Bank of America is adding 1,000; Citigroup, 200. Over at JPMorgan Chase, the bank is trumpeting the fact that it has already hired 500 new bankers and that the number of loans it has made to smaller companies via the Small Business Administration has soared 170 percent, with the dollar volume jumping 217 percent, making the bank the largest SBA lender in the country. In fact, small-business banking is the flavor of the year, going by the headlines at least.

And yet, even as the big banks announce a string of new programs and initiatives aimed at boosting their ability to serve the smallest auto-parts suppliers as well as the reborn General Motors, small businesses are still griping that they can’t get access to the capital they need. A report issued by the National Small Business Association this past summer noted that 41 percent of small-business owners—a record—say they weren’t able to get adequate financing from banks of all stripes. That’s up from only 22 percent in 2008, in a survey done just before the financial crisis hit.

The perception gap—between big banks seemingly going all-out to meet the needs of small companies and entrepreneurs and the claims of the latter that they aren’t getting the help they need—is a big problem for the banking industry and for the Obama administration. Smaller companies, as is often stated, are the biggest job creators in the economy: The extent to which they are overlooked, ignored, or actively shunned by banks focusing on larger companies or more profitable products leads to a crimp in much-needed job creation.

Big banks—especially Citi, which required an outsize amount of direct assistance from the government during the crisis to stay afloat—are now under pressure to show their gratitude for that aid in the shape of help for small business. But that involves a lot more effort—and a lot more economic luck—than politicians may wish to acknowledge.

The big banks haven’t been working with small companies that closely for many, many years. Slowly, they have drifted away to focus their attention on more profitable and “scalable” businesses—investment banking, trading, issuing credit cards, working with large corporations on their financing needs, and, yes, even bundling mortgages into those toxic collateralized-debt obligations, or CDOs. Smaller and regional banks have picked up the slack and developed the outreach programs to meet small companies’ needs for such products as lines of credit and receivables financing.

To get business, you have to ask for it, as any banker will admit when questioned. And for a number of years, big banks like Citi and Bank of America weren’t out there banging on doors. And when they did get inquiries, too often, potential borrowers got the message that the banks weren’t interested in building a relationship. “Maybe they might have given me a small line of credit, but it would have been a personal loan, not a small-business loan,” says one New York-based independent business owner who sells artists’ materials. “But they were interested more in working with me as a person than my business. They didn’t seem to know what questions to ask.”

No wonder, then, that the Independent Community Bankers of America has claimed that about 56 percent of small-business loans are done by banks with less than $10 billion in assets, compared with Citi or Bank of America, both of which have assets of more than $2 trillion.

The other reason that bigger banks are having a tough time delivering more loans to small business is—or so they claim—that small businesses just aren’t applying. That’s at odds with the results of a National Small Business Association survey that appeared to show that small businesses were asking, but were being turned down by the banks. But it’s the truth, bankers insist. Small-business owners, they argue, are wary of loading up their balance sheet with debt when the economic outlook is as murky as it is today.

That’s certainly the message that Kerrie Campbell, Bank of America's Dallas-based small-business segment executive, delivered when she spoke to us last month about the bank’s revamped approach to serving small business and its own hiring binge. There is no demand for small-business loans, she claimed. “Our clients tell us demand is down for their products; their sales are down. They don't have the confidence to begin hiring, expanding, or taking on new debt."

Those assertions are hard to prove, however, and the banks are still among the most unpopular corporate citizens in the nation. Maybe it’s just that the big banks—who have already taken a drubbing when it comes to everything from CDOs to credit-card charge-offs and whose most profitable business lines are in the process of being outlawed by regulatory reform—just don’t want to take on the risk themselves. After all, in the first half of 2010 Bank of America announced it would charge off about 14 percent of its loans to companies with sales of less than $50 million a year, defining them as “uncollectible.”

Some banks are going further, pledging not just to hire more small-business bankers, but to actually lend more in dollar terms. JPMorgan Chase, for instance, offered small-business borrowers a break on the rate on a new business line of credit for each new employee, up to a total of three, that the borrower hires.

But the truth of the matter is that small-business lending is a tricky nut to crack and that it’s going to require a long-term commitment, as well as innovative products and a short-term hiring push. To make good-quality loans requires knowledge and painstaking due diligence of many one-of-a-kind business plans that can vary across a wide range of industries. (A small-business banker might be called on to evaluate the financial health and business prospects of a pet-grooming salon, a machine-tools workshop, and a gardening contractor all in the same 24-hour period.) And the loans aren’t big enough that any one of them can move the dial when it comes to the bottom line of a bank with trillions of dollars of assets; banks may have to reconcile themselves to the fact that small business may not be a windfall for their own profits.

Perhaps the best that small businesses can hope for is that the strongest, most persistent, and fastest growers among them will get a more sympathetic hearing from the big banks and perhaps a second look at loan applications that have already been rejected.

So, while there are plenty of incentives for the banking behemoths to announce new lending programs—some of which may even be tied specifically to job creation—and to hire new bankers, there are fewer incentives to redefine the bank’s business model to give more weight to catering to small business. And if the administration pushes for banks to open up the purse strings further, the odds are that the bankers will point to those programs, shrug their shoulders wearily, and say there isn’t much more they can do if potential borrowers aren’t applying or don’t qualify—and then dig in their heels. After all, foolish and reckless lending got them into the mess in the first place, they can point out. Now that the American consumer is suffering and unemployment levels are high, banks may conclude that linking their growth to small businesses that are highly dependent on the economic cycle might simply end up adding to everyone’s woes.