State's Jobless Rate Worse Than Nation's

CHICAGO (CBS) – The state's unemployment rate is 10.4 percent, with some 423,000 Illinoisans looking for work.

One Chicago company is bucking the trend: It's hiring. Seaton Corp., a recruiting and job placement firm, is adding 400 employees, and some are already on the job.

CBS 2's Derrick Blakley talked with some of the new workers about how they have dealt with the toughest job market in years.

Forty-four-year-old Jonathan Miller -- high school graduate, former Marine and father of four -- was only out of work four months but it seemed the longest four months of his life.

"The second month is when you really realize, 'Hey, I don't have a job? What am I going to do?'" he says.

Even with an accounting degree, 23-year-old college grad Jose Macias looked eight months for work, without success.

"I graduated school, and automatically assumed that I was going to get a job right after, but it really didn't act that way," he says.

But now, both Macias and Miller are among the first of 400 workers to be added at Seaton, a Near North Side company that handles recruiting and placement for some of America's biggest corporations. Seaton is hiring, but other companies aren't, because the economy's slowing again.

To get the new jobs, old workers need new skills. And young workers need extreme patience.

"I didn't give up. I've been searching for a job for the past eight months, and if this opportunity didn't come up, I'd continue to be searching," Macias says.

The national unemployment rate isn't budging at 9.1 percent.

Another problem in this economy: A lot of the hiring happening is replacement hiring. That's a vacancy that's filled after a worker leaves one job for another. 

Of course, switching jobs is a sign of greater confidence in the economy. But simply re-filling old jobs doesn't grow the economy, and it doesn't bring down unemployment.