Nonetheless, Foote says underlying the decline may be "nervousness being created by the daily election news cycle," which includes increasing attention to the "fiscal cliff," a series of automatic spending cuts and the elimination of tax breaks beginning next year if Congress takes no action to stop them.
Foote also said more employers have decided to step back and recheck their hiring plans for the rest of the year and into 2013. That is normal year-end behavior, but it is being influenced by the uncertainty in Washington, he noted. Foote predicted a quick return to aggressive hiring.
In a continuing survey of CIOs, Victor Janulaitis, the CEO of Janco, said many IT leaders are feeling cautious, but believe overall IT hiring will improve significantly next year.
Janulaitis said there are a many issues, both international and domestic, contributing to this caution, and noted that the stock market has been relatively flat for the past few weeks.
The fiscal cliff is also a factor "because we have no guarantee that Congress is going to do anything" to prevent the automatic cuts, Janulaitis said.
Patrick Thibodeau covers cloud computing and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed. His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com.
See more by Patrick Thibodeau on Computerworld.com.
Read more about it careers in Computerworld's IT Careers Topic Center.
