Optimism ahead of employment report

WASHINGTON - Fewer people are filing claims for unemployment aid, new jobs are showing up in service industries, and companies are squeezing all they can from lean staffs and may need to hire soon.

Hopes for the job market brightened Thursday ahead of a closely watched report on the nation's employment picture - although experts cautioned that the economy probably isn't creating jobs as quickly as usual after a recession.

"While we will see a period of job growth, it is going to take a long time to get back the jobs we lost," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, who predicts the nation will not recover the 8 million jobs lost in the downturn until 2013. Zandi says it will take until 2015 to get back to full employment, which he defined as a jobless rate of around 5.5 percent.