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Taleo (profile; site) reported its second quarter results today, saying revenues climbed to almost $39 million, a 25 percent year-over-year increase. It also picked up 225 new customers and bought Vurv (profile; site).

The big news in its financial report is that the company turned a profit and beat analysts’ estimates. The company earned and adjusted 15 cents a share, which is 2 cents more than the consensus estimate. In terms of dollars, the company reported earning $1.1 million for the quarter vs. losing $1.8 million for the same quarter in 2007. (Numbers here include both GAAP and non-GAAP reports. See here for an explanation of what these mean.)

It got a boost from an 83 percent growth in international sales, which now represent 13 percent of company revenue. New customers from outside North America include Cargotec, Veolia, AirFrance, Baloise, Eiffage, Manpower, and Vic Roads.

“Taleo achieved record performance across the organization, posted record revenues, and set a record for the number of new customers. Our results highlight both the growing demand for talent management solutions in large and small companies regardless of the economic environment,” said Michael Gregoire, Chairman and CEO of Taleo.

Big news from Monster (profile; site) today. It bought jobmatcher Trovix (profile; site) for $72.5 million; settled that class action shareholder lawsuit over the stock options backdating for $25 million, and managed to beat Wall Street’s expectations for its 2nd quarter financial performance, earning 40 cents a share excluding one-time expenses. The Street consensus was the company would earn 37 cents a share.

Total revenue grew 9% to $354 million, from $324 million in the comparable quarter of 2007, boosted by a favorable exchange rate. Even without the benefit of the exchange rate Monster grew revenue by 4 percent. Wall Street analysts had estimated revenues would come in at $361 million.

International sales fueled the company’s growth during the quarter, as it has for the past year. While revenue from North American operations fell by $10 million during the quarter to $164 million. But sales elsewhere in the world jumped 34 percent (23 percent when you exclude the effect of currency exchange rates). International sales now account for 44 percent of company revenue.

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Who knew that:

• Dartmouth College graduates have the highest median salary in the country with a Total Cash Compensation of $134,000;
• Colorado School of Mines has the highest median salary of all schools west of the Mississippi, excluding California, with a median Total Cash Compensation of $106,000;
• The University of California Berkeley is the state school with the highest Median Total Cash Compensation of $112,000.

These are just a few of the tidbits from the 2008 Education and Salary Report sponsored by Payscale (profile; site).

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I’m “sick and tired” of having to explain just how much disabled people deserve to work, can work, and want to work, a high-level U.S. Labor Department official says.

Neil Romano, assistant secretary, office of disability policy, told the ILG conference today that people still believe the myth that disabled people are receiving plenty of money and don’t need to work. On the contrary, Romano argues: the disabled are innovators who crave the chance at developing products others may not have thought of.

“The marginalization of people with disabilities starts very, very early,” Romano said, speaking from personal experience as a dyslexic. He said every job he has ever received has been from word of mouth, because his disability prevented him from successfully and correctly applying for jobs. “I completely messed up the health care forms at the Department of Labor — so much so that I wasn’t covered for two months,” he jokes. (Romano also tells the endearing story of when he called his mother to tell her the White House nominated him to his job, only to hear his mother respond, “do they know you can’t spell?”)

Disabilities are a running theme of this year’s ILG, with many speakers arguing that disabled job candidates are the next wave of diversity, the next band of talent largely shut out of the workplace, as women and blacks once were.

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We have been bombarded for a decade with news reports, articles, stories, and books about the looming talent shortage about to overwhelm our industries, businesses, and economies.

Taken at face value and looking at traditional work styles and jobs, there is some validity to these stories. Human resources people, recruiters, and some business people will affirm the shortage anecdotally. But it’s hard to find real examples and real numbers.

Certainly, anyone trying to hire a surgeon in North Dakota, a Starbucks barista in Oklahoma, or a stock broker in Alaska may have to look long and hard. But if you are looking for these folks in urban areas or places with significant populations, the number of qualified applicants increases substantially.

After all, it has never been easy to attract skilled professionals to rural areas, and it has become even more difficult as people leave the country for large cities. Rural parts of the world are emptying into cities — especially those located in coastal areas or those with significant educational and cultural activities.

Richard Florida’s books on the Creative Class point out in stark numbers and colorful graphs and charts the shifts in population away from some less desirable (and often semi-rural) cities and toward others that offer the lifestyle and engaging employment desired by the emerging creative class.

