How's the job market? It depends whom you ask. For Steve Hansen, a 55-year-old home healthcare executive in San Diego, it's great. Downsized last July when a larger firm bought the senior-care company where he was director of operations, Hansen joined a job-search club, honed his networking skills, and landed two full-time offers in four months. Now a manager with Comfort Keepers, a national network of in-home senior-care franchises, he is invigorated by the new challenge, excited to remain in a field he loves, and thrilled to earn about 10 percent more than before. "I paid no attention to the hype about unemployment," he says, "because I knew there was a place for me."

Debbie Mariani has a different answer. Laid off in December 2002 from US Airways after 24 years as a pricing analyst, Mariani, 51, has exhausted severance and unemployment benefits, and last fall began temping--answering phones and doing data entry--to pay the bills. She sends out three to five resumes a week and has scored about 25 interviews, but she is considering leaving her lifelong home of Greensboro, N.C., for a more receptive market if a full-time gig doesn't surface soon. "I'm not even asking for half of what I made, and I still can't get a job," she says of her former $53,000 salary. "I keep hearing things are getting better, but I sure don't see it."

It's a Jekyll-and-Hyde job market, and it's confounding job seekers, economists, and politicians alike. While the economy appears to be rolling along by many measures--corporate profits are way up, gross domestic product growth is strong, and low interest rates continue to provide consumers with historically high buying power--jobs are lagging. True, January's 5.6 percent unemployment rate was the lowest in two years, with payrolls swelling by a four-year high of 112,000. But that's not even enough to keep pace with population growth, let alone to absorb the 2.35 million Americans who've lost or left jobs since the recession began in March 2001. By comparison, this far along after the 1990-91 downturn--until now the nation's worst jobless recovery--the market had added 400,000 more jobs than it lost. The reality of today's sluggish job market was surely a big factor behind last week's sharp drop in the Conference Board's index of consumer confidence.

Behind much of the brouhaha is the fact that the job market is an increasingly global game. Two decades of trade liberalization have undermined the notion that any particular job or sector is a nation's--or an individual's--inherent right. Hong Kong assembles our toys, Bangalore analyzes our X-rays, and Manila answers our computer questions. But the price we pay for a world of speedy, relatively cheap conveniences is rampant job insecurity and a recovery that doesn't feel like one to many. "It's America's first post-NAFTA, post-WTO, post-Internet recovery," says John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Securities.

Aftershock. Increased global competition, a sharp rise in productivity, and the outsourcing of white-collar jobs overseas have all muted domestic hiring in many sectors. Economists also say we're feeling the aftershocks of overhiring amid the '90s bubble. Add the skyrocketing costs of healthcare and pensions, plus an investor culture that rewards layoff announcements with a stock-price boost, and you've got a business community that's been reluctant, if not loath, to hire. "Maybe we're starting to see the beginning of hiring again," says Erica Groshen, a Federal Reserve Bank of New York economist. "But it won't come back gangbusters again immediately."

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