Hiring Firms Gear Up for Finance Mop Up

The expected clean-up of the U.S. financial sector and an anticipated economic stimulus package has staffing firms preparing to find jobs for everyone from blue-collar workers to highly trained compliance officers.

While most headlines in the past few months have been about companies and industries eliminating jobs and closing factories, once these federal government programs roll out, demand within some sectors is expected to spike!

"Cleaning up the bad loans and reregulating the financial sector is going to be huge," said Brendan Courtney, Vice President of Mergis Group, a unit of staffing company Spherion Corp, which has set up a special group to handle hiring related to the U.S. financial sector bailout. "None of this is going to get done without armies of people."

The U.S. Congress is debating a nearly $900 billion economic stimulus package, including tens of billions of dollars for infrastructure projects to create jobs.

President Barack Obama has also vowed to overhaul the nation's financial regulatory system, which may include stricter rules for hedge funds, credit rating agencies and mortgage brokers, to prevent a repeat of the credit crisis that has plunged the world's largest economy into deep recession.

And U.S. policymakers are considering whether to place toxic or virtually worthless assets left in the wake of the financial crisis into a bank cleanup program that some analysts estimate could cost as much as $4 trillion.

Although the exact form of these programs has yet to be decided, staffing companies say they are preparing to fill a raft of different jobs with accountants, engineers, lawyers, bankers, mortgage specialists and compliance officers.