Until recently, I never saw a commercial that made me want to work for a bank. Between the mortgage crisis, the falling dollar, bank consolidations, and layoffs, the financial services field seems just as appealing to me as military service.

Upon learning that Bank of America had acquired Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, for the bargain basement price of $4 billion most people would have called their stock broker or sussed out the situation on Yahoo! Finance. Not me, I checked out B-of-A’s careers site.

So why is this banking giant tugging at our heartstrings? Here’s something you might not have considered in view of its layoffs: the giant bank is talent constrained.

You can tell Bank of America has invested a few bucks to create one of the better career sites in the financial services field. I recently interviewed the SVP in charge of the operation. You would think I was probing him about the New England Patriots’ playbook for all the answers he gave me.

“It is meant to connect the candidates to the culture,” reveals the possibly gregarious Thomas Becker, SVP of Talent Sourcing.

Becker wouldn’t tell me what adding video to their site had done, except to say it had done good things.  He was non-responsive about any of the following post-video changes:

• Site traffic (percentage increase)?
• Resumes (percentage increase)?
• Better candidates?

Despite Becker’s reluctance to discuss specifics of his careers site, here’s what I like about it:

• You’re greeted by a video-based avatar of an actual bank employee who introduces you to the site. Despite the otherworldliness of an avatar, it has a warm feel to it.
• The site has tools designed to push candidates who don’t know the bank very well to target specific lines of businesses and locations.
• The site features interview tips, including a recommended note back to the interviewer. This approach makes sense, particularly for Gen Y candidates who are unfamiliar with the process of  applying for corporate jobs.
• There’s a separate part of the site for college students – where the bank harvests many of its entry-level workers.
• The site includes global jobs not just those in Charlotte or San Francisco but also in Antwerp, Dublin, Madrid, and Milan.

Of course, the careers site is just one part of the bank’s initiatives to tap the global talent pool. “It is the preferred method,” allows Becker. To the bank’s credit they have managed to apply both scale and a bit of ‘culture’ to the job applicant’s experience. Other career sites will surely follow.

The bank, which operates in 82 countries, expects its “high-potential” people to work in at least several diverse cultural environments, according to the authors of a June Harvard Business Review article called “Make Your Company a Talent Factory.”  

A Talent Factory implements “rigorous talent processes that support strategic and cultural objectives.” The good news for global careerists is that these objectives won’t simply mirror your career goals they might pave the way for you. For instance at HSBC, a Brazilian manager is currently on loan to China and an Armenian citizen is in India, the article states.

The “World’s Local Bank,” as HSBC would like us to know it, has established company-wide processes for assessing and recruiting tomorrow’s leaders. The authors, Douglas Ready and Jay Conger, say HSBC has a system of talent pools to “track and manage the careers of high potential’s in their firm.”

The system of nurturing and developing talent is important, the authors argue, because global companies generally have an “insufficient pipeline of high-potential employees to fill strategic management roles.”

Still, no one can guarantee you a career-long boost in your market value just because you launched your career at a Talent Factory rather than at, say, a startup or even midsize company where you might take on broader responsibilities more quickly.

Procter & Gamble, for example, prefers to hire graduates and train them rather than import mid-career managers (nine out of 10 new hires). No one doubts that P&G managers are much sought after by other corporations, too.  Meanwhile, P&G is “building what amounts to a global-talent supply-chain management process, coordinated worldwide but managed locally.”

The metaphor of factory work doesn’t sound as appealing as it once was to previous generations, but when then the output of that factory is a boost your career development, the downside is a lot less apparent.

Labor and urban planning experts contend that transportation hubs such as the one UPS is investing US$1 billion to upgrade in Kentucky are critical to the rise of jobs – and community planning – in the 21^st Century. The topic was explored last summer in a fascinating Fast Company article called Rise of the Aerotropolis. 

The article makes the case that in the future some employers will assemble teams of workers at or near giant airports. These highly mobile workers will come together for short-term projects before migrating to other global hubs according to the ebb and flow of talent supply and demand.

UPS, a US$43 billion company, has 407,000 employees worldwide, placing it second to DHL among transportation companies and one of the world’s largest corporate employers.

Would you pick up and move in anticipation of future work in or near a global transportation hub? It’s clearly not for everyone, and countries certainly aren’t ready to tackle the concept of a mobile, global talent pool. Still, if any industry is going to blaze a new trail in moving talent where it’s needed, I look to transportation industry leaders to get there first. Think of UPS as an employment pace-setter for this decade and beyond.

How many companies produce reports that ask What Is A Company’s Role in Society? How many companies have an SVP of social responsibility? Well, the Gap needs this executive now more than ever.

Although the Gap’s credentials as a progressive employer are unassailable, the company has consistently failed to enforce its own policies with regard to managing its outsourced manufacturing suppliers around the globe. On Sunday the UK’s Observer broke the story about underage workers toiling in a New Delhi sweatshop run by one of the Gap’s outsourced manufacturers – a subcontractor. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the first time this has happened.

And there’s this: one month ago the Gap lost a laptop containing the personal data of 800,000 job applicants. What these sensitive records – some contained social security numbers – were doing on a laptop held by a third-party service provider was never explained.

So while how you treat your employees, the community and your environment is extremely important, let’s also not forget that relationships in orbit around the Gap – with job candidates and third-party contract workers – are also part of what defines a socially responsible employer.

