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Were it not for one-time expenses in the not-yet-completed HotJobs purchase, Monster broke even in the 2nd quarter. But even considering the $5.2 million expense, the recruitment advertising company still managed to do better than the consensus of Wall Street analysts.

Analysts expected a loss between 3 cents and 5 cents a share on revenue of $216 million. Monster, which reported its financial this afternoon, came in at break-even on earnings per share and $214.9 million on revenue.

Counting the HotJobs expenses and a few other smaller, one-time costs, Monster reported losing $2.96 million on revenue of $214.9 million. That translates into a 2 cent a share loss. Without those one-time expenses Monster’s loss was just under $200,000, which is break-even on a per share basis.

keep reading…

The Internet’s naming authority will take up the controversial plan to expand the .jobs addresses at its Aug. 5th telephone conference.

The agenda of the board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was released a short while ago and includes consideration of the proposal.

Also on the agenda for the three-hour meeting is the even more controversial proposal to approve a .XXX extension for porn sites. For obvious reasons, that request has garnered wider public interest, including 13,325 comments posted to the ICANN forum. The .jobs expansion plan garnered 316 comments.

The board’s telephone conference is not open to the public. An ICANN spokesperson said that the board’s decision on all agenda items will be made available following the end of the meeting. The spokesperson didn’t say exactly when the results would be reported. keep reading…

Without question, having a large LinkedIn network is a competitive advantage for any recruiter working on hard-to-fill positions and hard-to-find candidates. This advantage is lessened dramatically with LinkedIn Recruiter, since it includes complete visibility to the 70mm+ people in their network. Since this full-visibility product is off-limits to TPRs, it levels the playing field somewhat for corporate recruiters. But this is not as significant a disadvantage as it would seem to those of us who have to find top candidates the old-fashioned way — networking. Getting pre-qualified referrals from people who will call you back is the real secret of recruiting passive candidates. keep reading…

HR software vendor Taleo grew its revenue and customer count during the second quarter of this year and though it also grew its net loss, the company beat Wall Street’s earnings estimates.

The company reported this afternoon that it lost $1.4 million, up from just $113,000 in the same quarter last year. Stock options and costs relating to previous acquisitions totaling $6.9 million were responsible for the loss. Not including these expenses (which analysts don’t include in their estimates) and some minor other one-time expenses, Taleo earned 14 cents a share. That was 2 cents better than the analyst consensus.

Revenue from applications (software)– $47.9 million —  was almost 12 percent than the same quarter a year ago. That boosted the quarterly revenue to $56.3 million, for an overall increase over the year before of 14.6 percent.

Of the 226 new customers signed in the quarter, eight of the deals exceeded $250,000 annually.

Taleo also reported that CFO Katy Murray would leave by Oct. 1. She earns $315,000 and received a 2009 bonus of $126,000, according to the San Francisco Business Times.

Looking for a job as a chef in the Antarctic? Try looking here. Or if you’re a recruiter looking for an experienced vuvuzela sales person, then this South African job site is one place to start.

Talk about global recruiting. In the last couple days, both Indeed and SiumplyHired have announced country-specific (or, in the case of Antarctica, continent-specific) job search sites.

SimplyHired added South Africa and Argentina to its roster. Indeed added 24 countries.

In five years the two job search engines have gone from start-up to grown-up, indexing millions of jobs a year. They’ve built enough of a presence to land themselves among the top 10-most-trafficked career sites.

Indeed’s new sites now give it a presence in a remarkable 53 countries. It offers its listings in 24 different languages, among them Norwegian, Turkish, Greek, and Russian.

SimplyHired, based in Silicon Valley, across the continent from its Connecticut rival, is now in 21 countries, providing its listings in 10 languages that include Chinese, Korean, German, and Spanish. keep reading…

The much-watched Consumer Confidence Index hit a five month low in July, dampening investor enthusiasm after three days of big gains in the Dow and most other markets.

The Dow closed in positive territory, but just barely. Both the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 lost ground for the day.

The Conference Board’s Index fell to 50.4 from a revised 54.3 in June. The Index was last this low in February, when it stood at 46.4. Despite encouraging quarterly financial reports that have been trickling in since the end of June, the percent of consumers who expect business conditions to worsen rose in July to 15.7 from 13.9 percent in June.

Even more consumers are pessimistic about job growth over the next several months. keep reading…

Job board owner Dice Holdings reported this morning that it earned 6 cents a share on 2nd quarter revenue of $29.9 million, coming in better than Wall Street’s expectations.

