From Washington, where Michelle Obama announced yesterday that corporate leaders will hire 100,000 vets and military spouses in the next two years, to a Phoenix job fair today where Chase Bank is encouraging veterans to attend its job fair, the focus has been on addressing veteran hiring. Late Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed a veterans jobs bill.

Without a doubt, it is a worthy effort. But it is also one that faces challenges very much like those plaguing the civilian employment situation. The fact of the matter is that unemployed veterans look a whole lot like unemployed civilians: young and undereducated.

A second, smaller, but still substantial problem, is the one facing Reservists and the National Guard: multiple call-ups and the legal obligation to rehire them when they return from duty, makes many employers reluctant to hire them in the first place.

Testifying before Congress four years ago, Ted Daywalt, CEO and president of Vetjobs.com and himself a veteran, said, “The military knows that returning members of the National Guard and Reserve are having civilian re-employment problems.” He told a Congressional committee back then that VetJobs received several calls a month from veterans telling how they were asked about their interest in the Guard or the reserves. “While the question is illegal, it is occurring.”

“Most disturbing,” he added, “as this trend grows, returning National Guard and Reserve personnel — the very people who have been fighting to keep the United States free — will find it harder to obtain meaningful employment equal to their education and experience.”

Little has changed, Daywalt says, since his testimony to Congress. “If you are leaving the military today,” he told me just a few months ago, “companies want to hire you, until they find out you’ve joined the Reserves or are in the Guard.” The call-ups of Reservists and the National Guard may have abated, but employers who had to endure the loss of people in key positions they couldn’t fill or, if they did, had to figure out what to do when the employee returned from service, those employers are reluctant risk it again.

That may explain why the rate of unemployment for the Guard and Reservist veterans of this century’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was 14 percent last year. For all veterans, including the Guard and Reserves, the rate was 11.5 percent.

Under federal law, “returning service members are to be reemployed in the job that they would have attained had they not been absent for military service, with the same seniority, status and pay, as well as other rights and benefits determined by seniority.”

Officially the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act and known by its initials, USERRA, the law is supposed to protect returning vets from being penalized for their active duty service. But, Daywalt says, small and mid-sized employers in particular have found ways to game the system, out of necessity, he adds, not malice. One of the examples he offered in our discussion was of a company where the HR department laid off workers before the acutal call-up orders were issued, thus circumventing the USERRA rules.

According to the Department of Labor, in fiscal 2010, there were 34,612 calls to the customer service center run by the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve. ESGR is typically the first place employers and veterans turn for help with the requirements of USERRA. Of those contacts, 3,202 resulted in actual cases that required mediation.

When a formal complaint is filed by a veteran, an investigation is launched, which can, though rarely does, lead to a federal prosecution. In fiscal 2010, there were 1,438 new cases; 117 were referred to the Justice Department. Five resulted in DOJ complaints.

Just this month the Justice Department settled a case against Lowe’s, which fired a National Guardsman without cause within a year of his reemployment. Lowe’s paid $45,000 to the fired veteran.

Although, as Daywalt’s Congressional testimony points out, the Guard is also subject to being called out with some frequency for natural disasters, the reemployment and discrimination problems should diminish with the reduction of overseas forces. Less tractable is the high unemployment of young veterans.

Despite what seems to be a prevalent theme that veterans can’t find jobs, the reality is that it is veterans under 25 who are having the most problems finding work.

For all veterans, regardless of age, the unemployment rate last year was 8.7 percent. For the nation, it was 8.8 percent. (The percentages are not seasonally adjusted.) But as you drill down, as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics did in a special report on veterans, it becomes obvious quickly that veterans 18-24 are faring the worst. Last year, 20.9 percent of them were unemployed. Those 25-34 had an unemployment rate of 12.6 percent.

Not to minimize the problem, but young vets aren’t much worse off than the youth population generally, especially when you consider the participation rates: more vets are in the labor force than civilians their age. The BLS data for 2010 says the unemployment rate for all 16-24 year-olds was 18.4 percent. (The data for just the 18-24 year group isn’t available. However, the BLS rates for 18-19 year olds in 2010 was 24.2, and 15.5 percent for 20-24 year olds.)

Says the BLS, “In general, Gulf War-era II (Iraq and Afghanistan this century) veterans had unemployment rates that were not statistically different from those of non-veterans of the same gender and age group.” The BlS might also have added educational level to that statement.

Gulf War II vets older than 24 had an overall unemployment rate of 10.2 percent. Those with only a high school degree had a rate of 12.7 percent and about the same for those with some college. However, only 3.9 percent of vets with a college degree were unemployed.  Last month, 4.2 percent of the U.S. labor force with a college degree was unemployed. (The number of vets who didn’t graduate high school was too small to include.)

