I just read that Toys R Us plans to hire about 45,000 employees for the holidays which will result in its US work force being doubled. This comes on the heels on a report from CEOs of large US companies suggesting that they aren’t as optimistic about upcoming sales or new staffing requirements which suggests that job creation could be muted for the time being at least.

As I mentioned in my last post on Wednesday, with the holiday season approaching, many retailers and other businesses that see a rise during that time of the year – restaurants, caterers to name a few more – increase their workforce in the weeks and months leading up to Christmas in anticipation of the increased business that this holiday season tends to produce.

The Christmas season also tends to be the yardstick by which the retail sector measures its success for the year as many retailers count on this time of the year to make or break their year. Given the last 2 years or so, many of them probably haven’t even been able to count on this holiday season to improve what might already be a fairly bleak economic outlook for their businesses.

In the case of Toys R Us, the increased seasonal employment that they have planned is more than what they’d hired during the 3 years which does sound positive and tends to lead to positive thoughts regarding holiday sales.

This tends to be counter to evidence produced by the Conference Board that suggests that consumer and business confidence is now at its lowest point since February. With unemployment holding at around 10% and with no evidence that job creation is coming to any extent, what does this mean for the average job searcher?

It means that there seems to be very little optimism that things are actually getting better, and in fact the opposite might be true. So as we spoke about on Monday, searching for a new job is still something you should pursue if you feel the time is right. You just need to pick your spots, do your research first to ensure you are going to a worse situation and ensure that if and when you do make a move, it’s to a better place and for the right reasons.

How many times have you heard this phrase recently when talking about job losses in a particular industry or sector? I’ve heard it too many times to remember but it’s true. In many cases, jobs that are being lost will most likely never come back.

In some cases, companies downsize and eliminate jobs and then the remaining staff are simply expected to pick up the slack and do the work that used to be done by the person(s) whose jobs were eliminated.

As more and more jobs – particularly service-related jobs – are sent overseas by major employers, it’s difficult to say if many will ever return. As technology changes, many jobs also become obsolete and they are lost as a result, too.

Customer service jobs are interesting in that some companies such as telcos have faced a backlash and have started to bring their support function back inhouse after sending the jobs offshore years ago.

The general trend though has been for these companies to send middle-skill positions to countries that pay lower wages and most likely these jobs are not returning any time soon.

This situation has been exacerbated by the global recession so if you’re in the market for a new job you might find yourself competing with more people for a fewer number of jobs as many people have already discovered. The difference is that the jobs that were lost aren’t necessarily coming back once the economy picks up.

Has your old job – the one you held and then got downsized from – been lost for good?

I recently read a career article in the New York Times that referred to how many job that were eliminated in the past 2 year or so during the global economic slowdown are jobs that have simply disappeared for good.

Many positions were eliminated and the work was picked up by other staff members who remained on board. Now it’s like the old staff members never existed in the first place and the remaining staff were doing the extra work all along.

Sometimes job get eliminated due to new technology or when jobs simply become redundant and no longer necessary but in tough times companies also cut head count and ask the remaining staff to pick up the slack.

I remember back in university when I worked at a milk processing plant part time, the company decided to eliminate jobs by essentially eliminating a particular job in the production department and having each machine operator do the job themselves for their own machines rather than having a dedicated person to look after that part of the process for all machines as they were currently doing. They ended up eliminating 2 jobs X 2 shifts so 4 jobs were lost in total and the remaining machine operators simply picked up the tasks for their own machines and had that added to their job.

I remember some managers at the plant thinking that it was going to be difficult to get the operators to do the extra jobs since they weren’t used to doing them and they worked in a unionized environment and this would undoubtedly cause some trouble since jobs were being lost.

I remember thinking that I didn’t think it would be a problem long term because pretty quickly people would forget that there used to be a dedicated person doing the job and they’d forget that it didn’t use to be part of their role. Plus, since it was a union environment, people switched jobs and eventually they’d have different machine operators who didn’t know the difference since the change would have happened before their time.

And that’s pretty much what happened. A few weeks after making the change, everyone had gotten used to the changes and the company probably saved themselves over $120K per year in wages for the 4 people whose jobs had been eliminated. The company got by with doing more with fewer staff.

About 1 year after that, they then replaced all their filling machines with new models that ran 33% faster and which enabled them to wring even more efficiency out of the staff.

Over the past 2 years or so as the global economy melted down, some companies and industries were certainly hurt much more than others. According to a recent Fortune article I read online, the 15 companies that shed the biggest number of jobs were not surprising, companies like Citibank, TimeWarner, GM and AIG.

But the list also included some (perhaps) surprising ones like Starbucks. Mind you, when you read the article and learn than they closed 800 stores in the US alone, you can start to see where the job losses came from. Perhaps people aren’t drinking as much expensive coffee as they used to when times were better?

After reading the article, it reminded me about a post I’d written a few months back where people try to chase the “hot” jobs or industries. You see the lists on the Net all the time. The “10 hottest jobs,” “10 high paying industries” and stuff like that. When you chase the jobs that are “hot” today by the time you catch up it may no longer be hot.

Plus when you see a fairly diverse list of employers shedding huge numbers of jobs like the Fortune article shows, it’s clear that sometimes the hurt goes around and affects everyone and not just a short select list of companies or industries.

Click here to see the article in full and see the extent of the job losses by company.