As part of my job as CEO of Mahalo I get invited to a lot of very cool conferences packed with really intelligent speakers. At one recent one, some of the top minds in business and economics put the peak unemployment rate at 10-12%.

Many of these, however, thought there was a small but real chance of unemployment in the United States spiking to 15-20%.

My personal belief is that we are in the middle of a very confusing "employment reset." In this reset employers and employees are rethinking their entire businesses and careers.

Many are asking questions like:

a) "can we eliminate these jobs forever?"
b) "would our company be more profitable if sold off or cut these two under performing units?
c) "can we move this work to a freelance pool of workers outside of our office--perhaps even our country?"

Employees are thinking:

a) Will I be able to get back to the salary I had over the past five years any time soon?
b) Do I even want to work in this industry any more?
c) When the markets come back will companies want someone older or someone who needs to be retrained like me?

These questions lead me to believe that MANY of the jobs that were cut--not all but many--are simply NOT coming back. They are gone and many folks will experience painful "career resets" where their salaries and positions get reset 10 years back as they try to establish themselves in the new jobs that will emerge from this mess.

We're going to continue to lose jobs for the rest of the year as companies realize that the only way for them to either exist or maintain their earnings--which for a public CEO is basically the same thing--is to cut costs. Most service and technology-based businesses have human capital as their number one expense.

As you can see from this chart the loses are getting deeper on a monthly basis and we're racing to 10%.

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