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.

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.”

Thomas Cooley, New York University:

“We’re looking at a recession that is probably going to last well into 2009. I think it will be worse than the recessions of 1991 and 2001. How much worse, I don’t think anybody knows at this stage. There are lots of reasons to be concerned it could be as bad as the recession of the early 1980s.

We are going to be going through tough times for HR departments. They are more likely to be shedding employees, rather than acquiring new ones. In the last recession, companies shed workers too quickly and found it difficult and costly to rebuild their workforces. So there’s reason to be a little bit cautious.”

David Smith, Pepperdine University:

“2009 is going to bring higher unemployment, which means from the standpoint of recruiting leaders more of a buyer’s market when it comes to labor. Take sufficient time to make sure you get the right candidates for positions. You can afford to be a little more choosey, picky, at this point. Be as smart as you can so you can in retaining your best and most product employees — those individuals whose intellectual capital is the key to the company’s success.”

James Bennett, George Mason University:

“We’re in for three-to-five years of rocky times, probably the worst economic times since WWII.

Nurses are still going to be hard to find. Truck drivers, not so much. Truck drivers can fairly easily be trained — three months, six months — that’s not a big deal. But nurses – there’s a lot of hands-on instruction that can only be done in small groups. It’s very expensive training.

Being a physician is a pretty good idea. Health care is a pretty good idea. Being a tenured college professor is a pretty good idea.”

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.”

Bradley-Morris is a placement and staffing firm in Georgia, which itself is 60 percent staffed by former military. It also conducts job fairs, operates a veteran-focused job board and publishes a careers newspaper that is distributed on bases throughout the U.S. and elsewhere.

Veterans make great hires, says Scott, because the military emphasizes leadership training, instills a strong work ethic, places a value on teamwork and accomplishment and skills training is about as up-to-date as it gets. Plus, he adds, with passive candidates increasingly reluctant to leave secure jobs or unable to relocate because of the housing market, “This is an excellent opportunity to pursue military.”

The hottest job opportunities for veterans, says Scott, are in manufacturing and energy.

The CareerBuilder survey found employers agreeing with Scott’s list of qualities. Almost three-quarters of the employers surveyed said veterans brought a strong sense of teamwork and a disciplined approach to the workplace.

So why is it that some veterans are reporting difficulty in finding work? BMI executives believe there is a communications gap, Scott says, explaining that there are all sorts of training, placement and other free services specifically for ex-military. But, he says, “There is no one place for a vet to go to find out about all the free services.”

SimplyHired (profile; site), the vertical search job board, has added a tool specifically to make it easier for veterans to find employers looking to hire ex-military. Announcing the search tool, SimplyHired described it as a way of filtering the “results from DirectEmployers Association’s list of over 400 federal contractors and “vet-friendly” employers, who take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment veterans in accordance with Affirmative Action Programs, the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), and the Jobs for Veterans Act.”

The U.S. Department of Labor has also organized 120 veterans job fairs to be held in 31 states this month as part of the HireVetsFirst initiative. Find the list here.

CareerBuilder HR vice president Rosemary Haefner, commenting on the findings of the survey, said, “20 percent of employers said that they will be actively recruiting veterans over the next 12 months.

“Employers value the diverse skill set that veterans can bring to their workforce and how these workers can have a positive impact on their bottom lines.”

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.”

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.”

During tough times in the past, when companies started laying off, among the first to go were the recruiters. “Companies thought recruiters were nice to have, but they axed them right away,” Eskenazi told us. Now, he says, “I have not seen a recruiter get fired first.”

What’s different is that employers have more of a challenge hiring workers. Even while some workers are laid off, there are always some positions that have to be filled. These are the jobs that generate revenue or are otherwise critical to keeping the company operating.

“It’s a much harder thing to do today to get people to quit their job and move,” says Eskenazi. “Recruiters are professionals at doing that, and employers know they need them.”

He cites the case of one large bank whose recruiting leader told him at a recent STARoundtable meeting that the bank needs good recruiters more than ever now because of the negative publicity affecting the industry and her bank in particular.

Terry Terhark, CEO of The RightThing (profile; site), echoed those comments. “I’d caution all companies not to wholesale reduce their recruiting,” he warns, even though recruiter layoffs will mean more more work for The RightThing, one of the leading RPO firms in the U.S. In fact, he says, that is already happening.

“We have more RFPs in house than ever,” he told us, referring to the volume of inquiries from companies that want The RightThing to take over part or all of their recruiting operation. Terhark said the company had its best third quarter ever and is on track to have an even better fourth quarter. This is coming despite a slowdown in the hiring by the company’s clients.

“Our clients are like all the other companies out there,” Terkark explains. “We’ve seen a flatness to a decline (in hiring). Some are down 10, 20 percent in their hiring.”

On the other hand, pharmaceuticals and technology firms are hiring, he says, but convincing talent to change jobs is getting harder. “We’ve seen an increase in the reject rates,” Terhark says, adding, “In a tough economy, people tend to hunker down and stay in their jobs if they are stable.”

