Surveys of economists had predicted the numbers would be closer to 150,000 to 175,000 lost jobs and an unemployment rate of 9.9 percent. The spike pushed the unemployment rate to its highest point since April 1983 and the job loss was the 22nd consecutive month of declines.

The largest losses were in construction, manufacturing, and retail trade. The three sectors and finance are responsible for the biggest share of job losses since the recession officially began in December 2007. Construction alone has lost 1.6 million jobs. Manufacturing has lost 2.1 million.

The rate of job losses is well off its highs from earlier this year, some of it due to government stimulus efforts. But the numbers still portend a slow recovery for the labor market.

With the latest numbers, the government says 15.7 million are unemployed. An additional 11.7 million people are working part time because they can’t find full-time jobs or had given up searching for at least the four weeks before the survey period.

Unemployment, however, is not evenly spread across the labor force. It’s worst for teenagers who are part of the labor force, at 27.6 percent, and lowest — 4.7 percent — for those 25 and older with at least a four-year college degree.

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Other indices, including the Monster Employment Index, showed little movement. Consumer Confidence, which had improved in the last few months, declined, as did the number of new jobs posted online.

In Canada, the jobless rate hit 8.6 percent as employers there cut 43,000, surprising labor market forecasters who were expecting a gain of 10,000 jobs.

Sal Guatieri, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto, told Bloomberg.com, that the report was a “big disappointment.” “Our economy seems to be struggling out of the recession and the weak employment just fits into that trend.”

Another economist, speaking about the U.S. job outlook, but who could just as well have been talking about Canada, too, told BusinessWeek: “This recovery is shaping up to be a jobless one, just like the last two.”

Added Paul Ashworth, an economist with Capital Economics in Ontario, “Our concern is that, unlike the last recovery, with credit still tight, households aren’t going to be able to smooth their consumption using credit until the labor market eventually strengthens.”

Aw, come on. Of course you’ve looked yourself up on the Internet. Almost half of all Internet users did in 2007. The latest survey puts the number at 59 percent.

And if you really, really haven’t then you may want to retake recruiting 101.

Just as companies no longer are masters of their own brand, neither are you. There are sites to rate teachers, cops, doctors, even parts of your anatomy. Then there are the pictures and comments well-meaning friends have posted about you.

Google yourself and you may find those bleery-eyed conference party photos of you rank higher than than does the whitepaper you authored. Or, you may discover you rank lower than the death notices of others with like names.

To help remedy that there’s PlaceYourName.com. It’s a personal marketing service that promises to help users “manage and control what is seen about them when their names are searched online.”

For $50 and a few minutes of your time you get a press release (which you write, they edit) sent to an online newsservice and PlaceYourName submits your name and some bio info and your photo to what it says are four “high ranking websites, blogs, and news portals, viewable in search engine results.”

For $100, you get double the distribution plus a vanity website of your own.

There’s nothing PlaceYourName will do that you can’t do yourself. But the truth is most people don’t. Sarah Welstead, a Toronto recruiting marketing professional, a few months ago wrote about the importance of building a personal brand. Yesterday, ERE offered a webinar on this topic: “Creating a Personal Brand: Increasing Your Online Presence.” Presented by Toby Nathan of RecruitaStar is the nuts and bolts of how you build a personal brand and it’s archived here.

There’s also a valuable personal branding blog started by Dan Schawbel, a guru of personal branding.

While a service like PlaceYourName.com can get you started — and you may want to consider it and other branding tools like Personavita or VisualCV if you lack the discipline — in order to sustain the effort, you need endurance, and something to offer.

Details are sketchy, but Dave Mendoza did post an email about the hire to his site Six Degrees From Dave. The email is from a recruiter for Nelson Staffing and says the firm got a contract from “A Major (and pretty exciting) employer in the South Bay here in N. CA.” The email doesn’t name the employer, but it says Nelson needs to find “200 upbeat and enthusiastic recruiters and sourcers for them — by next week.”