Thursday, the U.S. Senate approved a bill giving employers tax breaks for hiring disabled and unemployed veterans, and, of particular importance to younger veterans,  providing education and job training benefits.

“After this year’s show I am smiling from ear-to-ear,” he wrote, in praise of how vendors are integrating and leveraging assessment data for “analytics and business intelligence.”

I saw what he saw, but from a different perspective; a perspective that encompassed the sweep of the showroom floor, and in-depth discussions with many of the largest vendors, and casual conversations with several others.  What I sensed, more than saw, was that HR analytics are being understood as more than a measure of recruiting productivity.

Wanted Technologies is an example of how vendors are providing tools to access data and show its cross-departmental value.

The other day, Wanted added salary ranges to its AnalyticsT platform. AnalyticsT is a data product designed specifically for recruiters. It can tell you on a very granular level what the market supply is like for specific jobs; how many of those jobs are being advertised at that moment; what the trends been; and who is doing the hiring and how many positions they have.

Now with the addition of the salary range, recruiters can compare the going rate in their locale — or elsewhere — to what they’re offering.

A valuable tool for recruiters? Certainly. But it would be a shame if that intelligence stayed with HR. As Wanted’s President and CEO Bruce Murray said, “Talk about a seat at the table… They (HR professionals) can provide competitive intelligence on a company and get very detailed about it.”

Wanted was one of the companies on my not-to-miss list for HR Tech. Alas, I did miss connecting with the company there, so our conversation the other day was about much more than the new salary addition.

“These kinds of reports,” Murray was saying, “are the building blocks of HR providing business intelligence.”

Before going further, let me explain what Wanted’s AnalyticsT does. First, there’s the database of job listings going back years. The company’s roots are in collecting online sales information. Among other things, the company spidered listings of various types, cleaned it, sorted it, and sold leads to companies.

Its recruitment database goes back six years has 650 million job ads alone. From that job descriptions, titles, salaries, the company placing the ad, and other critical information has been extracted and indexed, making it possible for a recruiter in Milwaukee to learn how many game-level software developer jobs have been listed in the last several months, how the number has changed over time, what the pay is, and who’s doing the hiring.

There’s more than that available, but with just that much, HR can inform marketing and sales about what the competition is doing. Have salaries been going up? What’s the supply of potential candidates like? Critical information for managers of the development teams, which may need to adjust their pay scales or spend more time plumbing the career plans of their people with hard to find skills.

The AnalyticsT platform integrates with LinkedIn so recruiters can directly source candidates. The integration handles the supply side. Wanted’s job posting collection handles the demand side.

Other companies collect job listings, but Wanted is the only one to be vetted by The Conference Board, a private business organization that collects and distributes enormous amounts of economic information, including the widely quoted Consumer Confidence Index. It’s from Wanted that The Conference Board gets its data for the monthly Help Wanted OnLine Data Series.

It’s probably a totally meaningless analysis, but LinkedIn managed to get some PR mileage (and yes, I realize I’m playing right into that) out of scouring the 100 million profiles to find the most common CEO names.

If the research department had stopped there, it still would have warranted a water-cooler mention. But the team must have really had fun, since it dug into the various occupations and functional areas discovering such gems as:

• “Sales professionals tend to have short names, around four letters (like Chip, Todd, and Trey).”
• “Engineers tend to have longer names, around six letters (like Rajesh, Jeremy, and Andrew).”
• “U.S. professionals in the food and restaurant industry tend to have longer French names (like Thierry, Philippe and Laurent).”

I’ve got my own ideas on correlation. Salespeople, (at least the good ones, in my experience), focus on developing relationships and nurturing a friendly, casual, “guy or gal next door” persona. Chip, Todd, or Cathy just sound more best-friend-informal than Theodore or Cathleen.

And the French sounding name for a chef? Do we really need to discuss that one? (Although it would be more fun if just once I walked into a restaurant and Gordon you-know-who was there in the kitchen, dishing about the running of the place.)

Anyway, the remarkable PR people at LinkedIn turned to an onomatologist for an explanation of the name associations.

“Typically hypocorisms, the shorter form of a given name, are used in intimate situations as a nickname or a term of endearment,” said Dr. Frank Nuessel, the editor of NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics (a publication of the American Name Society) and a professor of classical and modern languages at the University of Louisville.

“It’s possible that sales professionals in the U.S. and male CEOs around the world use these shortened versions of their name as a way to be more approachable and accessible to potential clients. Interestingly enough, female CEOs appear to prefer to use their full names and not nicknames, which could signify that they want to be taken more seriously and want co-workers to think of them in a more professional light.”

