The June jobs report released Friday was a mixed bag. The economy bled jobs, but the unemployment rate ticked down slightly. Investors frowned on the data; the major stock indexes posted modest declines Friday . However, the employment situation could have a larger impact on a smaller group of stocks those with a direct stake in job market.

Recent labor data have been disappointing. Only 13,000 private sector jobs were added last month, according to a Wednesday report from Automatic Data Processing, far short of the 60,000 projected by economists. Thursday, the Labor Department reported new jobless claims for the past week rose by 13,000, and the previous week's numbers were revised up to 459,000 from 457,000. Initial estimates called for a net drop of 2,000 for the past week.

On Friday, the government said the country lost 125,000 jobs in June, a step backward after having added a revised 433,000 in May. Some losses were expected, as temporary census jobs came to an end. Meanwhile, the national unemployment rate slipped to 9.5% in June, down from 9.7% in the previous month.

For the mostly beaten-down shares of companies directly tied to the work force services industry, the change in the national unemployment rate could have varied effects. Shares of online job recruiters like Monster Worldwide; temporary staffing outfits like Kelly Services, Robert Half International and Manpower; or payroll-services firms like ADP and Paychex could see immediate declines, but over time, analysts say some could offer far more positive returns than the numbers suggest.

In a recovery, temporary employment tends to lead permanent job creation, so companies like Kelly, Robert Half and Manpower are in position to benefit from short-term improvements in data. Andrew Steinerman, an analyst at JPMorgan, said in a report on the staffing sector that temp help numbers are on a nine-month streak that's surpassed all previous recorded data going back to the 1970s.

"From our conversations with private staffing vendors, we highlight that temp help fundamentals remain strong, reflecting the value of flexible labor in this somewhat uncertain economy," he said.

That uncertainty is global, and worries over Europe put Manpower at a disadvantage to its competitors, with almost 90% of its revenue coming from outside the United States. In comparison, Robert Half derives only about 21% of its revenue from abroad.

Kevin McVeigh, an analyst with Macquarie Research, wrote Tuesday that "the sector should grind higher as we see less headline risk in Europe and improvement in the U.S. jobs market, but that any outsized stock moves will not occur until the second-quarter earnings season."

Investors banking on a recovery should look past the short-term stock moves that come with a barrage of discouraging data, said Vishnu Lekraj of Morningstar.

"The headline number itself is not necessarily going to drive the employment related stocks," he said. "We expect slow growth for jobs and slow growth for our stocks over the longer term."

Although job recruiting companies like Monster are ready to benefit from a cyclical upswing, they also face stiff competition from sites like CareerBuilder, owned by a consortium of newspaper publishers and Microsoft. Nervous investors have pushed Monster s stock down about 35% for the year to date, and the company s stock is heavily shorted; about 19% of its shares are held by investors who are betting the stock will go down.

Tim Boyd, an analyst at MKM Partners, is more confident about Monster s prospects. "Employment is one of the last things to decline in a recession and one of last to climb in a recovery," he said. "There's evidence that the economy is riding a cyclical bounce in this industry, and that Monster is starting to take share back."

The Monster Employment Index, a monthly gauge of U.S. online job demand, on Thursday had its strongest reading since September 2006 and has shown improvement every month since January.

As for companies such as ADP and Paychex, which provide back office functions, the biggest influence on their share prices isn't the unemployment number. These service companies do well when small businesses are being created and contracting their services, and weaken when small business bankruptcies rise.

Morningstar's Lekraj pointed out recently that ADP retains about a 30% market share and has managed to increase revenue "even amid the economic malaise of 2008 and 2009."

Paychex, which last week beat Wall Street estimates for its fiscal fourth quarter, offered weaker than expected guidance for fiscal 2010, echoing Lekraj's tepid outlook for job growth.

Boyd says investors remain skittish. "The level of psychological damage after the collapse of Lehman Brothers was more than we've ever seen," he said, adding that a short-term selloff could follow worsening unemployment stats. "At the first sign there might be anything like that ever again, people are saying, 'Get me out of here.'"