While California’s Bay Area — home to Silicon Valley — is crowded with tech employers, few are big enough to support a need for 200 recruiters. Google is. The company laid off about 100 contract recruiters at the beginning of this year, which was 25 percent of its recruiting force. The fact that the company is now hiring 200 suggests that it expects to grow in 2010.

Some 70 percent of the new positions are at company headquarters. The rest are in other parts of the U.S. and in other parts of the world. All the positions are onsite; “no work from home.”

I’m guessing that the positions on the Nelson job board for recruiter and sourcer in Mountain View (Google’s HQ) are the same ones referred to in the email. If so, the pay scale appears to be in the $40-$45 per hour range for sourcers and $60-$70 for recruiters.

Incidentally, Mendoza’s post doesn’t mention Google by name. Nor would he confirm that the online search and advertising company is behind the hiring. Other sources, however, did confirm that it is Google.

Mendoza’s blog post has all the details — they are also in the online job postings — but briefly, here’s what Nelson Staffing says it wants:

• Experienced Recruiter (minimum 5 years total in both corporate and/or agency recruiting) – Technical,  sales, product marketing. Recruiting experience on resume in ’09;
• Recruiters (minimum 4 years recent exp) – Candidate sourcing;
• Sourcers (minimum 3 years solid recent exp) – Ability to reach passive candidates – exceptionally internet savvy;
• Recruiting Coordinators (minimum 2 years in an HR support or recruiting support role) – heavy scheduling, process management.

The Conference Board’s monthly Help-Wanted OnLine Data Series reported that online job postings dropped by 83,000 in October. The number of newly posted jobs dropped by 24,000.

“The September and October numbers are a further indication that, thus far, the recovery is weak,” says Gad Levanon, senior economist at The Conference Board. “Labor demand is a leading indicator of employment, and the numbers indicate that employment is not likely to rise for the rest of this year.”

That’s bad news for the nation’s 15 million unemployed workers, whose numbers are only expected to swell when the official government report for October is released Friday. One survey of labor economists predicts the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will report that 175,000 jobs disappeared during the month. Another survey predicts the number will be closer to 150,000. Either way, the unemployment rate, 9.8 percent in September, is also expected to rise.

Only a few days old and the beginning of the seasonal hiring slowdown anyway, November is starting off with news of a layoff of 8,000 workers by Johnson & Johnson. The pharmaceutical company said its layoff of between 6 and 7 percent of its global workforce will save it $800-$900 million.

Despite some positive manufacturing and economic news in the last several days, workers are still struggling to find work.

A report from job board operator Beyond.com says 47 percent of the job seekers to its 15,000+ websites reported being recently laid off. Another 22 percent said they are looking because they are unsatisfied or insecure in their current job.

Of the job seekers responding to the quarterly survey on the Beyond.com network, 7.7 percent said they have been looking for a year or more. That’s a 20 percent increase from the previous quarter (April-June 2009) when 6.43 percent reported their job search was taking longer than a year.

The Beyond.com report doesn’t provide numbers or a more detailed breakdown, so it’s not possible to say how many of those are unemployed. However, the BLS September report said that among the unemployed, 35.6 percent were out of work more than 27 weeks, about the time when unemployment benefits begin to run out.

On the Beyond.com network, two-thirds of the job seekers posting resumes had five or more years of experience. The biggest percentage jump in candidates from the second to the third quarters has been among those with 21 years or more experience, suggesting older workers are having a tougher time getting reemployed. No surprise, at least on the Beyond network, where 76 percent of the job postings were for positions requiring less than a year experience. That’s up from the 55 percent recorded in the previous quarter.

Tomorrow, Monster releases its monthly employment index. It’s been stagnant since the beginning of the year, rising a little, then falling back. In September the index was at 119. In September of 2008 it was at 160.

To add to the doldrums, the Consumer Confidence Index released last week by The Conference Board for October was 47.7, down from September’s revised 53.4.

