During interviews on NBC's "Meet the Press," executives from Xerox (NYSE:XRX) and Caterpillar (NYSE:CAT) both expressed that hiring initiatives are unlikely to pick up until the economy shows further signs of improvement. Caterpillar CEO Jim Owens said, "We have had to continue reducing employment. . .We will probably not be able, in a position to, rehire until mid next year as we see these markets begin to recover." In the same show, Xerox's chairman and CEO Anne Mulcahy said, "if you look at net head count it's still coming down, because that's what our intent is, until we're sure that things are improving." She continued to say that the company is hiring, but very modestly. Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) CEO, Eric Schmidt, also made an appearance, adding that he expects the economy to bottom out sometime during the summer with unemployment bottoming in early 2010. "We're in a classic recovery of a very long and hard recession," Schmitd said.

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