SourceCon is unique. It brings together the best minds in the sourcing profession to focus on minute intricacies of the art like no other event in existence.

I was at the first SourceCon, and remember being impressed by the vibe. There was an excitement in the air of a community coming together face-to-face for the first time. Several people came up to me unsolicited and told me how amazing it felt to finally be in a place where there were other sourcers “just like me.”

Since the current recession began, there has been talk of the death of sourcing. I disagree, and now ERE is putting its money where its mouth is.

So what does this mean?

For sourcers, this means that SourceCon is back, plain and simple! I and the ERE team respect the grassroots nature of the Sourcing community, and as we grow the event, we will do it in a way that respects the distinct (and quirky) ethos of the community.

For Leslie, SourceCon’s Founder, this is the result of years of her hard work building SourceCon into an amazing event. I and the ERE team will do our best to run the event as she has done, and hope to have her continued involvement for a long, long time.

As for us, SourceCon represents what ERE is all about — extending deeper into the talent acquisition community with another event that helps us to educate the profession.

We’ll be announcing the dates for the next SourceCon shortly, but if you can’t wait for your SourceCon goodness, check out The Source newsletter!

I have a second email from an even more prominent HR blogger in my inbox from late July, offering “guaranteed positive posts and tweets” in return for ERE covering all or part of their travel costs.

Why do these emails bother me? They show a willingness on the part of their authors to write their “thoughts” publicly, while never disclosing that those thoughts were not genuine, but contingent on favors.

I don’t think that either blogger thought of those emails in this way, but they were, in short, proposals for payola. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. And these are not extraordinary — they are just the two of the more bold tit-for-tats I’ve received.

Workforce Online recently published a piece on transparency in the HR Blogosphere. Collectively, the HR bloggers’ reaction ranged from outrage to dismissal. Nobody likes to be called out in public.

But as someone intimately familiar with many (but not all) of the players, I’ve long been troubled my many of the same things that are brought up in the Workforce piece. And so far, I’ve seen a lot of indignation and questioning of motives about the article (Old media: scared, out of line, link-baiting.  Bloggers: Great guys, opinionated, keeping it real.) but nobody seems to be claiming that any of the points and examples of undisclosed conflicts of interest in the article were incorrect.

I think that is a disservice, because even if HR bloggers disagree with the assertion that the level of disclosure they’re currently providing about their conflicts of interest is woefully inadequate, it’s worth considering the issues raised in the article and the level of disclosure that they provide.

It’s not wrong for bloggers to make money from their hard work. But deception about the motives behind a post — even by omission — can destroy all of that in a heartbeat. (Anyone else remember the Pay Per Post scandal?)

HR bloggers: I love you. Please don’t let the Sturm und Drang over the Workforce article keep you from giving this issue a cold, sober look.

One of our goals with the new community is to reach out to the entire recruiting profession to participate in our conversation, not just those who visit the website each day. (Don’t worry — we’ll always love you best!) To that end, we’ve opened up the conversations on ERE.net in a couple of new ways.

Email

We received a lot of pushback from the community about our decision to do away with the email group discussion digests with the full text of each post in the group.  We originally did this because we were trying to cut down on the volume of emails that you receive from ERE.net, but doing away with it altogether was a mistake.

The team here has created a new email digest that I think will meet both goals. It has a personalized email with the full text of all the groups and discussions that you are following, and at the same time you’ll have fewer emails cluttering your in-box. In fact, it looks a lot like the digest that we had before we made the big change! Of course, if you prefer the new emails with just the synopsis, you can still get that.

To sign up for the new email digest, you need to click on the “manage” link at the top right of the ERE.net website (make sure you are logged in).

On your manage account page, just scroll down to the “Newsletter Subscription” section of the page, and check the box next to “ERE Discussion Digest.” After you check that box, you can choose to receive the “personalized” version (only messages from discussions you’re following or from groups you’re a member of) or the “all messages” version. Be sure to click the “change subscription settings” button when you are done!

Twitter

There are more recruiters every day who are active on both ERE.net and Twitter (and so am I), so I’m excited that we can now link those accounts and automatically let our Twitter followers know when we post to the ERE.net community!

To set this up, you must have a Twitter account! If you do, go to the ERE Community, click “Settings”, and then “Broadcast”.

Now check the box to enable the Twitter connection, save your changes, and finally click on the authorize link.

