Employment in general may be stagnating, but there is at least one area where more companies are looking for help: Human Resources. ERE says advertised jobs for HR specialists rose 4 percent in July. For the year, job posting in the area rose 34 percent. The number of recruiting jobs, in particular, is increasing. That's good news for HR, but it goes deeper than that. As John Zappe at ERE points out, bringing on HR staff isn't the first priority for companies when they resume hiring. So, he reads "the upward trend as evidence that companies have loosened up hiring." Of course, these numbers don't reflect the impact of the debt-limit shenanigans in Washington, or the ultimate course of the subsequent market downturn. Whether companies fall back now remains to be seen. Source: ERE