Now Hiring!

By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

For Lanre Kalejaiye, 22, the answer was to sidestep the job drought by packing up and hitting the road. After graduating from Illinois State a year ago, he moved from employment-parched Chicago to Des Moines, Iowa, where he took a position as an underwriter at Allied Insurance. He loves the job and was pleasantly surprised that Des Moines is less a "farm town" than "a small Chicago." For actuary Ronen Twiss, 33, of Teaneck, N.J., the answer became clear when he was laid off during an industry nosedive.

Figuring that if he wanted work, he would have to hire himself, he and his wife Sandy, 33, started BabyRide.com selling baby strollers online. The answer for retiree Elaine Donahue Duncan, 58, of Houston, who had to return to the work force after her 401(k) dwindled, was to switch industries. After working three decades in the telephone business, she took her skills and migrated to the relentlessly booming health-care field, where she's now the purchasing manager for a hospital.

New disappointments, new adventures, new cities, new lifestyles and new challenges. And brand-spanking-new jobs. But don't call it a boom--yet. Call it a job thaw. Even as the first blasts of winter are whipping across much of the U.S., the economy's red-hot third-quarter performance seems to be loosening jobs from the cold clutches of corporate managers.

The Labor Department reported a net growth of 126,000 jobs in October, the largest one-month gain since the recession officially ended in November 2001. Unemployment has held steady at 6%. Economic growth leaped 7.2% in the third quarter, while worker productivity rose a remarkable 8.1%. President Bush, increasingly desperate for an economic turnaround as 2004 nears, called the strong employment numbers "the beginning of good news for job seekers."

It's about time. The economy has a lot of catching up to do. Since the recession began in March 2001, the U.S. has lost 2.7 million jobs, many of them manufacturing jobs that are gone for good; 8.8 million people remain unemployed, 1 in 4 of them for an average of seven months. "You could say it wasn't as much a jobless recovery as it was a job-loss recovery," says Alan Blinder, a professor of economics at Princeton University and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

Still, prospects look better than they have in many months. Forecasters expect the economy to keep growing at a brisk 4% pace through next year, which supports predictions that payrolls will add jobs at a rate of about 100,000 per month. Even in some hobbled industries, job postings are already ticking up. Want ads for the financial-services sector jumped 49% for the six months through September at career website Monster.com and rose 39% for jobs relating to computer software.

As the recession eased, companies propped up their profits by being famously stingy about hiring, even as the work volume increased, which is one of the reasons worker productivity has zoomed. "What's happening is that businesses are telling workers to suck it up and work harder," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com According to a survey by Monster.com 71% of workers polled said they put in more than 40 hours a week, and 57% consider themselves overworked. "They can't do that forever," says Zandi. "Companies have got to hire." After the 1991-92 recession, it took 18 months for job growth to resume in earnest. "If history is any guide," says Zandi, "it won't be long now."

But it will be different, as the following stories in this package illustrate. Jobs are migrating to new areas across the U.S. Temping is ever more permanent for some workers, and relentless corporate downsizing will forge thousands of new entrepreneurs. Yet there are hot areas like health care that can't fill openings fast enough.

The U.S. labor force is perhaps the most flexible of any developed country's--and it's going to have to be. More than 2 million factory jobs have taken one-way trips to places like China and India since 2000. Technology-industry analyst Forrester Research forecasts that 3.3 million U.S. service-industry jobs, many in information technology, will move offshore in the next 15 years, taking $136 billion in wages and slowing down wage growth. Better technology and more efficient management have eliminated white-collar jobs too. What that means, then, is that legions of unemployed workers will have to switch industries entirely to find employment, says Erica Groshen, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who coauthored a paper on the subject.

So where are the jobs right now? With the nation's 68 million baby boomers getting creaky in the knees, health care and social assistance have added a robust 255,000 jobs this year through October. The echo of these boomers--their progeny--will create jobs too. America continues to need teachers, so jobs in private educational services grew by 56,000 this year. Thanks in part to low interest rates, new homebuilding helped boost construction jobs by 147,000 since February.

The service sector is counterbalancing the anemic manufacturing segment. Professional, business and technical services keep adding jobs, as companies outsource work like network maintenance and advertising. Bush's tax cuts, as well as the mortgage-refinancing rush, put cash in consumers' pockets, leaving them with more to spend at restaurants and bars--where employment bloomed by 113,000 over the year so far.

Lack of commitment to permanent jobs by businesses has created one: temporary work. The temporary-help sector has added 150,000 jobs since April, and while 1.4 million people hold part-time jobs only because they were unable to find full-time work--up 27% from a year ago--the growth of temp jobs isn't altogether a bad thing. "It seems to have some predictive power for permanent employment growth," says Groshen. "Companies seem to experiment with the job itself or with the particular employee. Do we really need this job? Can this person really do it?" If the answer is yes, it can lead to a permanent hire.

Outside of certain hot industries and regions, it will be a long time before companies will be hiring sight unseen. Which means if you're on the market, buckle down for a long job search. The average search is taking four to six months, says human-resources firm DBM. Finding a senior-level position takes longer than 12 months today, compared to seven months in 1998. So if you have a decent job, this is perhaps not the time for an impulsive exit. "Most people plan more for Sunday football or a vacation than for upgrading their career," says Jeff Taylor, CEO of Monster.com "They say, 'I know I'm marketable.' Well, there's an awful lot of marketable people on the street right now."

Aaron Evanson is one of them. He spent nine years as an art director at a Chicago ad agency, happily cooking up beer and pizza campaigns even as the offices around his emptied and his work load swelled. When he got the call in April, he thought he was finally getting a raise after three years of corporate dieting. "Instead, I was like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas: 'Hey, guys, what's with the tarp?'" The shock of being laid off melted into the acceptance of an unexpected respite in which to enjoy his infant daughter. "But there was always the black cloud looming--unemployment, unemployment," he says. Weeks became months. Evanson, 32, has free-lanced, and his wife Kari, also 32, has taken a job at the Gap. They've cracked into their nest egg. Health coverage ran out two months ago. It could be worse, he says: "We're not eating government cheese."

In the meantime, Evanson has figured out that the order of the day is to adapt, which means going where the jobs are--literally. He's aggressively pursuing an opening in Fayetteville, Ark., one of the hottest job-producing towns in the U.S. "This whole experience has really taught me that what's important is family and quality of life," he says. "I was working so hard before, I was at a snapping point. But at the same time, I'm excited to get back into the swing of things. I'm ready." So are about 8.8 million of his fellow Americans, whose prospects just might be picking up. --With reporting by Barbara Burgower Horden/Houston and Betsey Rubiner/Des Moines

With reporting by Barbara Burgower Horden/Houston and Betsey Rubiner/Des Moines