Here’s an example of how it looks – my status update on ERE about this post!

Give the new options a try, and let me know in the comments (or on Twitter!) what you think!

Our community has evolved as well, expanding to include over 50,000 recruiting professionals, and growing more every day. Today, I’m proud to announce the next step in that evolution of the ERE community — community.ere.net.

When you check out the new community site, you’ll recognize many of the same discussion groups and people that you have followed for years, but you’ll also see lots of new features.

Some of the features that I have been using the most are:

• The new activity feed. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring how to make this more visible on our home page, because it does a great job of showing just how much activity is happening in real time.
• Voting. Finding ways to separate the wheat from the chaff has always been one of the most challenging aspects of running a professional community like ERE.net, and the new voting system will let the community collectively decide which posts bubble to the top.
• Blogs. A select few have had blogs for a long time on ERE.net, but now every ERE member will be able to express themselves in their own personal space.  We will be featuring the best of the blog posts more prominently on the site.
• New discussion emails. We’re trying to cut down on the number of emails that you get from us, so we’ve consolidated our community emails into one community newsletter that will be easier to navigate and read.

Jim — who did a great job developing the site with Hunter — put together a video to introduce you to the features of the social network. Check it out, and then give the new features a try!

Jim, Hunter, & the rest of the ERE team will be spending the next couple of weeks responding to your feedback and making changes, so don’t be shy. Tell us what you think and how we can make this a better tool for you to share your ideas and connect with other recruiters!

They were debating the value of the cover letters vs. a more comprehensive personal branding effort built around social media.

So here is my take:

Charlie is right. Social media allows you to take control of your personal brand and highlight your strengths. You can show rich examples of your work. You can let people peek inside your head in a way that resumes and cover letters never have and never will.

This morning, Jessica Lee linked to Matthew Cadwallader, a senior at UMass-Amherst who is using his website and blog to showcase his obvious skills and passion for communications, A/V production and writing. Matthew’s got it going on. He could not possibly have communicated just how impressive he is with only a resume and cover letter.

Alison is right too. The vast majority of professionals are unwilling or unable to send the time and effort needed to maintain a presence as good as Matthew’s. To do it well is a job in and of itself, and if you are looking for a new job immediately, a cover letter can absolutely convey that you have spent the time to learn about the company to which you are applying. When I receive a cover letter that shows an understanding of what ERE is and the position that we are trying to fill, I definitely take note.

Long term vs. Short term & Farming vs. Hunting

To a large degree, the cover letter vs. social media debate is like discussing the merits of the hammer vs. the screwdriver. Different situations call for different tools, and often both are necessary.

The social media approach is a long-term marketing approach to career development where you make yourself professionally visible to the world. It gives you the opportunity to show off your work, drive, personal philosophy, and depth of knowledge.  More importantly, it lets you engage in conversations that would never materialize if you were not “out there.” You plant the seeds today, and over time you grow relationships that will bear fruit throughout your career. Everyone should do this, but in the real world, it will always be a minority (and Charlie, Matt, Jessica, and Alison are all examples) who do it well enough to truly stand out. Isn’t that what marketing is about?

The purpose of the cover letter, on the other hand, is to convince the reader it that you are the right person for that specific position at that specific company. You’re hunting, not farming, and the cover letter is a tool  to show that you have done your homework and have real interest. It’s transactional, which some look down on as short-sighted, but your goal is to find work ASAP, so that’s just fine.

It’s not an either/or proposition. There are so many people today who need a job now. And these people cannot afford to wait for the farming approach to bear fruit. If you are serious about managing your career you should start planting those seeds, but if you are hunting for a job today, you had also better do what you can to tailor your resume and cover letter to show your interest in the position.

Social media as a career management tool will definitely be a topic of conversation at the Social Recruiting Summit @ Google HQ. Follow @socrecruiting on Twitter for updates on the Summit as they become available!

LinkedIn is doing well in this recession.  According to Hoffman:

We’ve been profitable the last two years. Q4 was actually our highest revenue quarter ever.