So now, there you have it. An official, professorial explanation for the short form usage of names by salespeople and CEOs.

Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone, so did a little data digging myself. Not surprisingly, I found that many of the popular CEO names were also popular baby names. Deborah was popular between 1951 and 1956. Carolyn didn’t make the top five list, but Carol did.

John (of which Jack is a variant), was big for years, petering out in the early 70s. Ditto for Robert.

Considering that the average age of a CEO is around 56, we might just be seeing a correlation between popularity of baby names and the aging and career progression of the cohort.

So when the company needs engineers, not just any engineer will do.

“The positions we look to fill are very specialized, niche positions within the industry pertaining predominately to engineering-level, engineering-focus, that really have (a) very small number of qualified candidates with the years of experience we’re looking for,” says Navistar recruiter officer Keith Sanderson.

That quote comes straight from an informational video about how Navistar, working with CareerBuilder, used a new service from the job board company to source, qualify, recruit, and hire engineers for a new facility it was opening.

Watch the video and you get the impression you’re hearing about a successful job fair. And you are. But listen closely as CareerBuilder’s Mary Delaney explains the success. What you’ll discover is a new tool from CareerBuilder that brings a little more science to the hunting and sourcing of candidates.

The secret sauce that made the Navistar job fairs unique is CareerBuilder’s new Supply and Demand Portal. It provides even the most data-phobic recruiter a high degree of transparency into the demand for every category of worker and their numbers. It can even tell you how many in the last six months managed their CareerBuilder resume.

That’s how the locations for Navistar’s job fairs were picked. And that’s one reason staffing companies and large employers are finding the Portal a useful addition to their sourcing toolbox.

On the video, you’ll hear Sanderson admit to being skeptical of what the job fair would bring in. But, he says, “After the first day, I really came away very impressed.”

After seeing a demo this morning of what this service can do — and playing around with it on my own — I agree with Sanderson. I am impressed. About the only unremarkable thing is the name, which hardly does justice to the power the portal puts in the hands of a recruiter.

You can search for data about the supply and demand for specific jobs and skills. You get to see the trends in demand — and worker supply — over time, not to mention what the current situation is and who else is competing for the same workers. You get a ratio of supply to demand, zeroing you in on the best geographies in which to fish. If you think of the portal as a sort of Humminbird fishfinder, you wouldn’t be too far off.

CareerBuilder gets data from Wanted Technologies, EMSI, and its own resume database, crunches it to produce easy-to-read and understand graphics that give a recruiter the kind of data that saves time and makes recruiting more efficient.

Here’s an example. I ran a search for med/surg nurses in Los Angeles. What I discovered makes me glad I’m not recruiting for that position. According to the data, there were 358 job postings (unique, not duplicates, compiled from multiple sources including employer career sites and other job boards) in the last six months. During that same period, there were 93 active candidates with that title in the CareerBuilder network.

My biggest competitor is Cedars-Sinai, a prestigious hospital that counts much of Hollywood’s big names among its patrons and clients.

That alone tells me I’ve got a tough search ahead. The data makes it clear: for every active candidate in the last six months, there were four jobs advertised. In Los Angeles. But looking at what CareerBuilder calls the Labor Pressure indicator I can see that the supply of med/surg nurses in Indiana and Kentucky is much more in my favor.

A little further checking tells me that I might have better success in the Louisville-Jefferson County, KY-IN metro area, where in the last six month there were 279 actives on CareerBuilder, but only 79 available jobs.

“It brings a scientific approach,” says Hope Gurion, CareerBuilder’s chief development officer. Especially, she add, to “hiring needs that are hard to fill.”

Staffing agencies have been quick to embrace the new tool. Their recruiters are “very analytical,” Gurion observes, and routinely work with data, so they almost instinctively know its value. But, she says, it doesn’t take much more than a short demonstration for most recruiters to see what the portal can do.

Does this tool have its limitations? Sure. Actives are based on those who have submitted or updated a resume on CareerBuilder, which means that even as big as the 35 million current profile  database is, the picture isn’t perfect. But it sure does offer a good indication. And I wish that the data was cross-linked, so I could simply click into geographies — and compile a list of the actives matching my needs — instead of relaunching the search or toggling over to the resume database to do my hunting.

None of that takes anything away from the value the Supply and Demand Portal offers. From scouting locations for job fairs, to checking out the competition, to finding the best place to fish, to deciding where to site a plant or a call center, CareerBuilder’s new tool is one of those things you begin to use and wonder how you ever did your job without it.

Pricing is tiered, depending on employer needs, with annual licenses based on usage. Small staffing firms and employers, however, can also use the service, buying individual reports as needs dictate.

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.