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One of the toughest parts of this recession is of course the personal stories that I have heard over the past six months of recruiters losing their jobs and their businesses. Many of those have hit very close to home, as they have been people I have known throughout my time at ERE.

On the flip side, one of the best things to come out of this recession is the response from the community to help those people out. Things like Job Angels where volunteers personally look to help candidates connect with open positions one at a time, make you proud to be part of a profession that really cares about helping people out.

Even here at ERE, where our Editor Todd Raphael started a list of recruiters in the market, that has grown to over 100 people so far.

In that spirit, we are now opening up another one of the ERE resources to our community as a way to help recruiters find out about open posisitions. From now until August 1, we have lowered the price of a 30 day job posting on ERE’s Recruiting Job Board to just $25.

This is not a financial decision. The reason to lower the price from $200 to $25 is to make it low enough for anyone to post a job, however keep away the spammers who would take advantage of the situation if we made it free.

If your organization is looking to add to the team, there is no better place to post your job. And if you are looking for a job, make sure to keep track of the board as more positions are added.

We have also opened up another distribution channel for ERE jobs: Twitter with the @recruiting_jobs handle, so if you are in the market, make sure you follow the jobs feed there.

Now, jobs posted on ERE will not only be integrated throughout the site on the homepage, in our daily email newsletter being read by over 35,000 recruiters each day, and the board itself — but Twitter as well.

So let’s all work together to help our peers who have fallen on hard luck get back to work, so we can do our part to help all of those out of work get back on their feet.

If you have a position available at your company, or know of one, make sure it gets posted to ERE’s Job Board for just $25 until August 1.

In the June Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I’ve got an article about strategic workforce planning — a multi-functional discipline encompassing several human resources functions spanning a long-term planning period.

You’ll get much more detail there, but I wanted to whet your tastebuds with this sample paradigm for a workforce plan. keep reading…

This was an exciting week at ERE. After months of work by the team, especially our development team of Jim Dalton & Hunter Ford, we finally launched the new ERE Community! Hopefully by now, you have had the chance to check it out, update your profile, and start networking. If you haven’t already, come on over, and also check out David’s post from the other day where he introduces some of the new features of the new ERE Community.

We also took an important step to help connect those of you currently out of work with positions available in our industry. From now until August 1, we have dropped the price of a 30-day job posting on EREJobs from $200 to just $25. And keeping even a $25 fee is not a financial decision. We want to make it low enough for anyone to post a job, however keep away the spammers who would take advantage of the situation if we made it free. So if you are looking for recruiters or looking for your next opportunity, check out EREJobs today.

Here is a rundown of what else is going on around the ERE world this week:

• On Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, sign up for our next free ERE webinar: How to Attract & Retail Top Performing Employees, led by Janet Walsh, President of Birchtree-HR.
• Last week, we offered a special discount for the upcoming Fordyce Forum 2009 taking place in Las Vegas from June 10-12. If you are on the search and placement side of the business and didn’t receive my email with the exclusive ERE subscriber discount, drop me a line!
• On the content side of things this week, we’ll take a look at workforce planning, one of the topics our readers tell us is most on their minds right now. Expect some info on ere.net, and more in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.
• If you haven’t checked out the Fall ERE Expo agenda in a while, we have added some exciting speakers such as Marvin Smith from Microsoft and Tony Blake from DaVita to the lineup of speakers. Make sure to register early to take advantage of the early-bird discounts that can save you more than $400 on the attendee price for the Expo taking place September 9-11 at the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in Hollywood, FL.

Have a great week everyone, and feel free to leave any comments below.

Most corporate executives and HR professionals might think that the impending swine flu pandemic is strictly a public health issue, but if you are thinking that way, you would be wrong.

It turns out that the impending swine flu pandemic is also a major corporate issue that needs to be addressed with decisive plans and clear communications. Fear surrounding the illness is already affecting employee productivity and attendance, as parents in regions impacted are being forced to find child care or stay home as schools close for weeks at a time.

The potential damage that this particular flu can cause corporations is further intensified by the fact that many corporate staffs are already incredibly lean, making it difficult to tolerate extended spikes in absenteeism. If your corporation hasn’t set aside some time to assess how this threat can negatively impact your business and your employees, the time to act is now. keep reading…

Despite a first quarter loss, Monster executives told analysts Thursday the company is in good shape considering the sour global economy and that it is growing in brand strength and market share.

“We are gaining market share,” declared CEO Sal Iannuzzi. “We are declining less than the competition.” Instead of splitting a million dollars among Monster and one or two other job boards, Iannuzzi said employers are spending less but giving it all to Monster.

“Competition is stiff,” he said. Price discounting so steep he called it “stunning,” is common. And though he said Monster won’t “give away the product,” his marching orders to the sales force are “take market share.”

He didn’t mention any other company, but it was unmistakable that he was talking about CareerBuilder and, to a less extent, HotJobs. Neither company reports its financials completely. CareerBuilder is a private company owned by a group of newspaper companies and Microsoft and voluntarily shares its North American revenue. (Those figures weren’t available.) Hotjobs is a division of Yahoo, which does not separately identify the revenue.

In pursuit of share Monster spent $27 million during the first quarter on marketing its redesigned site and its new features. After a five year absence Monster returned as a Super Bowl advertiser this year, and also partnered with the NFL in a fan promotion to hire a “Director of Fandemonium.”

CFO Tim Yates said the $27 million was specifically for the launch of the new Monster site and won’t be repeated again this year. Without that expense and an additional $15 million in such one time expenses as $4.6 million in severance payments and legal expenses of $3 million connected with the stock option backdating affair, Monster would have been in the black for the quarter.

Even so the loss, amounting to $10.3 million or 9 cents a share, beat Wall Street’s estimates of an 11 cent per share loss. It came on revenue of $254 million, Monster’s smallest since the end of 2005.

Monster’s expense cutting over the last several months has been significant, Iannuzzi and Yates reported. Salaries, administrative costs, and office expenses totaled $184.5 million for the quarter compared to the same quarter last year when those expenses amounted to $214.3 million. A big part of that comes from a 400 employee decline in staff.

To further reduce expenses, Yates said the company has eliminated cash bonuses, paying them in stock options, and has halted contributions to employee 401(k) accounts.

During the financial call, the marketing expense and the product launch came in for close questioning, as analysts asked about the effectiveness of the new site features with users and customers. keep reading…

In normal economic times, search firms make a lot of money placing candidates corporations should be able to find on their own.

“How do they do it and what can be done to prevent them from doing it to us?” is a question many corporate recruiting leaders are asking. The underlying premise here is that if corporate recruiting departments could be organized and run like contingency recruiters and executive search firms, lots of money would be saved.

Despite the promise of the objective, very few companies have been able to successfully pull it off.

keep reading…