Sure, thousands of baby boomers are poised to retire over the next decade or two and, yes, there are somewhat fewer young folks behind them; but is that really going to be a problem? And will the number of boomers who choose to retire reach the predicted numbers?

Studies I have seen indicate that boomers will most likely defer retirement for some time because they have not saved enough to make retirement possible or because they remain healthy and want to continue working.

We will most likely also need fewer people to reach the same productivity levels of today.

The nature of work has changed dramatically. Today only about 2% of Americans grow food or work on farms. This is truly amazing considering the amount of food produced and exported. Farms have grown much larger and are more automated. Completely automated, GPS-guided tractors cultivate fields that used to take a dozen men and several dozen horses to plow.

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Now here’s a curious tidbit from a totally unscientific poll that has us scratching our head: Half of all entry- and middle-level workers think business casual dress hurts productivity.

That alone surprised us, since we have this sense that most lower-level workers are in their 20s and 30s and came of age at a time when casual was already the norm.

The corker, though, is that this self-same survey had bosses saying casual attire was perfectly fine. Only 40 percent thought it hurt productivity.

Remember we said this was an unscientific survey. Conducted by FPC, a national franchise search firm, the survey had 9,105 responses collected anonymously from workers who visited the site. Researchers and pollsters can legitimately argue that it is not random and self-selecting.

Caveats aside, we would have guessed that the bosses were the ones ready to go back to suits, skirts, and ties. And though a bare majority (51 percent) of the workers said going back to formal business attire would be a step backward, our guess would have been something like 90 percent would feel that way.

Interestingly, only in chemical, biomedical, and pharmaceuticals did workers and bosses agree that casual attire hurt productivity.

Mickey Silberman, the ubiquitous Jackson Lewis attorney with a gift for gab and an encyclopedic knowledge of the U.S. government’s online recruiting rules, offers employers who must comply with such rules three questions to ask themselves.

By asking themselves these questions, he says, you can reduce the number of people considered “applicants.” This can help employers better comply with the rules. (If you can show that you hired 20 women out of 25 applicants, that’s generally better than saying you hired 20 women out of 25,000 applicants.)

Anyhow, the three questions:

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The U.S. EEOC will be “looking very, very closely at disparate impact issues,” the agency’s chair Naomi Earp said a few minutes ago here at the big ILG conference in Anaheim.

President Bush appointed Earp, a single mother of a teenage son, to her current term in 2005.

She says the “agency has no illusion” that it can tackle all of its huge workload. Instead, it hopes to bring about workplace change through disparate impact cases. Expect the EEOC to focus specifically on technology and tests used by employers in the hiring process.

Also, Earp:

–Says that people with some Asian and African accents are sometimes “viewed as put-offs.” People dwell on the fact that they’re Japanese-Americans or another nationality and ignore the content of their words.

–Says Hispanics see this as “our time” and expect to be taken very seriously.

–Gets a kick out of a new Bloomberg flex-scheduling policy that coincides with a lawsuit against the company.

–Lashed out at those who believe “corporations are inherently evil.”

–Says, not-so-jokingly, of the EEOC: “The one thing we do really well is prosecute employers.”

With the Carl Icahn proxy fight averted and the Microsoft buyout dead (today, but check back tomorrow), Yahoo! can resume the reorganization it announced last month. It should be easier than most of the previous reorganizations the company went through as this time several top corporate positions are vacant.

(Watch out, though, for the fireworks expected at Friday’s shareholder meeting when almost anything may happen.)

For the past several months, senior managers and top-level executives have been leaving the company in numbers large enough to attract attention from bloggers and tech writers. In June TechCrunch published a list of 114 director and VP level personnel who left Yahoo!, many in 2008. Not long after the site published another story saying Yahoo! could see another 100 senior people leave in three weeks, after options vest worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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There’s a new recruitment site where a candidate doesn’t need a resume, doesn’t need to say who they are, doesn’t even have to go looking for the job.

Some companies have made hires that way for years. It’s just that those “special” candidates are the boss’s relatives. For the rest of the world, the new site is an experiment in anonymous sourcing. It’s called Scopings and it sort of reminds us of those old computer dating programs. Candidates put in a little bit of information about themselves; employers put in a little more information.