Purello’s departure marks the third change in the CEO office since Mullarkey left the job in 2006. His successor, Deepak Gupta, was gone less than a year later, succeeded by in February 2008 by Purello, who held general manager positions with Workstream subsidiary 6FigureJobs and the career networks business. Purello had been with the company since 2003.

The company has also gone through two CFOs and had a complete change in every C-level position. This morning’s announcement said Andrew Hinchliff was rejoining the company as senior vice president of North American sales. He previously held the job from 2001-2003.

Workstream hasn’t made a profit at least since it began reporting its numbers publicly in 1999. For the most recent quarter, it lost $360,000 on sales of $4.2 million. That compares to a $2.1 million loss on sales of $5.6 million for the same period in 2008.

(The company’s fiscal year runs from June 1 through May 31, so the most recent quarter is the company’s first for the 2010 fiscal year.)

In its last fiscal year, Workstream lost $4.9 million compared to the $52.6 million loss for the 2008 fiscal year. That loss included a $28 million hit for a writedown of goodwill.

An expected merger with human capital management and outsource payroll company Empagio fell apart in mid-June 2008.

The financial turmoil has taken a toll on Workstream’s stock price, which sank to an all-time low of  2 cents a share last December. Though it recovered and rose to a year high of 48 cents in May, today’s price is 28 cents a share, down a penny on the day.

The stock trades on the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board, an exchange typically for very low-priced stocks,  following its delisting by NASDAQ in the spring for failing to meet exchange requirements.

Despite all that, Workstream’s products have won praise from HR analysts. TalentCenter 7.0, released in fall 2007, was called a “truly integrated” HR platform and “not just a bunch of disparate applications” by Leighanne Levensaler, principal analyst with Bersin & Associates.

Job board 6FigureJobs won a place on Peter Weddle’s User’s Choice popularity list this year. It was also named a top 100 job site by Weddle.

And its Workstream Compensation won HRarchitect’s “Beauty Pageant” in April for compensation management systems.

In assuming the CEO position, Mullarkey said in a prepared statement that, “It is my firm belief that this company, now 10 years of age, has significant opportunities for substantial growth. The Board of Directors has asked me to return as our leader in order to accelerate the timelines for this growth, and for a return to long-term profitability, which our shareholders so rightfully expect.”

Revenue, however, was $215 million, $8 million below what analysts expected. Sales in North America continued their recession-fueled decline, dropping 39 percent from the same quarter a year ago, and down from the $102 million in Q2 of this year. International sales were off 41 percent from the prior year, but off only 4.4 percent from the $89 million posted in Q2. An unfavorable exchange rate took a $7.4 million bite.

Monster eked out the small profit by tightening expenses. Salary costs were off almost $24 million as compared to the same quarter last year. Marketing and promotion was down $10 million, and another $12 million came out of administrative costs.

Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi said in the press release announcing the results, “We maintained strict financial discipline during the third quarter while preserving our financial strength.”

During the conference call with analysts, held before the market opening this morning, Iannuzzi reiterated his emphasis on controlling expenses, but warned that he expected little improvement in revenue or profit during the current quarter. Sales, he said, would be flat or slightly down. That’s typical of the October to December quarter for all recruitment advertising; employers cut back on hiring during this period to limit year-end expenses and also because of holiday distractions.

Monster’s stock price was off about 4 percent in afternoon trading, selling for just under $16 a share.

Bloomberg News blamed the sales decline for the stock drop, quoting Mark Marcon, a Milwaukee-based analyst for Robert W. Baird & Co., saying, “They are one of the few employment-related companies that reported worse-than-expected revenue.”

CareerBuilder, a privately owned company, reported its North American sales at $135 million, the same revenue the company reported for the previous quarter. CareerBuilder voluntarily reports only its North American revenue, but not international sales or any expenses.

The new sites, identical in design and structure, made their appearance earlier this month. Among them are Atlanta.jobs, Boston.jobs, Mexico.jobs, and India.jobs.

