The more immediate outlook for IT hiring is somewhere between flat to slightly improving.

One Canadian firm that relies on automation to assess hiring, Wanted Technologies Corp., says it demand last month.

The firm uses Web crawlers to check every help-wanted ad on 1,400 jobs boards and corporate Web sites, cleans up the data by eliminating duplicates, and then give the jobs federal job classifications to help compare them with government data.

But the growth in job postings follows a big drop. About this time last year, the number of online IT-related job ads posted each week was 80,000; it's now 48,000.

Wanted Technologies data roughly parallels what job board Dice.com has been showing in its monthly reports. Last month, it had about 49,500 jobs posted on its site, as opposed to 85,600 for the same period a year ago.