the ability to think in new and innovative ways are prized attributes.

1. Wadah Khanfar

Topping the list is Wadah Khanfar, director general of the Arab news service Al Jazeera, which turned to Twitter, the 140-word social-media instant-messaging service, to disseminate news after President Hosni Mubarak jammed the network's satellite signal and prevented most Egyptians from watching the channels coverage. Khanfar's efforts in building an international news network that deploys both cutting-edge social media and old-fashioned reporting has empowered the people of the Middle East, Fast Company says.

Choosing Khanfar, ahead of innovative leaders at Apple Inc. (Scott Forstall, No. 2) and Google (Sebastian Thrun, No. 5), is a testament to the Al Jazeera editorial director's unorthodox approach to news, Fast Company executive editor Rick Tetzeli tells Reuters.

"He had done something over the last year that was very current, very public and really astounding when looked at by an American audience that doesn't get to see what he does much on television," Tetzeli says.

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2. Scott Forstall

As senior vice president of iPhone software at electronic-gadget maker Apple, Scott Forstall is the chief architect of iOS, the industry-defining operating system that runs on more than 160 million iPhones, iPads and iPods. The company's slick designs may grab the headlines whenever Steve Jobs introduces a new product, Fast Company says, but it's Forstall's smart software that fills Apple's coffers.

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3. Yuri Milner

Russian venture-capitalist Yuri Milner has done a lot of things right in the word of business, namely founding Mail.ru Group, the largest Internet company in the Russian-speaking world. He then put his money behind American up-and-comers Zynga, Facebook, and Groupon and has invested in a fund to help new-technology start-ups.

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4. Jack Dorsey

Dorsey is in the forefront of helping people communicate and make paying for things both inventive and easier. Dorsey, executive chairman at Twitter, is also CEO of Square, a new service that let's anybody accept credit-card payments with their iPhones. "Payments are a form of communication that could be better designed, less burdensome," Dorsey says.

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5. Sebastian Thrun

Having lost both a childhood friend when he was a child and a co-worker last year, Google's Sebastian Thrun has taken on a personal mission to end deaths caused by vehicle accidents. Both crashes were avoidable, Thrun says, which is why he's developing unmanned robotic cars that drive more safely. "I'm in service of humanity," he says.

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6. Guo Pei

Of all the products and services emerging from China, high fashion isn't the first thing to come to mind. But designer Guo Pei wants to change that. The 44-year-old visionary has since blazed a trail, building her Rose Studio into a fashion powerhouse.

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7. Sal Khan

Kids in U.S. classrooms have long struggled with the basics of math, and Sal Khan is making learning dividing fractions and other computations easier by turning mathematics into a game. Students learn to solve problems at their own pace, using a computer program that gives them instant feedback, charts their progress and rewards them when they get 10 correct answers in a row. Khan says his nonprofit Khan Academy's mission is "to deliver a world-class education to anyone anywhere." And he's got the backing of some of the richest donors in the world, such as Bill Gates.

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8. Conan O'Brien

Yes, he got fired from "The Tonight Show" in a rather ugly and very public falling out with Jay Leno and NBC, but Conan O'Brien is on the comeback trail, having created a nightly comedy show on cable network TBS. Though the network's budget isn't quite as ample as other cable networks (namely, HBO), O'Brien has proven during the past seven months since his show debuted that he can draw younger viewers than his broadcast rivals, thanks largely to his smart comedy.

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9. Jim Yong Kim

Frustrated by poorly executed health-care delivery systems in developing nations, Jim Yong Kim began an initiative at Dartmouth College to study the best health systems and practices. Kim, president of the New Hampshire-based university, believes the initiatives could improve health-care quality and lower costs as much as 30 percent.

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10. Arianna Huffington

The $315 million merger earlier this year of AOL and the Huffington Post raised a lot of eyebrows across the media landscape. The resulting company -- the Huffington Post Media Group -- is run by Arianna Huffington, who leads a group of 1,300 journalists who write and report for the company's numerous websites (including AOL Jobs). The merger and Huffington's extensive network of powerful people, Fast Company says, may be just the thing for Huffington, who believes in "'the power of using narrative to connect with people.'"

-- See the full list of 100 Most Creative People in Business

By David Schepp for AOL