“We just started pushing them out,” says Chad Sowash, VP of business development for DirectEmployers, a non-profit HR consortium, that has recruiting as its focus. Among its services is the Job Central job board, to which members can post jobs without additional fee.

“It’s a new playing field,” Sowash adds. “What this is going to do is allow thousands more, perhaps tens of thousands more” sites where job seekers can look for jobs.

Assuming job seekers ever become aware of the existence of a domain offering only jobs and career information, then those looking for opportunities in a specific geography — Atlanta, for example — need only enter that area and the extension .jobs. Those looking for an occupation-specific opportunity enter the title and the .jobs extension.

Members of the DirectEmployers consortium can request the creation of any site name they think will be of benefit, said Sowash, suggesting an oil company might want to use  refinery.jobs for its openings.

“It won’t belong to any company, but if a company wants us to offer a name, we can. The registrar isn’t selling these domains. They still have them,” Sowash explained. “We can light up every combination someone can think of.”

Tom Embrescia, CEO of Employ Media, the administrator and manager — registrar, in Internet parlance — of the .jobs domain, said the venture with DirectEmployers is a “great way to see what the world wants.”

The domain — technically a sponsored top-level domain — was pitched to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) by Employ Media and its partner the Society for Human Resource Management. The proposal, approved in 2005, argued that a .jobs extension would make it easy for job seekers to find the career site of individual companies and would provide a modicum of protection against scam job postings.

Companies could only get a .jobs address by using the company name and by pledging to adhere to the SHRM code of ethics.

Although about 15,000 companies signed up for the .jobs address, job seekers are largely unaware of its existence. As a consequence, most .jobs addresses get little traffic.

Building sites on the “reserved” occupational and geographic addresses, says Embrescia, is a marketing experiment. “It’s a beta test,” he says, explaining later in the conversation, “We need to build consumer awareness that these (addresses) exist.”

Besides providing the technology to power the job boards, DirectEmployers’ dozens of Fortune 500 and 1000 members will be encouraged to promote them. “Now I’ve got Fortune 1000 companies working,” Embrescia beamed.

Besides members of DirectEmployers, other firms with a .jobs domain address will also be able to post their jobs to the new sites.

For member companies posting jobs to Job Central, the additional placement on geographic and occupational sites will be automatic, Sowash told me. They are also likely to get a premium posting position.

Non-members, who own a .jobs address, might have to post their jobs manually or pay a fee for automation.

Others who want to post to these sites might have to pay a posting fee, or have some other limitation.

“The rules haven’t been hammered out,” says Sowash. There’s also a 40-company advisory group providing input on site names, practices, and feedback on the design and functionality of the job boards, which, Sowash is quick to point out, don’t look like job boards. “These are not going to look like your father’s job board,” he vows.

I asked Sowash whether he and DirectEmployers expected push back or opposition to its exclusive deal with Employ Media. “Yeah,” he acknowledged, “we’ll probably hear from some people who are not too happy.” But he didn’t anticipate resistance from the job boards, most of whom are struggling in the economy and couldn’t take on a project of this magnitude.

Bob Etheridge, a co-founder of JobCircle and a former VP of another job board, GettheJob, says he suspects “job board owners are walking the fence, trying to determine are they friends or are they foes.”

There’s suspicion now that Employ Media is not only a names registrar, but “they are getting in the publisher business.”

Those quoted here and others who talked with me either for background or anonymously all supported DirectEmployers for its aggressiveness and initiative.

DirectEmployers approached Employ Media with a proposal almost a year ago, but Embrescia said he wasn’t ready then. Conversation resumed about the time Embrescia publicly floated the idea of selling off the reserved names.

“They had a good plan and when we were ready we talked with them,” Employ Media’s Embrescia said. Their facility with the technology, flexibility, and non-profit status, and their enthusiasm were convincing factors.

Still, a top executive with a leading job board who asked not to be named, said he initially was upset over the lack of openness in the process of developing the joint venture. Now, though, he doubts the new sites will do anything more than simply add to the already cluttered job board environment.

