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Looking for a job as a chef in the Antarctic? Try looking here. Or if you’re a recruiter looking for an experienced vuvuzela sales person, then this South African job site is one place to start.

Talk about global recruiting. In the last couple days, both Indeed and SiumplyHired have announced country-specific (or, in the case of Antarctica, continent-specific) job search sites.

SimplyHired added South Africa and Argentina to its roster. Indeed added 24 countries.

In five years the two job search engines have gone from start-up to grown-up, indexing millions of jobs a year. They’ve built enough of a presence to land themselves among the top 10-most-trafficked career sites.

Indeed’s new sites now give it a presence in a remarkable 53 countries. It offers its listings in 24 different languages, among them Norwegian, Turkish, Greek, and Russian.

SimplyHired, based in Silicon Valley, across the continent from its Connecticut rival, is now in 21 countries, providing its listings in 10 languages that include Chinese, Korean, German, and Spanish.

The two search engines now have a presence in more countries than CareerBuilder and just behind Monster. And Indeed may have the only job board devoted to Antarctica, which is almost certainly more for fun and marketing than anything else.

What’s particularly surprising about the two search engines is that after five years their business model is almost unchanged. Jobs are free to post and free to search. They don’t collect resumes and don’t require registration. You won’t find a single credit card come-on or vocational school ad. (At least, none I’ve ever seen.)

The two search engines survive on revenue from premium listings and  Google AdSense, which might bring in enough in a year to pay for outings like SimplyHired’s staff winery visit.

The fact that both companies have survived, and even grown through this global jobs drought, is evidence of the strength of the appeal of the pay-per-click model. Borrowing from the success of Google’s keyword ad program, the two sites allow employers to set a budget and pay only when a potential candidate clicks into the ad.

They’ve also been particularly clever in how they built networks. Where CareerBuilder and Monster pay for the traffic partnerships they have (the HotJobs acquisition is a traffic play), Indeed and SimplyHired offer tools that enable bloggers, niche sites, and in fact almost anyone, to offer jobs on their site. The publisher customizes the job feed to target jobs to the audience and they get to share in any revenue that is generated through their site.

In the early years, when both sites were scraping listings off other sites, including most of the major job boards, a concern was what would happen if the pay boards decided, as Craigslist did, to cut them off. Today, every job distribution service and most (if not all) ATS vendors send jobs directly to Indeed and SimplyHired.

With their traffic continuing to grow and their global footprint expanding, both sites are regularly included by employers as job posting destinations. It would almost unthinkable for a job board to turn off the feeds to either site. What would be the point? So many employers are sending their jobs directly to the search engines, that it would be a loss only to those who don’t.

What will be interesting to see is how the services evolve. While they’ve resisted collecting resumes up to now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that change in the next five years. That they haven’t yet is partly technical and mostly practical. Resumes would have changed the competitive dynamic. Without resumes they are a distribution network. Collecting and selling resumes makes them a direct job board competitor, which might have choked them off at the starting gate.

If you haven’t checked into either site in a while, you might be surprised at the tools and utilities they offer, including integrations with Facebook and LinkedIn. Even if you don’t need to post a job, use the sites for business intelligence. Running searches is a good way to keep up with the local economy and to track what the competition is doing.

Games, case-study quizzes, and simulations online aren’t new: the Army poured millions into a game, and the not-for-profit MITRE built one, too. But what is new is the venue for at least one game aimed at potential employees: not a corporate career site, but Facebook.

The UK company Reckitt Benckiser has launched, in beta, a Facebook game called poweRBrands, for students who might be interested in its marketing jobs.

Reckitt who?

I thought the same thing, but you know at least some of this company’s products, which include Woolite, Lysol, Clearisil, French’s, and Calgon.

Anyhow, with the poweRBrands game, so far available in English, German, Italian, and Portuguese, players make decisions on such things as what to do if a sickness breaks out, increasing demand for Clearisil while you’re short-staffed. Or, you’re presented with a scenario where the VP of sales is impressed with your work and is looking for ideas for the next annual sales plan; should you approach him on your own, or with the brand manager? (I chose to include the brand manager, but the game told me “this was your chance to go for it on your own, and you blew it.”)

A bit harsh, but this is an impressive game.

