It's never easy to be unemployed.

But at least right now, as waves and waves of layoffs hit all sectors of the economy, people losing their jobs know it is not their fault.

"You can never take away the devastation of losing work and I would never want to minimize that, but when they are picking up the newspaper or listening to the evening news or talking to people in their dentist's office, they're hearing someone's story that has all of these similarities," said Barbara Parise, manager of the Downtown CareerLink office.

"Because it cuts across a wide spectrum, they're feeling more like part of a group."

Nationally, unemployment cut a wide swath from auto workers in Michigan to financial workers in New York. Government employees, once in the safest jobs, are losing theirs because of dwindling revenues to state and local governments.

The national unemployment rate hit 8.1 percent in February. The Pittsburgh region has not been hit quite as hard by the recession, with the jobless rate at 6.5 percent for January, the latest figures available. Statewide unemployment in January was 7 percent.

CareerLink, which has offices all over the state including one in the Regional Enterprise Tower Downtown, has computers, seminars on how to hunt for a job and, perhaps best of all, other people who also are unemployed to whom workers can turn for a sympathetic ear.

This recession has created an interesting situation in the available employee pool.

Cheryl Cavanagh, a managing director of Boyden Interim Management, said the pool of available talent has never been better.

"There's incredible people right now out there," she said. Normally, in the management search section of Boyden that fills permanent positions, they have to "unseat" people, a polite way to say steal talent from other businesses.

That's not the case now. "The A players are now in the candidate pool with no jobs," she said.

An example would be Gabe, of Fox Chapel, a 56-year-old engineer with an MBA, who was cut out of his job in a corporate merger. He did not want his full name or employer used for risk of violating his severance agreement.

In his case, the company that acquired his employer already had someone in that job. He was told in January his job was ending at the end of this month. "The acquiring firm has the leverage, and they don't need two [department] heads," he said.

What he has found is that "it's a full-time job looking for a full-time job." Every morning he is up at 5:45, reading the paper, checking Web sites and sending e-mail to friends in various businesses.

He has at least one meeting a day to talk to people about how he can help their business and is considering working with up to four firms at the same time to put together deals, such as pulling together the groups that would be needed to bid on the federally funded project to repair locks and dams on local rivers.

He is more energized and excited by his potential new opportunities than glum about losing his job. "I understand you get caught up in these things and they have nothing to do with you," he said.

Ms. Cavanagh said some top companies in many industries looked to save money by laying off people in the executive suites but now are finding they lost the people they needed to run the company.

Still, she said, "The wave of real hiring from this firing phase has not hit."

Instead, she said, most companies are looking at filling spots on an interim basis, project by project. Many older workers in their 60s who find themselves unemployed are glad to find that sort of interim project.

Thirty years ago, when Ms. Parise was standing on the unemployment line in McKeesport, the unemployed were nearly all steel workers because the industry was taking a dive.

Now the CareerLink manager is able to talk about the layers of people who are unemployed in this recession.

She said, "People who are in their 60s who might have been looking toward retirement are now reinventing themselves in a different way than someone who is in their 50s and has kids in college."

Younger workers, she said, grew up when the paradigm of staying in the same career their entire working lives was gone, so they already expect to have different careers throughout their lives.

But overall, she said, this group of job seekers looks different because they aren't wondering, "Why me?" They know why and they aren't taking it as personally.

"People realize it's in all industries and it cuts across all levels."