Coming at it from a different perspective, Gerry Crispin, CareerXroads co-founder and a leading recruitment consultant, complained that the latest turn means an end to “the embedded, implied promise” that all the jobs on a .jobs site would be legitimate and are those of the company whose name appeared before the extension.

“It no longer has the same aspirational goals,” laments Crispin, a member of the original SHRM advisory group that supported the .jobs creation. “It’s still milk, but there’s no guarantee it’s pasteurized.”

An indignant Twitter post by one of those whose account with The Guardian jobs site was compromised says she received an email from the newspaper advising her of the illegal access and suggesting she subscribe to an identity protection service.

“got the guardian hack email – they suggest I buy identity fraud protection services. Hang on, who let people steal my information?” reads the tweet by Joelle Nebbe-Mornod, a technology consultant and former CTO now in the U.K.

The site itself gives no hint of the hack, until you scroll almost to the bottom of the home page where, under a heading of Workplace News, there is a short item headlined: Guardian jobs site – Security Breach. It links to a page of more detailed information.

There, The Guardian reports that the site is now secure and adds, “It is clear that only a minority of Guardian Jobs users are at risk. Some of the data which appears to have been stolen is up to two years old. We have emailed the approximately half a million users whose data may have been compromised. This is out of the total of 10,328,290 unique users the site has per calendar year. The USA jobs site has not been affected.”

In an FAQ, The Guardian recommends users whose accounts were compromised obtain fraud protection at their own expense.

“The Guardian, in common with our users is also a victim of this crime and we deeply regret that this breach has occurred. We believe our technology and security measures were more than compliant but regrettably the threat from criminal hackers is continually evolving. Whilst our investigation is continuing we suggest that each individual should decide whether to follow the guidance recommended by the police and meet any associated costs.”

The Guardian’s British site is powered by Madgex Job Board Software. The U.S. job site is run by Indeed.com.

The Guardian says that no personal accounts were accessed, but other, potentially sensitive, information was. “Job application data, material such as covering letters, and CVs. We have no reason to believe that any financial or bank data was compromised in this incident.”

Police are investigating the access. No technical details have been released, however some technical publications have offered possible methods.

This is the second major security breach of a British job board this year. Monster’s UK site was hacked in January and some 4.5 million records were stolen.

But Sidewiki’s potential for deconstructing a brand is enormous. Unlike all the networking sites, Twitter posts, and job board forums where the disaffected go to vent their anger, Sidewiki makes it possible to post these comments directly to your site.

Just imagine the mischief a disgruntled job seeker or employee can wreak by posting their story directly to your site. Side by side with your video of happy employees talking about the fun and interesting work they do is a post — or multiple posts — from current and former workers denouncing your message as bogus.

If Sidewiki were to catch on and gain even a percentage of the users that Twitter has, the impact is easy enough to see.

Says Mark Hornung, senior vice president, strategy, at Bernard Hodes, “What that means for corporate employment sites is that they need to be monitored much more aggressively.”

But what you do about negative posts is much more difficult. As Sullivan observed in his article, “The new owners (of your brand) are a complicated mix of individuals who use a variety of communication channels to influence your brand without your knowledge, consent, or guidance.”

It should be needless to say that Sidewiki also offers significant benefits. Users can post helpful suggestions for others consulting, say, a how-to page of a site. Or offer additional places to look for information. Employers can even benefit from positive comments and helpful feedback.

So even though this article addresses the negative side of Sidewiki, there are plenty of pluses and lots of potential value for users in the application.

Before we go further, let’s talk about what Sidewiki is. It is a type of message posting system that attaches to web addresses and can be seen by users accessing the address who also have the Sidewiki app installed on their browser.

There’s nothing really new about Sidewiki. Similar tools — Purple Bunny, iComment for instance — have been around for years. None of them have gained broad enough acceptance to have a significant impact.

