The CareerCast.com/ JobSerf Employment Index, which measures managerial recruitment activity across the United States, found that the number of online job openings in July for C-level, VP, Director and Managerial candidates improved for the third month in a row with the largest monthly gain since January 2008.

Job listings in July were up 17.8 points, following a rise of 3.8 points in June and 15.2 points in May. The number of executive and management-level job openings posted online had an index value of 78.2 in July, 60.4 in June 2009, 56.6 in May 2009, and 41.4 in April 2009. Although unemployment may continue to rise in the short-term, white-collar candidates are seeing more opportunities than since the beginning of the downturn last fall.

Job listings for all levels of management improved this month, with manager and director-level jobs rising approximately 20 points. VP-level jobs rose 14 points and C-level rose 7 points.

Washington D.C. leads the top metropolitan areas in online job postings with one and a half times as many job listings as second-ranked Boston. Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco round out the top five with the highest number of managerial online job listings per capita.

Regionally, the West had the strongest gains, moving from 55.9 to 75 points (19.1 point gain), although it still lags behind the Northeast at 87.5 (18.9 point gain), the Southwest at 88.1 (18.7 point gain), and Southeast at 80.3 (15.9 point gain), while the Midwest at 72.4 (11.5 point gain) is still losing ground in comparison.

"While all regions saw a rise in hiring, cities with the lowest hiring levels are concentrated in the Midwest, Southwest and Florida," says Jay Martin, JobSerf's chairman. "Although the Index is still 22 points lower than it was a year ago, the gap is slowly closing. We are encouraged at both the direction and magnitude of July's gain. It shows the positive recovery, which started in the late spring, is still continuing."

The CareerCast.com/JobSerf Employment Index is an exclusive barometer showing the change in managerial job openings posted online nationally. The Index reveals the differences in job listings by month, and offers valuable trends and forecasts using proprietary employment data gathered by a team of researchers.