Not surprisingly, recruiting is one of LinkedIn’s three primary revenue sources, along with subscription fees and advertising. In Hoffman’s words:

We have a software-as-a-service business primarily driven by recruiting. And as a surprise we are actually doing quite well at that currently. You’d think that with layoffs and everything else that that business was being hit. Currently, we are the disruptive low-cost provider of really good hiring services, and when you are hiring 50 people as opposed to 1,000 people we are still growing there…

I find that “disruptive, low-cost provider” comment to be especially telling. Many startups claims to be disruptive, but when you actually kick the tires, few truly are. If LinkedIn is growing its market share of dollars spent while just about every job board is shrinking, it sounds about right to me.

There’s a preview up at http://beta.community.ere.net/, and we’re looking for your feedback on how to make it better before we go live on the main ERE.net.

So what’s new? Here are some of the highlights:

• Easier to use. You will find it easier to post discussion messages, and you’ll be able to add links, pictures and HTML without jumping through hoops.
• Threaded Discussions. To make it easier to follow conversations in the longer threads, all the discussions are now threaded.
• Community voting. We’re testing a new voting system for determining which discussion messages are most valuable to readers.  The best content will be voted up to the top of threads by the community.
• Activity Feed. There is now a central activity feed for all activity on the ERE Network, so it will be easier to see where the action is!
  
• Blogs. Every person in the ERE Network now has a Blog! Blog posts will have more prominence within the community, and we are working on integrating the best posts into the main feed on our home page to highlight the best content created by ERE members.
• ERE Forum. We’re bringing back the ERE Forum — a single, central place to post messages where everyone can see them without joining the smaller, specialized, groups.
• Following. Everyone has their favorite contributors on the network, and we’ve made it easier for you to follow just the ERE Members that you want, so you can see their content anywhere on the Network! This will replace the notion of “friends”, which as several members pointed out does not have a lot of practical use.

Why are you still reading this? Go kick the tires over at the preview site, and don’t be afraid to post messages to test it, because messages posted on the preview site will not appear on the main ERE.net.

Let us know in the feedback thread what you would change about it before we go live – we’re listening!

I find it striking how the worst problems in employment seem to center around the local areas that support the industries that are the epicenters of this recession: the real estate bubble, automobile manufacturers, etc.

Lots of red…

“Talent Pipelines.”

“Talent Networks.”

All of these buzzwords describe the same thing — the idea of building a community of individuals whose skills you will need before there is an immediate opening for them. The idea is to strengthen the bonds between these people and the organization so that when the need arises, it’s a simple matter of picking up the phone.

In theory, of course.

In practice, I’ve seen too many software solutions aimed at creating these “communities” turn out to be little more than databases with candidate names and contact information. I’ve seen too many companies fall in love with the idea (which is a really good one), but not put in them time necessary to implement them in a way that realized the concept’s potential.

This Tuesday, I attended a NY Recruiting & HR Network Meetup and had the pleasure of hearing Linda Paul, the Director of Team Development at Meetup talk about her work.

As background, Meetup is a software company that enables group organizers to create and manage events.  It helps people organize more than 100,000 face-to-face events each month. Its site is simple to use, and with only 58 employees the company, has developed a passionate fan following.

With such a devoted base of users, it’s not a surprise that many people want to work at Meetup. In a classic example of eating its own dogfood, Linda has developed the Working@Meetup group in order to develop relationships with potential employees.

The group currently has 424 members. Each month Linda organizes a face-to-face Meetup with 25 new people from this group at the Meetup headquarters. Those attending the Meetups get the chance to talk to current employees, get wowed by their cool office space (which is just up the block from ERE’s not-quite-as-cool digs), and get a feel for the culture of the company.

Early in the program, Meetup was getting a lot of very excited and very unqualified people signing up for the events, so it adapted. The current process prequalifies people to make sure that they are local and have skills in areas that the company needs before they can join the group.

The candidate experience is a seamless interaction with the Meetup brand; they sign up via the company’s product; get to tour the office, and meet the team. The people at Meetup get the chance to evaluate a group of prospects, develop relationships with them before they are critically needed, and leave a great impression.

Meetup found a way to run their program without expensive software, and they also did not forget that there’s no replacement for good, old-fashioned human touch.

Its program is simple, but I think it’s a great example of a company that’s done things right.

I’d love to see other examples of organizations doing this well. If you know any, let me know in the comments!

This morning, Indeed released data that they are calling Industry Trends, which compare the current number of online job postings in the United States today with the same data from a year ago.  It’s no longer news that there’s fewer jobs out there, but even with that in mind, the numbers are grim.