Google, however, has a big advantage over the other commenting tools. It’s packaging Sidewiki with its popular Google Toolbar that has been installed by millions of users. The Internet Explorer version alone from CNET has almost 4 million downloads.

“It’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict if Sidewiki will get traction or how large it will grow,” says Hornung, who leads Hodes’ employer branding practice.

“Practically speaking the growth of Sidewiki will be dampened by several factors,” he adds, citing the relative lack of anonymity to the postings, the need to download and install the toolbar, and the likelihood that corporate IT will fence off downloads of Google Toolbar.

Still, there are plenty of ways around the issues and with Google simplifying the installation of its toolbar, even novices can manage the feat.

“Sidewiki may become interesting only to those who have it, mostly the tech ‘in crowd’ who bother to download and use it,” says Hornung. “Employers should be concerned about it today, especially if they are in a technical field.

“The techie crowd will (by definition) be the early adopters and a negative buzz from Sidewiki —- especially if it appears that the employer is unaware of what is going on (kind of like goofing off in high school while the teacher was writing on the board) —- could be trouble.”

Already comments have begun to appear here and there on websites. Monster, for instance, has two comments posted on its main page. One is a pitch for another job board and the other is a political polemic that has almost nothing to do with Monster.

Google has thrown site owners a bene in that they get to post their own message, which will always appear at the top of the wiki, even as other posts slide down when more relevant posts rise up the list. In spot checking several job boards and corporate career sites, I didn’t find any employer posts. Hornung did, providing the Raytheon screenshot accompanying this article.

Curiously, though, he doesn’t recommend that employers make a peremptory post.

“I would take a ‘wait and see’ approach,” he counsels. “If there is no activity, why provoke it?…

“As some observers have pointed out, Sidewiki really creates a ‘bifurcated’ Web experience: those with and those without Sidewiki will see Web sites differently. To those who are unaware of, or don’t care about Sidewiki, why create a commotion when there isn’t any?”

He says his clients are just now beginning to get their arms around the notion that an old tool may be getting some new life breathed into it. “I think the hardest part is to grasp the concept that people may comment on your Web site whether you want them to or not. Some view it as online vandalism,” Hornung says.

While many corporate communications departments already subscribe to monitoring programs or otherwise track what Internet users say or write about the company, Hornung recommends that the HR department install Sidewiki to monitor the corporate career site. ” Sidewiki can go on individual pages such as benefits descriptions or diversity programs, and it is unlikely that (marketing or communications department monitors) will drill down too deeply on an HR site when they’re trying to keep up with the hobgoblins elsewhere.

“I believe HR must be more proactive in monitoring and policing it,” he says, especially since some posts may involve employment law issues that aren’t readily spotted by others. Hodes, among others, provides a brand monitoring service for employers and has added Sidewiki posts to its scrutiny.

And when a negative comment is spotted? “If you feel you have to respond, respect the opinion. Don’t be defensive,” warns Hornung, who likens online discourse to a conversation. “If something is really just venting, you can ignore it.

“The essential lesson is you have to be thick skinned. You have to accept it.”

Dice.com, the IT job board, introduced a new search result report that allows recruiters to toggle between the results that meet their criteria and other candidates who also match the criteria, but who haven’t been active on the site for a year.

Tom Silver, senior VP North America of parent company Dice Holdings, said the thought of offering additional results came about because more than half the searches on Dice are for candidates who have been active in the last 90 days. In their quest for fresh job seekers, recruiters were missing candidates with equally good skills.

“So,” says Silver, “We wanted to make it easier to see older candidates. We’re just trying to prompt recruiters to look at the entire database.”

Recruiters now get the results they asked for, as well as a tab that allows them to see candidates who first submitted a resume more than a year ago and haven’t been back since. The passive candidate results have all been filtered by Dice to make sure the email addresses are still current.

Why pick a year instead of six months? For the same reason eggs are sold by the dozen and reunions are celebrated in 5- and 10-year increments. “When you talk to people you hear they want to go a year back,” Silver explains. “It’s a natural calendar thing.”

