Our Recruiting Community at ExecuNet has been very active, so I took some notes from their recent meeting to report back what they're hearing directly from the search firms and corporate recruiters who source our executive members.

Sure, we bring you the Recruiter Confidence Index stats every month, with the most recent finding at the highest level since mid-2008, and then our company president and chief economist does the monthly video interpretation, but I wanted to find out what the recruiters have been whispering to our recruiting services team lately:

• Recruiters are definitely seeing business pick up.
  
  
• Companies overall seem more confident in the long-term than they are in the short-term, and they are hiring again.
  
  
• January has been a "building" month with companies prepping for strategic talent expansion, and companies will begin opening resources in February.
  
  

"The recruiters and companies we're talking to are saying they feel confident that by the end of the first quarter they will see the hiring at full swing," said Jason Maczuba, ExecuNet Sales Manager, Recruiting Services.

I don't want to give too much away, but my preliminary peek at the January results of our Recruiter Confidence survey supports Jason's prediction.

ExecuNet Senior Contributing Editor Joseph Daniel McCool goes beyond Q1, saying executive recruiters expect a "banner year ahead." He recently wrote: "A consensus view of executive recruiters' forecasts about corporate executive hiring activity in 2011 reveals that search firms expect, on average, a 20-percent gain in executive search assignments over the search work they handled last year.

The healthcare, technology, manufacturing, clean/green and life science segments of the economy are expected to generate the most significant gains in executive staffing activity.

From a functional perspective, executive recruiters anticipate they'll be far busier recruiting business development and sales executives than they've been over the past couple years."

We're working on our 19^th annual Executive Job Market Intelligence Report so stay tuned for much more insider trend information...

Robyn Greenspan
Robyn Greenspan is the Editor-in-Chief at ExecuNet, where she is responsible for setting and driving the editorial content engagement strategy across the private business network's publications and expert-led programming. She is also a Huffington Post blogger. You can follow her on Twitter @RobynGreenspan

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