Looked at one way, a raft of recent data about what employees want suggests they are hopelessly schizophrenic.

But it’s also possible to read the research as showing workers to be entirely sane—and asking for things employers either can’t fathom or don’t want to know about.

Let’s look at job security first. According to a recent Watson Wyatt Worldwide survey, job security was cited as a reason for joining an organization by 37 percent of top-performing employees, making it the second-highest-ranking reason. But research from the Corporate Executive Board indicates that once workers take a spot in a firm, organizational stability is not one of the most important drivers of employee engagement.

Indeed, employees say they want excitement. In a Salary.com study published this year, 35 percent of employees named “boredom” as a significant factor in an employee’s decision to look for a new job, enough to make it the fourth-highest factor. But Corporate Executive Board data show that employee engagement is deflated by disruptive change such as massive restructuring, and even more so by the anticipation of such change.

Employees also say they want a caring, encouraging employer. In a recent Randstad study, 80 percent of American employees said their ideal employer “cares about their employees as much as their customers,” putting that response in a tie for first place. And 75 percent of employees said that “recognizing and rewarding employee successes” was an important leadership practice.

That ranked as employees’ top answer for leadership practices. But right behind it was a nod to standards: 74 percent of employees said that “holding people accountable for their behavior” was an important leadership practice.

Given these responses, do employees collectively suffer from multiple personality disorder? I think not. Taken as a whole, what workers are getting at is a common-sense desire for a baseline of economic stability as well as a supportive yet challenging work environment.

These goals can be better understood in the context of economic and cultural trends going back 30 years. Economic risk has shifted to workers and families from business and government since the 1980s. Layoffs, pay cuts and roller coaster retirement accounts during the past year have added to the financial anxiety.

What’s more, the rise of social networking has highlighted the role others play in enabling individual success. And it’s ever clearer that a degree of predictability promotes happiness. 

Employers don’t seem to get this picture of what workers want. In the Salary.com study, only 20 percent of employers thought boredom was a significant factor in an employee’s decision to look elsewhere—a difference of 15 percentage points from employees. And in the Watson Wyatt report, job security didn’t turn up among the top five reasons employers gave for why employees join a firm.

I’d bet the disconnect is partly ideological. Many company execs adhere to a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality, downplaying the role of the group or the need for stability. It also may be that companies consciously want to avoid opening the door to an earlier era where their flexibility to hire and fire was limited.

In any event, some companies seem to be sticking their heads in the sand about security. Adam Zuckerman, a consultant with advisory firm Towers Perrin, says a lot of companies don’t ask directly about security when surveying employees. Another business consultant involved with engagement issues, Laurie Bassi, says she has talked with company leaders who didn’t want to ask their employees about job security.

“This is kind of like going to the doctor and saying, ‘I don’t want you to do that cancer test, because I just don’t want to know,’ ” Bassi says.

The attitude of denial suggests to me that business leaders, more so than workers, may need a head examination. In a world where engaged employees are increasingly critical to business success, a wise company will want to think clearly about how to win over its workforce.

While U.S. leaders debate whether and how to do more to fight unemployment, China’s government has taken a novel approach.

The country’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security recently signed a deal with recruiting software provider MrTed to help match job seekers with jobs.

Under the contract, thousands of recruiters in cities and districts across China will use London-based MrTed’s software to better connect employers with workers in the private sector.

“For the employer, it’s a recruiting service,” says Jerome Ternynck, CEO and co-founder of MrTed. “For the employee, it’s a placement service.”

Recruiting software products such as MrTed’s TalentLink do such things as manage job requisitions, track résumés and rank applicants against job openings.

Ternynck says the project in China is focused on “talent,” which refers to a class of workers distinct from farmers and civil servants. The goal behind the software effort is to speed up the time it takes to return “talents” to employment from an average of four months to three months, Ternynck says.

Although exact terms of the contract weren’t disclosed, Ternynck says it will bring MrTed annual revenue in the seven figures in U.S. dollars. The deal amounts to a feather in the cap for MrTed. Ternynck’s firm prides itself on its global capabilities, and calls the Chinese effort the largest-ever implementation of talent acquisition software provided over the Internet.

According to U.S. government estimates, China’s urban unemployment rate was 4 percent in 2008. But if the country’s large population of migrant workers is included, the total unemployment rate may have been as high as 9 percent.

Labor unrest in China can get ugly, and potentially represents a threat to the authoritarian government. In this light, the deal with MrTed is a forward-thinking move. I’m also not aware of many other deals by government agencies along these lines. Ternynck says MrTed was tapped for a similar pilot project in France not long ago, and showed decent results. But the effort died partly because of bureaucratic infighting, he says.

If so, it wouldn’t be the first time promising technology for boosting employment was unplugged for suspect reasons. In 2007, the Bush administration killed public job board America’s Job Bank without a thorough explanation. The absence of the site hamstrung an effort at the beginning of the recession to help Americans get back to work.

At this point, I’m not sure whether restoring America’s Job Bank is the best use of government resources to battle unemployment, which hit 9.8 percent in September. But it’s pretty clear U.S. political leaders ought to do more to jump-start employment, whether through an additional stimulus package, a tax credit for companies that create new jobs or investment in new infrastructure projects.

Not only will more jobs restore a sense of economic stability and peace of mind to millions of out-of-work Americans, but it will also help make the nascent recovery more sustainable.

China is taking action to combat unemployment. America can too.