Dice’s new feature is a curious twist on the usual recruiter pursuit of the passive candidate, a subject that’s come in for some ethical give and take in this economy.

Job boards typically don’t see a lot of searches for candidates a year or more old.  Job board sourcing is almost by definition a search for candidates who can fill a req now, so limiting results to 60 or 90 days is fairly typical. Job board denizens are, by definition, active job seekers. Thus aged resumes are inventory that is just not all that valuable, one reason the big boards encourage candidates to regularly update their profiles and resumes.

By offering up vintage candidates who now may have another year or more of experience and maybe even stronger skills, Dice is encouraging recruiters to look at job boards a little differently — as a rich repository of passive candidates, which may be why there is no current plan to offer up fresh resumes to recruiters searching for older ones.

It’s actually quite a clever approach:  Give recruiters exactly what they want, but tease them with easy access to vintage candidates they wouldn’t otherwise see. A value-add that may raise the value of aging inventory, and benefit once-active candidates.

What do recruiters who have tried it say about the new feature? It’s “yummy,” Silver told me. Seriously.

Tracked

This new site is not so much tool as resource. It got a positive review by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch the other day. He described the newly out of stealth site as “LinkedIn meets Yahoo Finance, on lots of steroids.”

At its center, Tracked.com is a financial information site, so it gives you all the usual data elements you would expect. It’s what comes next that makes Tracked more valuable. Besides the public companies, Tracked has bits and pieces on many private companies, too. The more public the private company, the more data available.

The LinkedIn analogy comes from the executives and key personnel that are part of a company profile. Tracked’s depth on them, however, doesn’t match what LinkedIn or ZoomInfo offer — not yet, anyway.  But as it layers on a network and a commenting capability, its content sources reach beyond what you are likely to find searching the public databases.

And keep in mind, Tracked.com is free.

To get the full value out of Tracked, you need to register and establish an account. Then you get to create tracking lists of companies, people, industries, and the like. This is an important difference from Yahoo Finance, which, while useful for top news, doesn’t offer near the depth of Tracked.com.

Tracked.com isn’t likely to replace your usual research sites any time soon. But its founder Mike Yavonditte has broad experience in the interactive world. In 2007 he sold ad service Quigo.com to AOL and a year later began work on Tracked.com. His progress and plans for the financial service so impressed Union Square Ventures, the New York City VC firm, that it kicked in heartily to the $11.5 million Tracked has so far raised.

The company reported earning 5 cents a share or $3 million versus the average 2 cents a share analysts had estimated it would report for the quarter ended Sept. 31.  Though revenue was down a third to $26.7 million from last year’s $39.6 million, expenses were cut by 28 percent. The $3 million profit was just under half the $6.4 million Dice earned for the same quarter in 2008.

Revenue at the DCS unit which includes the company’s flagship Dice.com and also ClearanceJobs.com, declined from $27.2 million to $19.5 million. The company also took a $900,000 hit from an unfavorable exchange rate during part of the year, particularly in its eFinancial Careers operations, which have a strong overseas presence.

Despite the tough economy, company executives predicted Dice will do better for the year than analysts expect.

Officials predict revenue of $25 million for the current quarter and $108.3 million for the year. A Thomson Reuters survey of analysts expects the company’s 12 month revenue to be closer to $106 million.

In announcing the financial results, company Chairman, President, and CEO Scot Melland said, “The tone of our customer conversations improved during the third quarter as some customers and prospects became more optimistic about the business climate. This mild improvement is not consistent across geographies or customer segments, but it is encouraging.”

Norwest Venture Partners, a $3 million participant in an earlier round of financing, put in $1.8 million. The balance of $2.8 million came from new investor Storm Ventures.

Originally based in Dallas and now in Silicon Valley, RiseSmart cleverly developed a technology approach to classic outplacement, focusing on providing job leads, resume editing, and networking suggestions. Its Job Search Concierge uses offshore researchers to scour online sources for job leads matching candidate interests. Instead of searching, candidates spend their time contacting companies and networking.

