We’re not out of the woods yet, but Americans got some good news this morning regarding employment.

The BLS reported that nonfarm payroll employment rose by 162,000 in March, and the unemployment rate was 9.7 percent for the third month in a row. This welcome news comes on the heels of CareerBuilder’s latest job forecast that reported 23 percent of employers increased full-time, permanent staff in the first quarter of this year and 23 percent of employers intend to add full-time, permanent employees in the second quarter of 2010.

While skeptics will be quick to show the jump is primarily due to temporary Census hiring, which accounted for about 30 percent of the jump, approximately 70 percent was true job growth.

Many industry sectors added jobs in March. Here’s how they fared:

• Temporary help services: 40,200
• Health care: 27,000
• Leisure and hospitality: 22,000
• Manufacturing: 17,000
• Construction: 15,000
• Retail: 14,900
• Education: 8,400
• Mining: 8,000
• Transportation and warehousing: 7,800

As mentioned before, there was ramped up hiring for Census 2010 which was reflected in the 48,000 rise in Federal government employment. Those industries that saw declines included financial activities (-21,000) and information (-12,000).

Unfortunately, of the 15 million unemployed Americans, 6.5 million had been jobless for 27 weeks or more. These long-term unemployed made up 44.1 percent of all unemployed persons, a record high.

To learn more about this month’s job numbers and what trends job seekers should be paying close attention to, watch this clip of CareerBuilder’s CEO Matt Ferguson on this morning’s Squawk Box on CNBC:

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