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.