The technology insider website TechCrunch says Yahoo has launched a curious recruitment advertising program that involves buying keywords against the names of former employees.

Just before Christmas, TechCrunch reported that Delicious founder and former Yahoo executive Joshua Schachter discovered that searching on his name on Google brought up a recruitment ad for Yahoo. He announced in a tweet saying “yahoo’s running recruiting ads against my name. classy.”

Schachter joined Yahoo when it bought Delicious in 2005. He left three years later, part of a mass exodus of top talent that left the company reeling .

Turns out that Schachter isn’t the only ex-Yahooer to find ads popping up on their Google search results pages.  TechCrunch said PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf is among the keyworded.

No comment yet from Yahoo.

Speaking of Yahoo, CEO Carol Bartz confirmed what has been an open secret: HotJobs is for sale. peHUB reported last summer that HotJobs was being shopped, but Yahoo wouldn’t confirm the report, though Bartz had indicated the company was weighing its strategic importance.

Now, though, Bartz told an investment conference earlier this month that Yahoo would sell HotJobs “if we got a decent price…”

What might that price be? Bartz didn’t say, but probably not enough to make a significant difference to the $6 billion (in revenue) company.

Last I heard, HotJobs was at least a contributor to Yahoo’s bottom line, netting around $50 million annually. That number is probably a little higher, since that figure is more than a year old.

Selling HotJobs is not going to be easy. Dice took a look. Monster supposedly also has. Don’t know about CareerBuilder, but I would have to assume the company at least kicked the tires. May have even done a bit more, since HotJobs has an extensive newspaper partner network and CareerBuilder is a newspaper-owned holding.

To make sense, any deal would have to include a traffic agreement with Yahoo and the newspaper partner network. HotJobs is the job channel for Yahoo.com, which is the world’s biggest traffic destination. Yahoo funnels traffic to HotJobs from links on the site while the several hundred newspaper partners do likewise.

(Yahoo used to maintain a list of its partner sites, as most job boards do. But the link now returns an error message. That may be part of a general corporate indifference to the site. The press center link to “Press Releases and Info Flashes” hasn’t been updated since 2008.)