I was listening to NPR’s Planet Money podcast from December 5th and found this part of the interview interesting enough to transcribe. Hopefully this isn’t as pertinent to your situation as it is to mine – best wishes to any job hunters out there!

Ian Sheperdson, Chief U.S. Economist for High Frequency Economics: We learned today that 533,000 people net lost their jobs in November, and we also learned that the number of job losses in October and September were nearly 200,000 worse than was first thought. So, really, we’ve had an announcement today of job losses not far short of three-quarters of a million in one go.

David Kestenbaum, NPR Correspondent: And you wrote that this is almost indescribably terrible.

IS: The November figure was the worst for 34 years. The trend in the last few months has been straight down at an accelerating pace. We’ve got an unemployment rate that’s heading toward 7%, and we’ll blow through 7% very, very quickly. And we’ve got weakness across pretty much every sector of the economy, with one or two small exceptions. So, it really is absolutely awful.

DK: Was there any good news in there?

IS: Nope, there was nothing in there that would make you think that anything is improving anytime soon. There’s nothing to think that there was certain sectors of the economy that are just charging along regardless. There was weakness pretty much everywhere. When you look at the data, it reinforces the impression that we have from a host of other numbers: that the economy is in something like free fall in the last few months.