The computer compares the candidates to the job description and suggests possible matches. Then the courting begins.

Only when both of you show enough signs of interest is the cloak of anonymity dropped. keep reading…

Below:

• Monday’s Question of the Day
• Building an ATS From Scratch
• Search Engine Marketing
• Sendouts vs. PCRecruiter
• Candidates Going Out of Their State for an Interview

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Job boards? Social networks? Search engines? Wikis? Blogs? Microblogs? The list could go on and on. What are you using? Some of the above? All of the above?

Recruiters and sourcers have a wealth of options at their fingertips to find, reach out, and connect with active and passive talent. Every recruiter and sourcer has a different set of sites, tools, and communities that they use to find their talent. This is what I like to refer to as the “recruiting portfolio.”

A recruiting portfolio can be comprised of countless sites and tools.

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I am privileged to interact with companies that have terrific goodwill and are constantly managing it — with customers, with shareholders, and with employees. Not so many years ago, working as a recruiter in the professional staffing arena, I unfortunately had to work with client companies that failed miserably in providing anything even resembling goodwill. They simply didn’t understand what it is or its value to them as a company.

For those of you who have forgotten what goodwill is, here’s a very simple Wikipedia definition: “The value of a business entity not directly attributable to its assets and liabilities.”

Goodwill comes down to a matter of your company’s reputation for treating employees fairly, addressing their needs creatively, and managing their work/life balance with flexibility — and then being able to retain those employees versus other companies competing for the same labor pool.

One company I know treats its employees as if they are children. It constantly holds the expectation that its workforce can’t be trusted, doesn’t have the company’s best interests in mind, and need to be watched constantly for any possible infractions of company policy. This sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn’t it?

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From a report today by Nate Swanson, who analyzes HR/recruiting stocks for ThinkPanmure:

“We believe that companies are beginning to realize that the value proposition of the large, generic job boards (Monster/CareerBuilder/HotJobs) is waning, at best, as they increasingly provide a large volume of low-quality candidates. With recruiter in-boxes being filled with the equivalent of “resume-spam,” these large job boards are becoming less effective and eliminate many of the efficiencies of the online model. We believe that growth in these generic job boards is slowing, with online postings moving to niche job boards that are geographically or vertically focused (StepStone and Dice), or to sites that offer a pay-for-performance or “all-you-can-eat” pricing model (SnagAJob).

Second, we see the recruiting process becoming more complex and believe that recruiters will be spending an increasing amount of time on “employer-branding” initiatives, which target passive candidates and employee referrals. Here, companies will look to leverage their existing employees or alumni groups as a valuable source of new candidates. In fact, studies show employee referrals to be one of the largest and most cost-effective sources of new hires. Popular social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook bring the power of an extended network to the recruiting process, although it’s still very early and a highly manual process. We think that social networking sites are becoming more and more like job boards. In fact, one HR manager to whom we recently spoke views the content on these sites as more valuable than those in a resume, as the content is public and therefore verifiable, and more current than the profiles listed on a job board, which could be more than a year old.”

Recruiting campaigns can be broken into two types: individual recruiting and group targeting.

A less-known alternative, the group targeting approach focuses on attracting a specific group of individuals who share something in common (i.e., Hispanic software engineers or fabric patent holders). Group targeting is common in political campaigns and product advertising but is rarely used effectively in corporate recruiting.

Convert Teachers Into Corporate Employees

There are several large groups of employed persons who are routinely interested in a major career change, including nurses, soldiers, and yes, teachers. However, there is no more highly qualified group of potential employees to recruit than teachers.

Before you howl about the social impact of “raiding schools” and hiring away all the teachers, remember that you can opt to limit your recruiting to retiring baby boomers, those recently laid-off, or teachers who have determined they no longer wish to teach.

There are no “hands off” groups in recruiting. It is a recruiter’s job to target everyone who is interested, qualified, and available. Yet corporate recruiters have avoided targeting teachers, which is perhaps the largest group of potential recruits simply ignored.

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For the first time in many quarters Workstream (profile; site) was in the money – sort of – eking out a half-million dollar finish to its 2008 fiscal year. The talent management software company reported Thursday evening that it had an EBITDA of $516,000 for the fourth quarter that ended May 31. That compares to an EBITDA of ($4.5 million) for the previous quarter and ($1.3 million) for the fourth quarter last year.

