What's misleading is the talk about "new employees". There have not been any 'new employees' since the beginning of the recession, all that's happened is we've just barely recovered to the old employment level while the new population's continued to grow.
The resulting cumulative numbers are sobering, that for half a dozen years the total working age population not employed was static at around 85 million, and w/ the '08 election we saw a sudden increase of 16 million.