Recession but still Hiring

By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER, AP Economics Writer

Help wanted: pharmacists, engineers and nurses. Believe it or not, even some banks are hiring, at least for their technology teams. While the recession has claimed 4.4 million jobs, the economy has created others, many of them for highly trained and specialized professionals. More than 2 million jobs openings now exist across a range of industries, according to government data.

Job seekers beware, though. An average of nearly five people are competing for each opening. That's up sharply from a ratio of less than 2-to-1 in December 2007, when the recession was just starting and nearly 4 million openings existed.

Human resources executives say companies that are hiring are benefiting from a top-notch talent pool as applications pour in from a larger base of job seekers. The number of unemployed Americans has soared, to 12.5 million last month, from 7 million when the recession began. professionals.

Broadly, jobs are being added in education, health care and the federal government, the Labor Department said, with the government adding 9,000 new jobs last month alone.

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10 Tools for Your Blog / Site

10. Control access to your pages with .htaccess Editor

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1. Get a reliable, affordable web host

Lifehacker reader Stephanie asked, you responded, and we compiled the feedback from more than 200 comment threads, offered up by readers who definitely don't pay a ransom for good service.

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Fail and Succeed

Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid. - John Keats

For those of you who are newly laid off, I have these words of encouragement. Now that you have no job, the opportunity cost for your start-up is as cheap as it's ever going to get. As a wise man once told me, now go do it! Hack away. The life you salvage might just be your own. - Kelly Abbott

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