Analysts estimated revenue would be right around $28.7 million with an average earnings estimate of 5 cents a share.

Investors bid up the price of Dice Holdings share by better than 5 percent. In afternoon trading in New York, DHX shares were selling at $8.29.

Growth was driven by ClearanceJobs.com, a job board for workers with security clearances, by international operations — especially in Asia — of its financial sector job site, eFinancialCareers.com, and by contributions from the company’s smaller units, including AllHealthCareJobs and Targeted Job Fairs.

Dice.com, the company’s flagship IT specialty job board, wasn’t detailed specifically, though it is the largest contributor to revenue. Dice reported that the DCS Online unit — Dice.com and Clearancejobs.com — contributed 71.3 percent of the total company revenue in the first six months of the year. That’s down from 74.4 percent for the same period in 2009, likely reflecting the continued softness in the tech sector.

Looking ahead, Dice said it expected revenue to continue growing. It estimated 3rd quarter revenue of $31.5 million and $121.5 million for the year. That compares to $26.7 million for the 3rd quarter of 2009 and $110 million for the year.

In addition to an improving global job market, Dice is also moving strongly into social recruiting. Today it launched the Dice Talent Network on the Dice.com site.

Monster will report its 2nd quarter financial results after the market closes on Thursday. CareerBuilder, as a privately owned company, isn’t required to report its numbers, but it typically does provide its North American revenue.

You have a great candidate who seems ideal for the job you’re looking to fill and you start researching her online. You land on her Facebook page where you see a picture of her and your spouse or partner, which suggests that they’re more than friends. What do you do?

1. You shred the resume and delete it from your ATS
2. You make up a reason why she’s unqualified
3. You look up the classifieds in Soldier of Fortune magazine
4. You decide to interview her anyway

If you picked #4, you’d be in the minority. keep reading…

It’s a big day for Dice today. The IT specialty site officially opens its Dice Talent Network, while its parent company, Dice Holdings, reports its second quarter financial performance.

Analysts, reported by Yahoo Finance, expect the job board company to report earnings per share in the range of 5 to 7 cents a share, with the consensus at a nickle. Besides its flagship IT site, Dice also owns a few other boards, among them eFinancialCareers and ClearanceJobs and a company that produces job fairs.

The numbers will be the lead item on the financial conference call with analysts, but you can be certain that CEO Scot Melland is going to showcase the Talent Network release.

The network is a major step to integrating social recruiting into a job board environment. Like Facebook or LinkedIn, the Dice Talent Network program  builds off a company profile that can be richly populated with external content, photos, even video. Recruiters can create their own profile page and invite potential candidates to connect with them. keep reading…

Jobmagic has joined the growing number of vendors offering social media recruiting tools.

The company, the successor to job-match provider Vitruva, released a tool set for recruiters and employers that simplifies the distribution of jobs to social networking sites and spiffs up their appearance with logos, pictures, and even embeds You Tube videos.

Most of the features automate the job distribution to social and business networking sites and via Twitter channels. The graphic elements and the interactive components are differentiators in this growing area of social media servicing.

A Jobmagic posting can include a mini-profile to give candidates some confidence that there’s a real person somewhere out there who just might look at their application. Even better is a contact button that connects recruiter and candidate. I couldn’t find out how that’s done. IM would be really cool, but it’s probably a post to the recruiter’s or the company’s Facebook wall. keep reading…

The quality of those not hired is the most valuable recruiting metric that you have never heard of! It informs you how often your organizations is failing to hire the highest quality applicants.

A few years back I was advising a Fortune 100 firm that had a painfully slow and somewhat arrogant hiring process. To demonstrate the negative impact of their process I had to prove to a skeptical senior manager that they were letting top candidates get away. I asked a manager hiring for an important job to rank, in order of quality, 100 applicants who had been sourced for the role. The chosen rank was discretely written on the back of paper copies of the candidate’s resumes. Months after the role had been filled, the manager was asked if they were satisfied with the hire. He was, and felt quite certain that he had successfully hired a “top 5” candidate. After hearing of his satisfaction I had him look at the initial rank he had provided the candidate who was later hired: 75. keep reading…

I had an informative, and reassuring conversation this morning with the founder and head of BranchOut, a Facebook app that I wrote about yesterday, which has a potentially valuable future as a sourcing tool.

Rick Marini, an entrepreneur with an impressive pedigree, was concerned enough about the transparency issues I raised in the post, that he pinged me to clarify a few things.

