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The Bureau of Labor Statistics played spoil-sport this morning, raining on Wall Street’s parade with a jobs report that said unemployment has officially hit 8.5 percent following the loss in March of 663,000 jobs. The loss is the equivalent of putting every person in Baltimore out of work.

The news, though expected, sobered Wall Street, where the Dow flirted with the 8,000 mark, before giving up nearly 40 points at midday.

Since December 2007, when the recession officially began, 5.3 million jobs have been lost, with the BLS pointing out, “Half of the increase in both the number of unemployed and the unemployment rate occurred in the last 4 months.” The unemployment rate is now the highest it has been since 1983.

The BLS also adjusted its figures for January, adding 86,000 more lost jobs to the 655,000 it had previously reported.

As bad as the job losses are, they only tell part of the story. A better measure of the pain workers are feeling is found in other parts of the BLS “Employment Situation” where the government reports that 9 million Americans are working part-time for economic reasons, the so-called “involuntary part-time workers.” Their numbers swelled by 423,000 during March

These are people like Ken Karpman, who was featured on ABC’s 20/20. He’s the Florida hedge fund founder who turned to pizza delivery after finding himself without a job and no prospects after going bust.

Now add to that another 2.1 million workers labeled as “marginally attached.” The BLS defines these people as individuals who “wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.”

When these numbers are added to the 13.161 million officially unemployed it means 16 percent of the U.S. workforce is out of work or marginally employed.

“We’re closing in on 25 million people who are underemployed in one way or another,” Mark Zandi, founder and chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, told the New York Times “It highlights the incredible breadth of the downturn.”

The Federal Reserve and economists expect the big job losses to continue for at least the next few months, although they differ on how much worse things will get. The Fed predicts unemployment to top out at 8.8 percent; many economists think it will hit 10 percent.

For the next issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I asked business, econ, and finance professors what they expect out of the 2009 economy. They weren’t too cheery about the overall economy. But, when it came to the labor market, they suggested what recruiters already know: that the competition for top talent won’t let up much.

Here are some excerpts from that upcoming Journal.

From John Worrall, Rutgers University (pictured):

“My back-of-the-envelope guess is the unemployment rate will be North of 7% in 2009. Do I expect it to be at depression levels? No, I don’t.

I think HR managers will be deluding themselves if they think there will be less competition for talent simply because the unemployment rate is high. There’s a temptation to let people go during downturns — the stronger the downturn, the stronger the propensity for layoffs. They would be well-advised to consider carefully how much they have invested not just in key people but across the management spectrum. They’ve invested a ton in training formal and otherwise. That’s gone if they lose those people in a recession. They might not get them back.”

keep reading…

As America honors its military veterans, there’s news about the difficulties some vets have finding a job. A CareerBuilder (profile; site) survey says 1-in-6 vets report spending six months job hunting after leaving the service. About 1-in-10 say it took them a year to land a job.

Of the 750 vets surveyed for the report, about 20 percent said the biggest challenge to getting hired is the difficulty employers have in understanding just how transferable military skills are. Some of the vets also said they were at a disadvantage because they lacked a college degree, good interviewing skills, or there was just a lack of appropriate jobs in their area.

However, the news isn’t as bleak as the survey might imply. Bill Scott, with military recruitment specialist Bradley-Morris (profile; site), told us, “In our view, we still see this market as strong for veterans.” The U.S. economy has slowed hiring generally, acknowledges Scott, the firm’s VP of marketing and business development. But there are ”many opportunities (for veterans). There are employers who want to hire veterans.”

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Eleven Tril is the equivalent of 9.5 months of our Gross Domestic Product ($14.3 Tril a year), or 2 1/2 months of the world GDP! ($54 Tril). And while we are in the throws of a seemingly major recession, there will be a lot of jobs created.

Yes, $11 Tril has been or is planned to be injected mostly into the world banking system, starting with the Bear Stearns bailout in March, and more recently the $700 billion bailout bill passed by Congress. European central banks are contributing an estimated $2.8 Tril, and our own Federal Reserve some $5.6 Tril to offshore banks, mostly in “swaps” (our dollars for their currency) to unclog the world banking system which almost ground to a halt in early October. This will regenerate loaning ability, and letters and lines of credit. While Q4 might be the worst since 1980, this avalanche of money suggests a quick recovery starting in Q1 or Q2 of 2009.

A small percentage will go directly back to taxpayers in a second round of rebates, some to help 3 million subprime “victims” keep their homes. This has spawned a “cottage industry” of loan mitigation and modification services, sadly sometimes employing the same subprime brokers who orchestrated the crisis.

Eleven trillion is a lot of money, and hundreds of thousands of jobs will be created, a lot of them in banks, regulatory authorities to monitor disbursements, and loan modification companies. Yes, many are being laid off, but many will find new jobs created by this massive flow of money.

My suggestion to fellow recruiters looking for new business? “Follow the money.”

What’s worse than losing the presidential election? Winning it three days before the unemployment rate jumps to 6.5 percent after the U.S. economy loses another 240,000 jobs.

That bit of bad news was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirming fears that the economy is in a recession that is only deepening.

Yet for the recruiting industry, Jeremy Eskenazi, founding principal of Riviera Advisors (profile; site), says, “I think this whole recession is different than in the past.”

keep reading…

As we mentioned, Monster moved to the New York Stock Exchange today. A couple of videos from today feature Monster’s CEO Salvatore Iannuzzi. In one video, on CNBC, he says, “When everyone says things are bad, it must mean it’s pretty much the time when things will start to turn around. So I’m more optimistic than negative.”

Similarly, in a Bloomberg video, embedded below, he notes that “the slowdown has been going on for nine months or longer … and I’d like to think we’re somewhere in the middle” of it, headed toward the end.

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From October 15 to 24, 2008, Towers Perrin surveyed human resources executives and staff at more than 450 companies, asking what they’re likely to do now that the economy’s quite a bit less peppy than it was. Seventy-nine percent of the companies have more than $1 billion in annual revenues.

Jonathan R. Hefferlin, managing director at MRI Dana Point, a former radio commentator and a prescient observer of economic trends, gives his weekend take on Friday’s jobs report. keep reading…

Workforce planning uses a blend of hard data, human intelligence, and management intuition to accurately forecast upcoming recruiting needs. While the process is vital, a challenge to forecasting efficacy is general economic trends that don’t always jive with the labor market trends.

This can make projecting employee retirement or turnover rates and swings in the labor pool difficult. Tracking labor market trends to proactively predict changes and comparing your company’s historical experience to those changes can increase forecasting accuracy and recruitment strategy effectiveness.

A new Employment Trends Index (ETI) developed by The Conference Board synthesizes data from eight sources to predict swings in the labor market. Since the labor market usually contracts before the general economy and recovers earlier, the index is helpful in spotting changes and explaining variances to senior leadership.

“I think this type of data always helps talent acquisition leaders become more strategic and less tactical in their planning,” says Kevin Wheeler, president of Global Learning Resources.

“The individual index components may also point out potential sources of employees. For example, increases in the number of working temporary employees might point to hiring opportunities within the temp workforce.”

keep reading…