You're hired—next year in The Economist offers insights on hire-and-hold strategies and preparations for ramped up hiring.

Bright Spot in Downturn: New Hiring Is Robust in The New York Times does a good job of defining net job creation and loss. People are still being hired even when the economy experiences gross job losses. Some industries even show net job gains. Bottom line: companies are hiring.

BusinessWeek’s Why Jobs Go Begging Amid Layoffs uses payroll statistics and reports to come to the conclusion that the employability gap is due to mismatched skills and a buyer’s market in hiring. Their Help Wanted article cites US statistics and compares 13 million unemployed workers with 3 million jobs unfilled. Of course we see how this dilemma points to talent management and our research on a couple of levels.

Talent Management in a Down Economy makes the point that talent processes are important in any economy because even in recessionary times with a backdrop of layoffs and unemployment, there are millions of jobs that still need to be filled.

Aligning talent to business goals and people to jobs is a big part of the solution. The underlying mismatch problem shows how assessments combined with structured data delivers a powerful solution for getting people into jobs where they can demonstrate their passion for the game.

Not only do people need to adapt their skill sets faster, business needs to be more agile in how it evaluates and places candidates.