Still, the company reported losing $14.9 million in the last quarter and $39.4 million for the year.

Only sketchy and incomplete numbers were released by the publicly traded company, so it isn’t possible to detail the company’s income and expenses other than to say the fourth quarter revenues were $7 million, up from the $6.2 million of the third quarter.

The company attributed the incomplete financial statement to an “on-going goodwill analysis.” “This item does not have an impact on EBITDA, revenues or cash,” the company noted in the announcement of its financial results. However, goodwill is a business asset that has to be adjusted if its fair value is different from the value carried on the books. Workstream valued its goodwill at $45.3 million in an April filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But in the financials it released Thursday appears to be anticipating a reduction of $13.6 million.

Regardless of the eventual accounting decisions, Workstream is a troubled company. Its operating expenses have exceeded its revenues every year since the company went public in 1999 and for two years before that as well. It is very likely to be delisted by NASDAQ, where it trades under the ticker symbol WSTM. To remain on the active exchange Workstream would have to lift its stock price to at least $1. It closed today at 16.27 cents. A planned merger with payroll processor Empagio fell apart in June.

Still, Chief Executive Officer Steve Purello says in the press release announcing the financial, “Workstream had a solid finish to its fiscal year.”

Purello could not be reached for additional details.

Like salespeople, one of the biggest challenges a recruiter faces is getting enough “outbound activity” (sourcing candidates, building relationships, etc.) while dealing with a steady stream of “inbound” interruptions (emails, status calls, etc.).

To compound this situation, we do this in an environment of constant change (shifting priorities, new requisitions, etc.).

If not managed properly, it is easy to lose focus, get de-motivated, and become non-productive.

To avoid this situation, most top sales organizations have a weekly “sales” meeting. Objectives of these meetings include:

• Make sure each salesperson has a focused plan of action for the week.
• Make sure each salesperson’s plan includes an adequate amount of measurable “outbound” activity.
• Set team/individual priorities.
• Discuss any administrative loose ends.

If, for some reason, you are not having a weekly “recruiting” meeting, start now. Based on the challenges outlined above, I can’t think of a logical reason why you wouldn’t.

In our research efforts, we have learned that the best sales organizations not only have meetings, but the salespeople enjoy attending them!

While the clear intent of these meetings is to get focused for a productive week, unfortunately, the majority of companies’ sales meetings are mundane, boring, and unproductive.

Most sales professionals view these meetings as a “necessary evil” to provide management with a status on progress toward their goals.

Indeed, during my 19 years in recruiting, I have attended my fair share of boring, mundane meetings!

To avoid falling into this trap, try the following meeting agenda/format. It provides structure and sets the tone for a productive, positive week:

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Are your candidates reluctant to provide a reference until they have received an offer?

Do you outsource the reference-checking process to a third party or your administrative staff?

Are you asking “legal” type questions (eligible for rehire, dates of employment) and a few innocuous “Can you tell me the strengths and weaknesses?” type questions?

These old-school reference practices do little more than irritate the reference you are contacting.

If you have the correct reference contact and the appropriate information, you can get do better.

How?

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Web 2.0, Web 2.0! That’s all Willie is hearing from some of his recruiters, and the words seem to pop off every page he reads. This morning he picked up the Wall Street Journal and there was a big headline espousing the many benefits of social networks and Web 2.0-enabled websites.

Willie is a progressive guy, usually the first to try out new technology or bring new ideas into a conversation. He was one of the first recruiting managers to adopt an applicant tracking system years ago, and he is an advocate of maintaining close relationships with candidates via email. He is just not sure how to go about implementing a Web 2.0 strategy or how to create a social network.

Willie’s organization is a construction company with over 1,000 employees, mostly all located in the United States with a handful in China setting up a new operation.

Despite the economy, they have lots of work. Many of their contracts are local and state government jobs that are funded by tax dollars and have strict deadlines. Revenue is excellent and the firm projects to earn more than US$1 billion this year. The future looks bright given the poor state of the U.S. infrastructure. They project doubling revenues within 5 years as more roads, bridges, airport runways, and water systems need to be replaced.

But Willie faces some major challenges.

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The U.S. EEOC has new “guidance and instructions for investigating and analyzing charges alleging discrimination based on religion.”

The agency lays out three examples of how discrimination can crop up in the recruiting-hiring-promoting process.