What he said was encouraging. “We are very aware of the privacy issues,” he said at the outset of our conversation this morning. “We would never compromise privacy.”

In the team’s haste to push out the app, a few things were overlooked, he said. One of them, a rather important oversight, was any sort of explanation about the access to personal Facebook information that BranchOut needs to do its work. keep reading…

Games, case-study quizzes, and simulations online aren’t new: the Army poured millions into a game, and the not-for-profit MITRE built one, too. But what is new is the venue for at least one game aimed at potential employees: not a corporate career site, but Facebook.

The UK company Reckitt Benckiser has launched, in beta, a Facebook game called poweRBrands, for students who might be interested in its marketing jobs.

Reckitt who?

I thought the same thing, but you know at least some of this company’s products, which include Woolite, Lysol, Clearisil, French’s, and Calgon.

Anyhow, with the poweRBrands game, so far available in English, German, Italian, and Portuguese, players make decisions on such things as what to do if a sickness breaks out, increasing demand for Clearisil while you’re short-staffed. Or, you’re presented with a scenario where the VP of sales is impressed with your work and is looking for ideas for the next annual sales plan; should you approach him on your own, or with the brand manager? (I chose to include the brand manager, but the game told me “this was your chance to go for it on your own, and you blew it.”)

A bit harsh, but this is an impressive game. keep reading…

As a recruiter, how would you describe the culture at Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, or at your own organization? Being able to distill the essence of an organization’s culture into a few well-thought-out adjectives is worth a lot. Sometimes I ask a wide variety of people to come up with a few adjectives that describe a company and then use a tag cloud technology such as Wordle or TagCloud to generate a tag cloud map. This will give you a pretty good idea of how people feel about an organization’s culture.

For example, Apple might be described as perfectionist, controlling, modern, and demanding, while Microsoft might be described as Yuppie, Gen X, brash, or arrogant. IBM as stuffy, old school, traditional.

Customers form opinions about an organization from its brand image, its presentation and packaging of products and services, but most of all from their contact with employees. keep reading…

Want to get your friends to help you raid a company? There’s an app for that. Want an introduction to a hiring manager? There’s an app for that, too. Just nosy about where your friends work? Yes indeed, now there’s the (same) app for that, too.

BranchOut, which launched yesterday and is profiled today on TechCrunch, is an app that details the past and current employers of your Facebook friends. And, if you can convince your friends to install the app, you get the same info for the friends of your friends.

It gives a new twist to Sun-tzu’s counsel about keeping your enemies closer. With BranchOut installed, you’ll want friends closer, lots and lots of close friends who will unlock their profiles so you can see who works or worked where and who has friends there.

If you’re a recruiter or otherwise have reasons to know your Facebook friends’ work history,  it’s a great tool, even if it’s a little buggy right now. Michael Arrington, who wrote the TechCrunch piece, warns as much. The most glaring bug I found was that BranchOut has trouble distinguishing between current and past employers. It also listed the clients of some of my friends as employers. keep reading…

If the sheer number of comments decided the matter, the proposal to expand the use of .jobs addresses would be DOA. In the week since opponents of the plan launched a campaign against it, more than 200 comments were posted to the public forum run by the group that will decide the matter.

Not all the comments opposed the expansion; however, most did. The majority appear to stem from an email campaign launched by the International Association of Employment Web Sites, the trade group for the world’s job boards.

While many of the comments followed the sample letter circulated among IAEWS members and to others including staffing agencies (here’s a sample that includes the pitch), several argued their own case against the expansion. keep reading…

We’re about halfway through our contest looking for the best blog posts from the ERE community in the month of July (still plenty of time to try your hand at that if you haven’t yet). At stake is an Apple iPad as well as two Amazon gift cards for the runners-up. I wanted to highlight some of my favorite posts so far and encourage you to check out all of the blog posts our community has to offer.
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Without even knowing the name of your organization I can predict that throughout the most recent downturn you let your employee referral program “go,” so to speak. By failing to take advantage of new trends, technologies, and tools, and decreasing efforts to update and keep the program highly visible, your organization has allowed a number of program-performance-degrading-things to occur.

Unlike the previously posted list of program design features that can “kill” an ERP, these factors plague even well-designed programs, rendering them weak and ineffective. While much more likely to occur during economic downturns and periods of reduced or halted hiring, these program degraders can emerge whenever an employee referral program is neglected. keep reading…