For IT workers who lost their jobs between 2001 and 2005, have you seen a lot of them re-enter the market? Highly-skilled people, people who brought value to the client, stayed employed. They might've stayed employed with a slight rate reduction, but not by much. Those people who weren't as highly skilled might have run into problems. If you were doing Cobol, CICS or DB2 (programming), you found yourself in a world of hurt for a while. I don't really see them coming back into the workforce that much. We're not seeing a lot of people coming back from that.

Studies have indicated that people who are victims of layoffs often move on to less challenging positions afterwards, perhaps as a result of seeking greater job security. How have you seen this play out with technicians and IT managers that your organization has helped place? We do mostly contract staffing. Let's take a project manager who might've been laid off due to geographic circumstances or was in an industry that wasn't performing well during the economic downturn. We're finding that they want to become permanent employees. Maybe that's because there's more risk aversion.

So are employers leaning more towards hiring contract workers or FTEs? We're seeing [employers] trying to have their cake and eat it too. Most clients would like to bring workers on as contract labor with the option of picking them up as a permanent employee. It's almost like doing a working interview, bringing someone on for six months and then determining whether to bring them on full time. We're seeing a lot of that.