I recall my last job loss more than 10 years ago as if it were yesterday. I have always had the reputation of being the logical, analytical one that doesn’t get sidetracked by the emotional aspects of life. There is some truth in that, but it all changed when my employer showed me the door. I was 100% emotional!

I couldn’t look for work when it was a struggle to just get up. My husband, friends and relatives kept trying to cheer me up and encouraged me to look for other jobs. I wanted my old job back – and I wanted the pain to go away and the grief process to end.

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The current economic turmoil dramatically impacts job seekers. As more people flood the job market, job seekers are facing a new reality. The market is now swamped with more experienced professionals than ever before. These days job seekers are competing with others who have also done their job very well, have the qualifications to succeed, and are now readily available purely due to the economic situation.

There is a subtle change when the market is saturated with job seekers: The old question employers were asking is “Why should we hire you?” The new question is “Why should we hire you instead of all the other highly qualified professionals available in the market?”

This is where your personal career brand comes into play. If you can distinguish yourself from the rest of the qualified people in the market, you are more likely to be selected for the job than the others.

I also get very jazzed when I actually see or read about a person or company that “gets” the value of branding within the context of culture fit. So it was when I read the interview of Steve Stoute, Chief Executive of Translation LLC, in the NY Times.

If your organization hires for culture fit – or – if you as a future Chief Financial Officer want to land in an organization that has a culture built for your unique wiring, strengths, and interests, read the entire interview. Stoute makes some excellent points and he has some great ideas around ensuring the team is a good fit within the culture he has built.

Two salient points jumped out at me.

In the story – Trapped in Unemployment – Scott Pelley indicated that today, there are over 4 million Americans who have been out of work for more than a year.

One of the individuals interviewed related being at home alone, in front of a computer, answering hundreds of job ads – but not receiving any invitations to interview. I found myself talking to him and the others – through the television – telling them what they were doing wrong!

Why are these individuals, some of your family members and friends – or you – out of work for a year, two years or more?

How do you crack the code and discover the strategies to prevent or recover from long-term unemployment?

From his lofty seat at the top of the top professional network in the world – through which daily flow valuable job postings, job searches, candidate searches, and networking requests – Reid has a unique vantage point for observing the life cycle of careers in 2012.

Along with his co-writer Ben Casnocha, he brings into question the idea that each of us has a specific calling that requires only that we discern the color of our particular parachute to know what we should do with our life. This prevailing cultural myth is challenged, and rightly so in my opinion, by Reid’s particular insight into the way most people’s careers actually develop.

Reid says that careers develop according to the interaction of your assets, your aspirations, and market realities. And that where we end up can be very different from where we started. He also says that often you can perceive an inner logic to the journey. (This may be more where we see Richard Bolles ideas than anywhere else.)

But one question: why do we feel compelled to choose only one trend? The companies that place top talent will utilize a strategy that takes advantage of all of the above – and more.  This was the message at July’s truBoston, a leg in the famous unconference organized by Bill Boorman, which attracted sorry people like me who think it’s actually exciting trying to make the recruitment process work better. The discussion was, well, awesome – no idea was wrong. We listened, we shared, and every one of us walked away with a richer knowledge base.

Let’s address each hot-topic, and see how they’re continuing to gain traction in the coming year. Or not.

The team at Adzuna has done some serious number crunching over the last few weeks, comparing our very own search index of over half a million jobs (almost every job vacancy in the UK) to the latest government unemployment info. At the end of all that, we came up with some insights which could hopefully help you identify the hot spots – and not spots – to help target your job search!