Pasadena, CA -- (SBWire) -- 03/03/2011 -- The initial jobless claims went up again for the week ending February 12. Before this week, jobless claims had fallen for two straight weeks.

The Labor Department said that around 410,000 jobless claims were filed, an increase of 25,000 claims from the previous week’s figures of 385,000. Also, according to the Labor Department, the unemployment rate for January was 9.0 percent. The latest claims are well below the March 2009 high of 651,000 initial jobless claims, but economists say that in a healthy economy the number of initial jobless claims should be below 400,000.

The number of Americans receiving benefits under normal state programs for the unemployed rose to 3.91 million for the week ending February 5. But the number of people receiving emergency unemployment benefits dropped by around 127,000 to 3.63 million as of January 29. The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits stood at 9.1 million. This figure includes both federal and state unemployment benefits.

Although the job market remains tight in most parts of the country, there are thousands of openings which are not advertised in newspapers and other traditional sources of job hunting. These are opportunities that unemployed people often overlook says A. Harrison Barnes, CEO of EmploymentCrossing.

EmploymentCrossing, a job aggregator website, has been able to find over 743,000 jobs in the last seven days. Most of the jobs are in the retail and the hospitality industry, followed by healthcare and information technology sectors.