Bloomberg BusinessWeek (09/21/12) Patrick Winters; Leigh Baldwin

Adecco is working to rebuild its U.S. presence after being too slow to capitalize on the profitable information technology staffing sector, says chief executive officer Patrick De Maeseneire. Adecco has had trouble keeping up with the U.S. market since acquiring MPS Group in 2010. The attention paid to integrating MPS meant Adecco had its “eye off the market,” De Maeseneire says. “It didn’t let us hire the additional resources we needed in our IT business on time to cope with the market growth. We missed the boat there.”

In May, the company’s top executives toured the U.S. and fired the manager of the U.S. IT staffing unit. Now that Adecco has a “good footprint in the U.S., we really need to attack the small and medium-sized accounts,” says chief financial officer Dominik De Daniel. “The share of profit from the U.S. will increase in the mid term,” with growth driven by the automotive and technology industries, he says.

PRWeb (09/24/12)

Elevate Services Inc. has acquired the analytics division of RFx Legal, a U.S.-based firm specializing in legal sourcing, procurement, and staffing services. RFx Legal Analytics provides consulting services to help corporate legal departments reduce legal spend, and to help law firms increase profitability through alternative fee arrangement value pricing. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Wall Street Journal (09/22/12) Josh Mitchell

Companies cut jobs last month in seven of 10 battleground states—Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The U.S. unemployment rate was 8.1% in August. In Nevada, the unemployment rate was 12.1%, the highest rate in any state. The rate topped 9% in Michigan and North Carolina and 8% in Colorado, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

Wall Street Journal (09/22/12) Ianthe Jean Dugan

A new federal program enabling states to give companies financial incentives for hiring jobless people has not gained traction, highlighting the complications of government attempts to tackle unemployment. Many states are struggling to pay unemployment benefits, and have already been experimenting with self-funded programs that give companies incentives to hire those out of work. New Hampshire and Georgia, for example, allow companies to try out people who are collecting jobless benefits before hiring them.

Under the federal law, states were invited to submit ideas for “re-employment demonstration projects”—initiatives that motivate companies to hire people who are collecting unemployment checks. The government plans to initially pick 10 winners and reward those states with waivers to federal unemployment-insurance and labor laws, allowing them for the first time to fund programs out of their own unemployment-insurance trust funds. Seven months after the federal law was passed, many states say they will not apply because they don’t have the funding to set up and comply.

Frank Vaccaro of Diamond Staffing Services Inc. recently hired a worker in New Hampshire through a state program that allows candidates to work for up to six weeks, 24 hours per week, at no cost to the company. “We have a small staff, so we couldn’t afford to try out a worker without this program,” he says. “We do work all around New England and if other states had similar programs, we would do more hiring.”

Reuters (09/21/12) Jessica Wohl

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to hire more than 50,000 seasonal employees to work at its U.S. stores, slightly more than it did last year, as it gets ready for the winter holiday season. The company also says that it will give current workers the chance to work more hours during the season. Department store chain Kohl’s Corp. has indicated it plans to hire more than 52,700 people for the holiday season to work in stores and support its online business. Target Corp., meanwhile, says it plans to hire about 80,000 to 90,000 seasonal employees for its stores and distribution centers.