On the job seeker side, Google searches for the keyword “jobs” had a seasonal dip in December, followed by a huge spike in the new year. At one point in January, they were up over 50% over the historical average, an indication of just how many people are now looking for work.

The graph on the bottom of the Google Trends data represents media coverage about jobs, which has been on the rise since mid-2008.

All of the data above is backward-looking — it tells us what has happened in the past. What does the future hold?

Intrade is a online market that is used to trade futures on anything from who will be the next justice to leave the Supreme Court to which continent will host the Olympics in 2016. It harnesses the wisdom of those crowds willing to put their money where their mouths are in order to collectively predict the future.

Here is the chart for the Intrade futures on whether or not the U.S. unemployment rate will be higher than 9% at the end of December 2009.

The market is now predicting a 60% chance that the unemployment rate will be over 9% by the end of the year, up from 7.6% today. At the beginning of this year, it was predicting a less than 20% chance — like the Google trends on job searches, it has spiked dramatically since.

Batten down the hatches.  It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

There’s no other way to put this — in spite of the semi-cheery headline (”Jobs May Rebound in 2010″) the forecast is unrelentingly negative for this year. The only nationwide pockets of short-term job growth are government and education, with no private sector industry showing job growth for the year.

Economics is notoriously inaccurate, but I think that every recruiter should check out this data for the their industry and geography and have a plan for if these numbers turn out to be true.

Happy Monday, everyone!

As an exercise, I wrote up a draft of what I believe ERE.net is all about — our raison d’être.  Here’s what I came up with:

ERE’s mission: To facilitate dialogue and learning about talent acquisition.

ERE’s values:

• Sharing & Freedom of Expression. We built ERE.net to make it easy for all talent acquisition professionals to share their knowledge and learn from their peers. We encourage you to speak your mind because diversity of opinion makes the conversation richer for all. We don’t agree with every opinion on ERE.net, and we don’t expect you to either.
• Debate & Civility. We believe that the best ideas are arrived at through the crucible of questioning and debate. In order for this dialogue to flourish, there must be an atmosphere of mutual respect and assumption of good faith on the part of all the participants. Comment on the content, not the contributor.
• Transparency. In any dialogue, we believe in personal responsibility and accountability. If we are not willing to put your true names and reputations behind a statement, we believe that it should not be said.

It’s only a draft for now, and I’m putting it out there for feedback from the ERE community. Are there big picture values that I’m not including?

If you have suggestions, let me hear them in the comments!

Principles of Open Space: Graphic by deb roby on Flickr (cc)

Our friends at Fistful of Talent just launched the pilot of their new FOTv show this morning.

There’s a ton of noise in the recruiting blogosphere these days, and Fistful is on a very short list of the blogs that have become my daily must-reads. Like everything they do, the pilot is fun and opinionated, and the production values set the bar high for everyone else in our industry who works with video.

I spoke with FOT Editor Kris Dunn today to learn more about the thinking behind the project and what we should expect in the future, and here’s what he told me:

• Kris is a big sports fan, and the format for the show was inspired by ESPN’s PTI.
• Moving forward, the plan is to produce the show weekly, and future shows will be much shorter — closer to five minutes in length than 20.
• While the pilot was shot with Kris, Jessica Lee, and Josh Letourneau, future shows will feature a revolving cast of FOT contributors.

FOTv – Show #1 from Fistful of Talent on Vimeo.

I spent most of it freaking out as I tried to connect to today’s webinar and listening to busy signals and dropped audio on my laptop’s speakers. The rest of the time I spent on hold waiting for technical support at GotoWebinar, the company whose technology we were hoping would power future ERE webinars.

We will not be using them again.

The virtual meeting room that we used was supposed to hold up to 1,000 people, and since we regularly get large groups of 500 or more on our calls this was important. This time, we hit 250 listeners on the call when the problems began.

GotoWebinar has no emergency line, and when I finally got through to them I was informed that they were “already investigating issues with that phone number.” When I asked to speak to a manager and said that it was urgent, I was asked for my number and told that I would get a call back. They did not ask for my name, and I am still waiting for the call.

My apologies to every person who was on the call and experienced the poor audio quality.

My apologies to those who could not even make it on to the call because they got busy signals when they dialed in.

Especially, my apologies to Jeremy and Dan who soldiered on through the webinar in spite of the technical issues — they behaved like the pros that they are and did not miss a beat.

