Robert Half agency pulled my resume off of monster.com and called me to come in to sign up with them. Here's hoping something comes of it. My 2-month temp assignment from an acquaintance has turned to 5 months+. I wish it were permanent.

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Cheri, and others (et al),
The Robert Half agency is one of the largest employment groups in the Information Technology sector, but I think this *may* be mostly because they acquire other agencies and bring the operations of them under the Half umbrella. I applied as an employment seeker with them on half a dozen instances in the past and never received a call back. So my advice would be if you get a position through them, hang on to it! Collect contact names of the people you meet, create a user Profile over at LinkedIn.com and begin asking the people you work with if they would network with you through it. On LinkedIn they can become a "Contact" (similiar to Facebook's "Friends") and they can leave comments about you work called "Recommendations". The writing of good Recommendations is a great skill in and of itself, not to mention also being a nice thing to take the time and do for someone.
I believe in the power of social networks to educate and inform, and to bring people together in ways they would otherwise have to do a lot of footwork and socializing in person to accomplish. There is an inherent danger in these networks also, and here are some comments I made about that last night:
"I do not think it is illegal to "hire based on personal preference" but what you wrote is unclear. Are you saying the employers IS or IS NOT hiring because of a personal preference THEY have or one a potential employee has EXPRESSED online?
Actually, hiring someone based on a positive personal preference the expressed online would be "subjective" and you (we) would have to know whose preference was the influencing factor! In order for something to be discriminatory there would need to be a way to PROVE the employer was tracking certain factors and using them as a screening criteria. Q: "How are you going to do that??"
What we are going to get into, eventually in my opinion, is a form of information warfare between employers and candidates for employment, and this has already begun with paid services online that check out and help individuals maintain their "digital footprint". The issue is what is Constitutional for them and what Rights do individuals have in this respect? Very few "rights to employment" exist and most rights of employees only apply, I think, after an employment agreement has begun. So we can grumble, shout and post all we want, but both private commercial businesses and government agencies are absolutely entitled to use anything a person put out on the Internet against them in any way they see fit.
It may suck, and it may limit opportunities, but think about the off-shored job candidates some of us are competing against who DO NOT use Facebook-India, or Facebook-Thailand at all! -- We have only managed to shoot ourselves in the foot once again by joining a social network that changed what it does from the beginning of its existence (what is does, how it does it, who the information is shared with - which most of us naively shared with multiple game providers and other Facebook partners). So there is no good crying about it now, and turning ON privacy settings won't help either if the shared information has been cached by search engines and "crawled" by web spiders. Tough cookies folks!"
I believe there are certain things America does in business as well as in our social infrastructure that although they are innovative and imaginative, they also represent a "make your bed, now sleep in it" sort of thing.
Facebook is and will continue to be used by law enforcement agencies, employers and others who simply enjoy snooping and as a school teaching former classmate of mine found in Arizona, the only way NOT to be involved in it is to cancel your account and stay off it.
Best wishes,
~

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