Since the middle of last year, a downturn in the U.S. housing market has taken its toll on a wide group of people and companies, clobbering homebuilders, condo flippers, borrowers with weak credit, lenders who oversold loans, and just about anyone with a home for sale.

Now the housing slump is hitting yet another target: housing-related jobs, a list that includes everyone from the people who build and sell houses to makers of appliances and furnishings.

That's a sharp contrast to the height of the housing boom in 2005-06, when the industry was responsible for creating some 25,000 to 50,000 new jobs every month, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moodys.com.

"In the recent months it's been laying off workers at a pace of 25,000 to 50,000 per month," he said. "And I think the next couple of quarters we'll start seeing job losses of between 50,000 and 75,000 per month. ... I think the housing market is going down a whole other notch."

Most books about leadership read like the Scout manual: CEOs and top managers should be authentic, considerate, sensitive, and modest, as well as creative, smart, and strategically brilliant. All true - but not very useful in the real world, where the person in the corner office might be as approachable as the junkyard dog.

Exhibit A: Steve Jobs.

Is he the charming, jeans-wearing CEO whose dramatic unveiling of the Apple (Charts) iPhone in January drove the stock up 8 percent by day's end? Or is he, as has been chronicled in several books, the classic jerk boss, notorious for belittling subordinates and business partners?

He's both, of course, and not much different from most executives: blessed with some attributes and cursed with others.

So who will be the YouTube of video resumes? Jobster, an online job board, is teaming up with social-networking site Facebook to launch a career site featuring video resumes in March. Vault.com another job board, concluded its first video-resume contest last week, its prize a shot at (what else?) an investment-banking job. Smaller players 62ndview, HireVue and Resumevideo are all launching widely this spring. Workplace bloggers speculate that YouTube plans to start its own video-resume channel, although the company is noncommittal. Says Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster: "I can see a day when video as part of the resume is the norm."