Update: 1/29/09

Jeremy and Dan have been gracious enough to offer to repeat the webinar on Friday, February 6 at 2:00 PM EST. Register here.

Also make sure to check out the slides and a re-recording of the presentation below!

Progress: Graphic by rustybrick on Flickr (cc)

John and I were trading emails last week, and he asked me to elaborate on one of the comments that I made. I have been thinking about it ever since.

The recruiting profession is at a unique moment in time, and it’s not just because of the economy. We are at an inflection point where the tools and tactics that the vast majority of recruiters spend their budgets on is completely different from those being discussed and debated throughout the profession.

The last time I saw this was a decade ago. Even as early experimenters began using the Internet to bring talent into their organizations, the lion’s-share of corporate recruiting budgets still went to the newspapers, and it took the better part of the last 10 years for that to change.

That shift was driven by lower costs of publishing online, freedom from the space restrictions of a print ad, searchability, and the ease of access of online classifieds relative to their print predecessors. As a result, recruitment advertising shifted from one-way communication via print ‘broadcasting’ to doing the same thing online — the same model, but using the new medium.

Today we are seeing a shift from that online broadcasting model to a conversational model, one that is enabled by the social networks and Web 2.0 technologies.

There’s a relatively small group of very vocal (via social media, of course) experimenters out there right now who are testing an endless variety of Web 2.0 and social media tools based around the conversational model. Through trial and error, they are figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Most have very little to show at this point in terms of ROI, both because the tools are so new and because so much of their time and energy is necessarily wasted on those experiments that do not work.

These experimenters have an outsized impact on the thinking within the industry, and as their experiments bear fruit — generating hires for their organizations that demonstrably show the ROI of their efforts — they will drive more and more strategy going forward.

The companies that form the backbone of the online broadcasting model (job boards, job distributors, and the software companies that enable companies to manage their candidate flow) are already under siege by cost-cutting from their customers due to the difficult economic times. So far, I don’t believe that the early stages of this shift have had a large impact on the spending of their customers, and that makes it a particularly difficult time for them to adjust to a fundamental change like this one. But they have no choice but to evolve — the current plight of the newspapers illustrates what happens to those who are slow to realize when the old business models become obsolete.

Edvard Munch Google Logo: Graphic by rustybrick on Flickr (cc)

Google is arguably the most storied company of the new millennium, but even it is not immune to the global economic slowdown.

The company just announced via its official blog that it will be laying off 100 recruiters, a large slice of their recruiting team, which our own Dr. John Sullivan has called “one of the most innovative recruiting organizations on the planet.”

With the exception of cuts after its DoubleClick acquisition, these are the first staff layoffs ever for Google (although it has recently made deep cuts to contractors). It’s a logical move for an organization that sees less hiring in its future, but still feels jarring to me that recruiters were the first to go.

I’ve met several recruiters from the Google team over the years, and have found every one to be smart and capable. I hope they land on their feet.

No talking about Facebook: Photo by Alpha (CC)

On Wednesday, we created a Facebook fan page for ERE.net. It’s a fun little experiment, and we’ve put up some pictures, upcoming events, and a feed of our articles.

I’m not sure where we’re going to go with this yet, but it’s obvious that there is demand for more ERE on Facebook — it’s only been 48 hours and we’ve already got 100 fans!  One day I hope that it will be as big as (and a little less chaotic than) our ERE LinkedIn group.

If you want to show your support and connect with other ERE members on Facebook, take a minute and join us!

We’re already a week into 2009, and everyone else has already published their predictions for the year. In the spirit of better late then never, here are a few of mine:

