Accenture Hiring Blitz in SF?

My friend Kelly tells me that Accenture was conducting some sort of a hiring blitz in downtown SF yesterday. That immediately made me think, "oh good! that means the economy is turning around!"

Accenture started scaling back hiring in early/mid 2008. It started major lay-offs (VERY unusual for ACN to lay people off) at the end of 2008. By mid-2009 it had dumped a ton of people (myself included, though I got a phat severance package and I'm finishing up my MBA at Presidio, so I welcomed it). Accenture's hiring practices have to me always seemed to be an early indicator of where the economy is going.

The reason for this is that Accenture is a professional services company, contracting with nearly all of the planet's major companies. When those companies start feeling the pinch, they scale back or even cancel their consulting projects, well before they start any layoffs. If that happens across the economy, Accenture can't re-distribute its workforce to new projects, because there aren't enough projects available, so it freezes hiring. Accenture's attrition is naturally ~20% annually, so a hiring freeze can often be enough to re-adjust its size to match a downturn. But if the downturn is severe enough, it has to lay people off (which, if I remember correctly, has only happened twice in its history in the US (including its 50-plus-year history as Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen): 2001 when the tech bubble burst, and 2008/9).

Conversely, when companies find themselves with cash again, it is often much faster to hire an Accenture (or Deloitte or whomever) to staff new projects because Accenture can mobilize a workforce within days of being asked (by pulling available staff from all over the country, even all over the planet if needed). Since Accenture had cut its staff so dramatically in the last 2 years, the fact that Accenture is out on the streets pounding the pavement for new blood suggests that demand has risen so quickly and so dramatically that the traditional pool of new college hires and displaced Bay Area tech workers isn't sufficient to meet their demand. I have *NEVER* heard of Accenture hiring through people on the street or a truck driving around. You'd need to verify the truth of it (I know some recruiters in SF if you need their contact info), but if that's the case it suggests that demand is rising insanely fast, and Accenture is desperate for new blood to staff at its client projects.

Yet another economic leading indicator like the Baltic Dry shipping index thing, but this one's a bit closer to home for both the Bay Area, and the US. =)