A new CareerBuilder.com survey found that 22% of all hiring managers have combed through social media profiles to help evaluate potential hires, up from just 11% two years ago. HR execs from media and creative agencies like MediaVest and AKQA weighed in on the practice, identifying LinkedIn as their site of choice for new hire research.

"We use LinkedIn a lot. It's like resume shopping," said Lionel Carreon, creative recruiter at AKQA. "Sometimes we'll ask candidates why they aren't on LinkedIn or Plaxo, because it's the easiest way to be found."

Carreon also said that the digital agency has hired employees they found through blog searches. "We look for some of the more serious blogs, particularly for positions like art directors and developers," he said. "Blogging about what they do and how they're being innovative makes candidates that much more attractive."

According to Tricia White, SVP and director of human resources at MediaVest, LinkedIn profiles can even substitute for resumes in some cases. "They both have a list of jobs and basic accountabilities," White said. "If I'm searching for a position like a media planner, for example, I can fill in the blanks with LinkedIn."

Click below to view the exclusive world premiere of the Employment Law Sing-A-Long Video. Follow my bouncing head and sing along at the top of your lungs. (Warning: potential side effects could include nausea and/or gastrointestinal discomfort resulting from excessive lateral eye movement as well as instantaneous imbedding of all major employment law principles deep inside the cerebral cortex.)

The companies said 19 of the Times' newspaper sites -- which include the Boston Globe, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and the Times itself -- will co-brand their online recruitment advertising Web sites with Monster, with the sites beginning to appear next month.

For Monster, the deal offers a local reach that otherwise might not be possible, enabling companies and recruiters to drill down into local employment markets via the newspaper sites.

"The alliance significantly advances Monster's strategy Barracuda Spam Filter – Free Evaluation Unit to provide highly localized online recruitment and career services, allowing Monster to leverage its expertise and full range of solutions" with local news outlets, said Monster CEO William Pastore.

Getting local could help Monster attract a greater variety of job listings to its site, including positions that would, because of salary or other factors, only appeal to potential employees in specific locations.

Over the past year, Monster has actively signed deals with more than 60 daily newspapers.

On Wednesday, Monster and The New York Times Co. said the local job sites will feature geographically focused content from newspaper partners, as well as job-hunting advice from Monster.

And just as the way we surf the web changed, the way that corporate America does business has changed in this middle space. Case in point: the most radical dotcom 2.0 recruitment wave is happening in virtual reality thanks to Second Life. Instead of posting a resume on Monster.com that will hopefully net a flesh-and-blood job interview, your avatar can be interviewed and hired all within Second Life, often for jobs possible only in virtual reality.

"People who have been in SL since its inception might not be professional content developers, but they have become experts," says Brandon Berger, senior strategist at OgilvyInteractive's Digital Innovation unit. Hence, Ogilvy has hired a lot of people directly from Second Life to execute projects for the big name clients who have worked to be in Second Life. Cars of Second Life

The same goes for Electric Sheep Company, a 27-person operation that brought Starwood, Reuters, musician Ben Folds and Nissan Motors to SL. The core team was plucked from Second Life, not from a pool of PR applicants or professional computer programmers, says Gif Constable, head of business development. "We hired people we had never met in the real world because we'd spent a year looking at the work they produced within Second Life, and the way that they approached the community," says Constable. "To a certain extent we knew each other... We knew that in Second Life, they were the best."

"This is like the first dotcom boom, when the forward-looking companies were all building websites because they understood that people would someday shop and pay bills and interact online. Someday we'll shop in virtual bookstores...We'll all have avatars," says Berger.

The right answers could help get you a job at Google.

Google has always wanted to hire people with straight-A report cards and double 800s on their SATs. Now, like an Ivy League school, it is starting to look for more well-rounded candidates, like those who have published books or started their own clubs.

Desperate to hire more engineers and sales representatives to staff its rapidly growing search and advertising business, Google — in typical eccentric fashion — has created an automated way to search for talent among the more than 100,000 job applications it receives each month. It is starting to ask job applicants to fill out an elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.

The questions range from the age when applicants first got excited about computers to whether they have ever tutored or ever established a nonprofit organization.

The Conference Board said its measure of online help-wanted advertising volume fell to 1.63 million last month from 1.82 million in November.

Online job ads declined in all 52 metropolitan areas for which data was available, including New Orleans, which dipped for the first time since Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast region in late August, the report said.

"A large portion of the declines in ads in November and December are seasonal declines as businesses cut back recruitment ads during the holiday season," said Ken Goldstein, labor economist at The Conference Board.

Recruitment in a variety of industries and occupations has pushed an online index of hiring to its highest level ever.

An official at Monster Worldwide says his company's Monster Employment Index indicates businesses are "more confident about the strength of the economy." He says companies are hiring based on the prediction of continued growth.

The company says hiring in the retail and wholesale trade industries for the year-end holiday season played a major role in job growth.

Found out about this employee blog network hosted by Honeywell HR that was aimed to promote and entice people to join their company. A recruiting blog, if you will. Some of the blogs are pretty well-written too.

If you're surprised to hear that this is a common practice, then I'm happy for you -- many job seekers have been dealing with it for years. If a company believes what you've said about your accomplishments and challenges at past jobs, if it believes what you've said about your likes and dislikes, your strengths and weaknesses, and everything else you discussed at the interview, but can't believe what you say about your past earnings without written proof -- then it doesn't deserve you.

This practice is so unspeakably tacky that I can hardly move my fingers over the keys to write this, but run -- RUN -- away from a company that asks for proof of your past compensation.