1. 2009 will be a painful year for recruiters. It’s obvious, but how could I leave this off the list? We’re in a recession, and as employment numbers continue to fall it will get worse for recruiters before it gets better. When will the turnaround come? Hiring typically lags behind corporate profits, so don’t expect recruiting activity to pick up again until after companies’ profits start rising again.
2. There will be less of us. As was pointed out to me today on the Recruiting Animal Show, I’m an old salt in the recruiting world at the not-so-tender age of 34. The last time I saw our profession contract was in the recession of 2001, when we simply had too many recruiters trying to fill too few open positions and thousands of professionals moved on to greener pastures. The strong and the lucky will once again survive, and those who are not at the top of their games will move on. In the last recession, many went into real estate. This time it will be different.
3. Recruiting stocks will rebound. As an industry, the public companies whose businesses connect people with employment opportunities will rebound before the year is through, including Monster, Taleo, DICE Holdings, Kenexa, Manpower, and Spherion, barring any issues specific to the individual companies. If the economy is so scary, why predict a rebound? The stock market is a forward-looking discounting mechanism, and in the next few months I expect the worst expectations to be priced into the stocks of these companies, and for investors to begin to look forward to better results in the future. On the other hand, Workstream will finally be delisted.
4. Social Media will play an ever-increasing role in our personal and professional lives. Yeah, this is a safe one. There are still plenty of people whose lives have not been touched by Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others, but there are less every day. More and more, it’s where people, young and old, are communicating and managing relationships, and smart recruiters always fish where the fish are. Also, the pace of innovation in Social Media will not slow down any time soon. Why? Because even though venture capital money is drying up, it does not take much capital to build these things. (BTW, I’ve linked above to my profile on each of these social networks, so be my friend!)
5. Social media overload/backlash. With social media innovation continuing at a blistering pace, we are constantly being barraged with new, cool-sounding social tools and networks. There are only so many hours in the day, and we are forced to pick and choose the services that best meet our lifestyles and objectives. In the fight to stand out from the pack, implicit promises are being made about why every single service is the best. Inevitably, people are going to be disappointed with those that do not live up to expectations. The best will continue to grow, while the ones that do not stand out from the crowd will quietly go away.
6. Social networks will make finding a business model their top priority. They’ve proven that they can attract huge audiences, but here’s a pop quiz — which of the following social networks made money in the last year — YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter? Not a single one. And in this economy, not even Google, YouTube’s parent company, can afford to have a money-losing property. Finding a solid revenue source to sustain their torrential growth will be the goal of every major social network.
7. …and the medium-sized players won’t make it. The biggest networks have or will raise enough investment money to give them time to find workable revenue models. The truly tiny social networks will find their niches and targetted advertising dollars will follow. It’s the medium-sized services — the Facebook wannabes — that are going to fall by the wayside, being snapped up on the cheap by acquirors or simply going out of business.
8. Vendor shakeout. It’s not only the social networks that will see a shakeout. This year will be brutal on the vendors that serve our profession. Less hiring = less recruitment spending = less business. Layoffs, consolidation, and bankruptcies will be norm until things stabilize later in the year. The strongest, and those with the best relationships with their customers, will survive.
9. Recruiters will try to shift towards the most cost-effective tools. Not the cheapest, but the ones with the most return on investment. Of course, recruiting departments do a notoriously poor job at measuring their own results, so I expect to see a lot more focus on metrics and measurement. Expect plenty of debate over how to properly evaluate recruiter performance and industry metrics in the next few months.

Reading back over my list, I am struck by how almost every single prediction hinges on the state of the economy, and I guess that sounds right to me. I can think of nothing that will be an bigger influence on our professional lives in the coming year.

I know this all sounds gloomy, but it’s always darkest before the dawn. We’re already a year into this recession, and nothing lasts forever. When the smoke clears, we’ll be back in the growth part of the economic cycle — and they are always boom times in recruiting.

What do you think the new year will bring? Let’s hear it in the comments!

From her post:

Oh, what a month! The U.S. lost 533,000 jobs in November, the highest rate in 34 years (since 1974). This moves the nation’s unemployment rate to 6.7%; it was 6.5% in October.

According to fresh Labor Department data, economists had actually predicted a 6.8% unemployment rate for November — yet they only predicted that 320,000 jobs would be slashed.

Either way, this is bad news across the board: construction employment was down by 82,000 over the month; retail trade employment fell by 91,000 in November, with the largest job loss among automobile dealers (-24,000); and leisure and hospitality employment lost 76,000 jobs in November.

For me, the most disturbing part of the report was this:

Employment also declined throughout the service-providing
sector.  The largest loss (-101,000) was in employment services,
which includes temporary help agencies.  Employment services has
lost 495,000 jobs so far in 2008.

Employment is usually thought of as a lagging indicator of the economy — companies only slash jobs after they realize that sales are going south. But temporary help is more of an indicator of things to come, since it’s easier to adjust the number of temporary workers than it is to hire and lay off permanent employees.

Buckle up, folks. This isn’t over, and it’s going to continue to be a wild ride.