I spend a lot of my time watching trends, reading articles full of statistics, and listening to experts prophesize about the curve of unemployment. For the past year we have heard a number of times that we are slowly creeping out of this recession. We have been told time and time again that companies are beginning to hire again and that the unemployed can finally take a deep breath. To be honest until this past week I thought this was a load of bull.

I wasn’t hearing it from unemployed friends, I wasn’t feeling it when I listened to the local news, and I certainly didn’t believe it as I scanned job listings only to see that there were so few being posted daily. Needless to say I have been skeptically accepting this “recession rebound” everyone kept talking about.

That was until this past week when I was (happily) bitch slapped with a different reality. This past weekend I spoke at PubCon, an internet marketing conference in Dallas. I am a huge fan of this conference, and try to make both PubCon South and PubCon Vegas every year. I am pretty active in the online marketing space and I have consciously been asking friends and old colleagues their take on the employment situation in our industry. For the past few months there wasn’t much movement. However this week I was bombarded by so many of them reporting that their companies were in fact HIRING.

You might think this was an industry specific thing, but PubCon actually has attendees from all walks of the world—small businesses, large corporations, agencies, start-ups, and everything in between. Each session I attended had panelists mentioning that they and their companies were looking for “fill in the blank.”

There were even a few jokes made that we should have tagged on a career fair to this conference, since there simply weren’t enough people looking for jobs at the conference. I mean seriously…how long has it been since you have heard there is a room full of people hiring and no candidates? I loved it.

I finally walked away from a professional event with a sparkle in my eye…and took a much needed deep breath. As I have mentioned in past posts we receive dozens of emails daily from people looking for jobs. I read through them and see the stress in their words, and this one conference experience has given me a glimmer of hope that perhaps these emails will start to take a turn. Perhaps, just perhaps, we really are rebounding from this recession craziness.

While I wait on more stats to support my claim, I remind you this is just an experience of mine laced with some positive thinking. But hell…I’ll start there if I have to.

What do you guys think? Are you and your friends sharing more stories of hiring successes, or promotions, or good stuff in general? I would love to hear your experiences as of late…thanks!