Reckitt Benckiser doesn’t do a hard sell for its jobs while you’re playing the game. The game does include, though not terribly prominently, links to the company’s pages: its blog, its careers page, Twitter account, YouTube, and more. Players are often asked to invite a friend to play, an invite which easily allows you to shoot a note to people you’re connected with on Facebook. On a Facebook fan page, developed with the recruitment ad agency Euro RSCG Riley, players can discuss the game, provide feedback, and learn more about the company.

This effort started last Fall, when the Reckitt Benckiser PR and HR departments, as well as the CEO, realized just how little-known the company was, despite the familiarity of the company’s products. Work began on the game in March, and cost in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. It got help from a fellow named Drew Spencer, then at Euro RSCG Riley (and who’s now at Blackbridge), as well as the social media agency Nudge to build the game, with UbaGLU helping as a sort of interactive integrator. Among the metrics Reckitt Benckiser will use to measure success of the game will be whether job candidates become more aware of the company.

Reckitt Benckiser is advertising the game through banner ads, videos, and MPUs using Facebook, Adknowledge, LinkedIn, and Techlightenment. Interestingly, the Reckitt Benckiser home page (not its careers page) plays up its jobs far more than most company home pages, which often include a mere link to a careers site.

“Give me a job, give me security, give me a chance to survive. I’m just a poor soul in the unemployment line. My God I’m hardly alive.”

When Styx first sang that 32 years ago, the Netherlands went to the World Cup finals, Iran was killing 122 protesters, Afghanistan was in turmoil, unemployment was spiking in Cleveland, and a fleeing filmmaker was in the news — by the name of Roman Polanski.

Sound familiar? After decades of sophisticated, expensive corporate campaigns to tell employees about their missions and brands and purposes, old standbys like money and security still top employees’ wish lists.

Here’s what employees value most, according to a new Robert Half study of 1,453 working adults:

(1 is less important, 10 is most important)

Working for a stable company: 8.8

Having a strong sense of job security: 8.8

Work/life balance: 8.7

Working with people I enjoy: 8.6

Working with a manager I can respect and learn from: 8.6

Having a short commute: 7.5

Working with state-of-the-art technology: 7.1

Working for a socially responsible company: 7.1

Having a nice office space: 6.7

Employees were also asked what’s most important when evaluating a job offer (1 less important, 10 more)

Salary: 9.0

Benefits: 8.9

Company stability: 8.9

Opportunities for professional growth/advancement: 8.6

Company location: 8.4

Company leadership: 8.0

Company reputation/brand recognition: 7.8

In-house training programs: 7.2

Job title: 6.7

Diversity of company’s staff: 6.1

Tuition reimbursement: 6.1

Company’s charity/philanthropic efforts: 5.8

Hire My Friend to Work For Us.

Sorry if that sounds like a weird request, but I just couldn’t resist the verbal mashup of two, sort of new Facebook apps.

The apps address employment from opposite sides, and in that sense, they are sides of the same coin. Hire My Friend helps your Facebook friends spread the word about their job hunt. Work For Us lets employers post their jobs to their Facebook pages.

Now if only there was an app that matched the Work For Us jobs to the friends who want to be hired. Oh wait. There is. Jobvite Source does that for jobs, matching the opportunity to employees and friends and tracking these posts (Jobvites) as they get passed along.

Work For Us is different only in that it doesn’t do any matching or tracking. What it does, and does very well, is to post job openings to a company Facebook page, producing a job list that bears a striking resemblance to a bland job board post.

For that you’ll pay $9 a month for five job posts or a few hundred a month for unlimited posts. There’s a free version that lets you post one job at a time.

TechCrunch, which wrote about this last week, says the Work4Labs, the startup that built the app, has already got 2,000 companies to download the app.

It works this way: You sign-up either as the friend in need or the friend who helps out. Answer a few questions about the job seeker to create a mini-profile, provide a LinkedIn address, and connect it up to your Facebook page (or ask your friend to do so). It creates a status post that notifies your network.

It’s a clever idea, though it will be interesting to see if it gains much traction. I’m thinking there might one or two good friends for whom I might do this, but I sure wouldn’t want my Facebook wall to become a repository of job hunt requests. Of course, if other people take the same kind of care, then Hire My Friend as well as my friend in need benefit from this self-screening. In that way, it’s got the same sort of quality assurance going for it as a traditional employee referral program.