Although Terhark says AIRS, which The RightThing acquired earlier this year, “has performed exceptionally,” and demand for the AIRS software hasn’t slowed, other vendors haven’t been so lucky. Taleo (profile; site), which beat Wall Street’s quarterly earnings expectations this week said it expected lower revenue for the 4th quarter.

Kenexa (profile; site), which competes with Taleo in the human capital technology area, reported that its  third-quarter profit dropped by 23 percent over the third-quarter in 2007 this week then saw its stock price plummet to 52 week lows. It reduced its earnings expectations for the fourth-quarter.

Rick Fletcher, founder and president of consulting firm HRchitect (profile; site), speaking with us two weeks ago, predicted that the technology vendors were in for some tough times in the coming months. “We’re going through a contraction,” Fletcher told us, pointing to the acquisition of Vurv by Taleo and other deals.

“The smaller vendors, those that aren’t as well capitalized, are going to have the most trouble,” he says, “But there’s enough pain to go around.”

His counsel for recruiters and HR professionals is to talk regularly with their vendors and look at the financials of the publicly held companies. The private companies, he says, should provide numbers as well, since most clients sign a non-disclosure agreement. “Ask for them,” he suggests. If the company drags its heels or doesn’t provide complete numbers, consider it a warning sign.

He also recommends that every HR department document how it uses the technology products it has, especially noting customization and configuration. And that HR participate in the company’s IT strategy committee, or push to start one. The purpose, he says, is to share vendor concerns with IT, develop a backup plan in case the worst happens and also help other departments and IT understand that HRIS is part of the overall business strategy of the company.

HRchitect is offering a series of webinars to help HR departments assess vendors generally and a series specifically for Vurv customers who have to make decisions about replacing their systems. To register for the Vurv customer series go here. Here’s where you’ll find more information on the entire webinar series. ERE also has an archived webinar on talent acquisition systems.

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.

There is renewed economic clatter with unemployment up by 0.2 to 5.7%, like there was a couple of months ago when it rose from 5 to 5.5%. We know the real number is higher, not counting folks whose benefits ran out before then found a job (an estimated + 4 million), which makes the true figure closer around 8%.

Betcha didn’t know that government stats only count those who are currently collecting unemployment and looking – a reported 1.6 million last month. 570,000 more, forced into part time work against their will, aren’t counted.

For all these shortcomings, you could at least use the 5.7% as an indication, until recent months. The entire rise from 5% can be attributed to the extension of unemployment benefits by three months, earlier this year. Had this not happened, the number we have learned to watch and love would be still 5% or less, as folks who used to be dropped off the rolls after six months are still counted.

Clarification might be found in lost jobs – 85,000 a month in Q1 vs. a recessionary 180,000 rate in 2001; 59,000 during Q2, and only 51,000 jobs lost in July, which was the 1st month in eight previous numbers weren’t revised downward. So the economy, which grew at a 1.9% rate in Q2 (0.5% of that $78 billion in stimilus checks thru June) vs 1% in Q1, proved amazingly resilient to $4.50 gas, $5 diesel, the credit implosion, and housing bubble.

If the plunge in oil prices continues, coupled with a weak dollar and the surge in bargain repoed home buying, the employment picture should continue to show some signs of hope.

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.”

In developing the ETI, The Conference Board states that they plotted back to 1973, and the index accurately signaled every rise and fall in employment over the last 35 years. On average, it leads employment by six-to-nine months at peaks and by zero-to-three months at troughs.

If recruiters have the data and the resources, they can compare their company’s historical experience to the index to see how employee longevity, turnover, and wages have been impacted by the trends and then use the information to forecast similar rises and falls in the future.

Wheeler suggests that talent acquisition leaders review macro labor market data once or twice each quarter to anticipate changes and then integrate the information into the long-term strategic planning process.

The review may also be helpful in gauging the mindset of candidates and then adjusting your company’s build versus buy recruiting strategy.

“When the index is trending downward, it may be very hard to lure passive candidates, and so expenses geared toward executing a buy strategy may not deliver a return and time-to-fill may increase,” says Mitzi Adwell, talent management practice leader for The Newman Group. “Recruiters can anticipate the market and adjust their talent acquisition strategies by watching the trends.”

The components of the ETI:

• Percentage of respondents who say they find “jobs hard to get” (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey)
• Initial claims for unemployment insurance (U.S. Department of Labor)
• Percentage of firms with one or more jobs open (National Federation of Independent Business)
• Number of employees hired by the temporary-help industry (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• Part-time workers for economic reasons (BLS)
• Job openings (BLS)
• Industrial production (Federal Reserve)
• Real manufacturing and trade sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis)

The Conference Board will publish the ETI monthly at 10 am ET on the Monday that follows each Friday’s release of the BLS situation report. A release schedule is available online.