For starters, the Gap needs to make a deeper commitment to how it manages third-party manufacturers – 90 people to watch 2,000 suppliers aren’t enough.

If I worked there, I might not quit but I would try to push them to change. If I were a customer, investor or business partner, I would apply whatever leverage is possible to impress the Gap about the need for serious reforms. If I were a job candidate I would pass, at least for now.

What about you?

On Sunday the UK’s Observer broke the story that in a New Delhi, India sweatshop factory run by an outsourced manufacturing firm, children as young as 10 were working up to 16 hours a day for no pay. One 10-year-old boy told reporters he was sold to the sweatshop company by his parents.

The Gap said that the “allegations are deeply upsetting.” Until recently, the Gap was well-regarded as a paragon of social responsibility, yet its mismanagement of global suppliers is a long-term problem that has damaged the firm’s reputation.

The company issued a parsing statement soon after the report: “The company noted that a very small portion of a particular order placed with one of its vendors was apparently subcontracted to an unauthorized subcontractor without the company’s knowledge or approval.” The company took pains to point out that it won’t sell the item of clothing that came from the sweatshop or work with that supplier again.

“In 2006, Gap Inc. ceased business with 23 factories due to code violations,” added Marka Hansen, president of Gap North America. “We have 90 people located around the world whose job is to ensure compliance with our Code of Vendor Conduct.”

Gap ownership is under the mistaken impression that spot check-ups to ensure compliance constitute a sufficient counter-measure. But that doesn’t cut it – there are more than 2,000 suppliers to check including 200 in India, according to the company. 

Clearly, the Gap needs someone on site at these locations who works for the company – not a third party. And if they can’t put someone on site, full-time, then they should terminate the relationship.  And clearly all subcontracting should be banned immediately.

Indefensibly, the Gap had similar problems in 2000, 2004, 2006 and now 2007.

Meanwhile, it was just one month ago that the news broke about the Gap’s lost laptop containing the personal information of 800,000 job applicants. That story died quickly but this one is less likely to go away so soon. Ironically, the Gap used to be one of the best companies to work for in America.

I’ll let you ponder that universal mystery while I move on to my next item. Wait, you seem a bit puzzled. Maybe you’re thinking the real mystery is why Google uses that type of question to screen candidates?

And Google recruiters are thinking: if they wonder why then they’re too linear thinking for us.

The nearly-departed Business 2.0 offers an amusing quiz to test how much you know about working at Google. The number of gourmet cafés there is a stumper.

Known for lavish spending on recruiting top talent, Google may reconsider its torrid pace of hires and aggressive bonus structures to reward strong contributors. In Google’s second quarter, just ended, the company hired 1,548 employees, boosting its total number of employees to 13,786.

The search engine leader apparently has solidified its recruitment operations. “We finally have a staffing division that can deliver at a rate that we need,” said Sergey Brin, a co-founder, at the company’s recent earnings conference, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

At stake is much more than three meals a day and laundry services among other perks for employees. If going out and recruiting world-class talent becomes too expensive for Google, then it will be forced to slow its hiring cycles to more manageable levels.

A change in Google’s hiring strategy could have a ripple effect in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Leading high-tech employers tend to conduct global talent hunts, recruiting at elite colleges and offering large internship programs designed to flag promising talent. Google, along with Microsoft, Yahoo!, Intel, and HP are considered among the best at hiring promising graduates. If they pull back it could negatively impact salaries paid to new hires and younger workers.

The announcement comes at a time when the U.S. Labor market is beginning to cool off. Last week the unemployment rate stepped up to 4.6 percent, the highest it has been in six months.

I had the opposite awakening one day in the back row of a college class packed with 700 freshmen students. Large universities aren’t well-suited for every type of student: what they offer in scale they also sacrifice in intimacy. The same dichotomy applies to choosing an employer.

Although bigger isn’t always better, in 2007 we developed My Global Career 500, the first directory of the world’s largest corporate employers, keeping in mind the virtues of working for large employers.

The trade offs are pretty clear: Large companies tend to be more structured, hierarchical and standardized in their operations than small or midsize firms. Large companies have more resources but also impose more bureaucracy than smaller ones. Generally it is more competitive to land a job at a proven company than at a younger enterprise (with the notable exception of hot high-tech firms).

Yet, once in, there are more opportunities to advance your career in large companies, here’s why:

• You’re more likely to receive better benefits such as training or profit sharing
• You have more options to relocate or try different jobs
• Large companies may have programs to advance diversity and multiculturalism
• Large enterprises are often global in scope and have more jobs with global responsibilities and interaction.

There are always exceptions and in the future we will spotlight employment in small and midsize companies that compete in the global economy – firms such as suppliers, service firms or distributors.

Gone are the days when working for a large employer guaranteed more job security than smaller firms could offer. Flux is the new career steady state. In the course of several months spent compiling My Global Career 500, we counted more than a dozen mergers and acquisitions, watched firms declare bankruptcy or announce severe losses, and experienced the churn of employers expanding or contracting headcount.

What can you do with this free resource? Go exploring! Apart from identifying leading employers in thirty-three countries and twenty-eight industries, each listing includes separate links to the firm’s corporate domain and job site. Altogether, My Global Career 500 companies employ more than 45 million people. Assuming a conservative 2% job vacancy rate, that gives you a rough idea of how many positions are available through these job site links.

Editor’s Note: We are no longer updating the My Global Career 500.