The stock market is worried. The Conference Board says a rise in its Employment Trends Index is a sign of loss of optimism. The CareerBuilder / USA Today survey says 41 percent of employers plan to hire in the coming months, which means 59 percent don’t.

Welcome to the second half of 2010.

From all indications, it promises to be just like the first half; uncertain recovery, tentative signs of a hiring pick-up; teases that job growth is accelerating.

Today’s Conference Board announcement was in line with the pattern set in the first half of the year. The Employment Trends Index rose .6, from 96.1 in May to 96.7 in June. It’s up almost 10 percent in a year.

Alas, the last two months have seen the ETI decelerate its rate of improvement, leading The Conference Board to suspect it means “that many employers are now concerned that the recovery is losing momentum.”

The Employment Trends Index is a sort of index of indices. It takes into account eight employment factors, including unemployment claims, job growth numbers from the Labor Department, and other data points. One of the latter is the response to a question about how hard jobs are to find from The Conference Board’s own Consumer Confidence Survey.

The number of consumers saying jobs were hard to find increased — one of the factors in the slowing of the ETI.

Whether that is objectively true doesn’t matter, since consumer confidence is a matter of perception. And perception is reality. Friday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report suggests that perception has enough of a grounding in reality that it lowered the unemployment rate to 9.5 percent.

That should be good news, but the BLS numbers suggest it was caused by the hundreds of thousands of Americans who simply gave up looking for work. Even the news that 83,000 private sector jobs were created in June was offset by the loss of  200,000+ temporary census jobs.

In case you left early for the long weekend, the stock markets reacted predictably to the news, closing out a losing week in which it lost 4.5 percent.

After a weekend of rest, traders returned to work this morning ready for some bargain shopping. Within minutes of the opening, the Dow was up, rising 172 points before sliding back. The day at least ended on a positive note, up about 57 points.

I would say it has been like this since the beginning of the year, but the reality is that the stock market, which hit a high of 11,205 in April, is off 13.6 percent since.

For recruiters, especially corporate recruiters, a declining stock market makes it more likely that even the tepid hiring that has been underway may become even slower.

The CareerBuilder / USA Today survey of 2,500 hiring managers and HR professionals says hiring in the second half of the year will mirror the first. It will be slow, but jobs will be added. Twenty-one percent of employers plan on hiring permanent, full-time employees in the current quarter. However, 65 percent expect no change in the quarter.

“Employers began recruiting at a moderate but consistent pace in the first half of 2010 as confidence levels inched upward amidst a better global financial picture,” said Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder. “The economic recovery has broadened, but employers remain guarded.  The survey indicates that we’ll see sustainable new job growth through the remainder of the year, but it will be absent of any dramatic shifts.”

The U.S. economy added 83,000 private sector jobs in June, on the low end of what economists had been expecting, but evidence, nonetheless, that payrolls are continuing to grow.

The news was tempered by the loss of 225,000 temporary census jobs, and continuing cuts to state and local government payrolls, which resulted in a net loss of 125,000 jobs in June.

Even the decline in the unemployment rate to 9.5 percent from May’s 9.7 percent was tempered. Ordinarily good news, much of the reason for the decline appears to come from the fact that some of the unemployed had simply given up looking for work. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which released the June employment report this morning, counts only people actively seeking in the previous four weeks as being unemployed.

Against the context of other economic news, including Thursday’s higher-than-expected numbers for first time unemployment claims, the BLS report shows an economy struggling to gain traction.

Since the beginning of the year, the private sector has added almost 600,000 jobs. To reduce the national unemployment rate by any significant amount, economists say 150,000 jobs a month will need to be created. That pace of hiring hasn’t been seen since the fall of 2007.

Still, there were indications that even though employers weren’t willing to commit, they continued to date, hiring another 21,000 temporary workers. It’s a sign that business is improving, at least enough to bring in additional workers.

On the other hand, the workweek decreased slightly for all private, non-farm workers by .1 hours to 34.1 hours. The manufacturing workweek declined by .5 hours to 40 hours even. It had risen in May by .4 hours.  Hourly pay for private non-farm workers decreased by two cents to $22.53. It had been rising in all but one of the last 12 months.

The Dow Jones and other stock market indices seemed to have expected the news. Prices were flat to slightly up in the first minutes after trading began this morning.