The Job Search Concierge is a consumer-focused service which individuals in the $100k salary category can subscribe to for $43.95 a month. The service has been likened to The Ladders, with the searching and filtering done by others rather than the job seeker.

As a human-mediated job search service, RiseSmart doesn’t have a lot of competition. JobSerf, coincidentally also founded in Texas, searches and also applies for jobs on behalf of candidates. It charges either $49 or $98 a week, depending on the number of hours candidates want.

RiseSmart, however, packages Job Search Concierge with phone consultation, resume writing, a bio/profile for posting to social and business networking sites, and some career coaching to provide a low cost outplacement service it calls Transition Concierge.

Unlike classic outplacement services that provide a mix of  counseling, coaching, and personal career consultation, RiseSmart’s focus is on getting the outplaced worker a new job as quickly as possible.

Since the start of the recession, its target market has been companies with layoffs and staff reductions. RiseSmart says its client list now includes some of the Fortune 500.

The company got its first seed money of $1.5 million after its launch in 2007 from a group of recruitment industry heavyweights including Craig Stamm, former CFO at CareerBuilder.com and Headhunter.net, Mark Hamdan, founder and CEO of HRsmart, and Louis Ramery, senior vice president of relationship marketing at Sears Holdings Corporation.

Its first A round in June 2008 brought it $3 million from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).

NVP’s Venkat Mohan, who joined the RiseSmart board last year, said in a press release announcing the new round of investment, “RiseSmart has grown rapidly … The company has gone the extra mile to provide an excellent customer experience to both corporate clients and transitioning workers — and that has paid off in word of mouth and new business referrals.”

AutoSearch Mobile, like its full-featured — and more expensive — PC and Mac version, makes it a snap for on-the-go recruiters to search much of the public (and some of the private) web without having to know all that complicated Boolean stuff.

That sound you just heard was the collective gasp of every sourcer in the world sucking the oxygen from the atmosphere. So that we may all resume breathing, let me hasten to say every recruiter ought to know how to write a Boolean search string.

But when you’re on the train commuting to work, or on the L circumnavigating the Loop or in a carpool on the 101 freeway, it’s way easier to use a pulldown menu and a few keywords to look for candidates for that new req. Behind the scene AutoSearch Mobile converts your keywords into Boolean, then searches the web for public resumes and a handful of key business networking sites for matches.

The results can be scrolled, the first few lines of the resume showing. Find something interesting and you can expand it to read more. You can email yourself the search results right from the app.

Lori Fenstermaker, principal of AutoSearch, told me the mobile search is slicker to see than to describe. “People are usually quite surprised,” she said, when they actually try it. “It’s really easy to use.”

Like the full version, AutoSearch Mobile will find matching candidates who have posted public resumes. It also searches LinkedIn, Twitter, Jobster, and ZoomInfo. Unless you have a connection, you’ll need to do a little sleuthing to track down a candidate from those sources, but then that’s why it’s called sourcing, and not compiling.

Fenstermaker sort of stumbled into the software business. The Grand Rapids, Michigan, resident was operating a boutique talent acquisition firm when she took a class in online sourcing.

“Pretty soon I found myself spending more time writing complex Internet search strings than I was calling candidates,” Fenstermaker admits in a post on the AutoSearch website. She turned to her husband who owned a software development company and AutoSearch was born.

It proved so popular with her search clients that they began asking to license it. Now AutoSearch is a separate company and, says Fenstermaker, it occupies most of her time.

AutoSearch for the PC or Mac has plenty of competition. There’s eGrabber and TalentDrive among others.

However, mobile search utilities are still relatively rare. Most of the leading job boards have iPhone applications to help job seekers search listings. But the only direct competition for AutoSearch Mobile I’ve found is Search On the Go, which is $9.99 in the iPhone store. It’s interface isn’t quite as simple, but it does save and display search strings, a feature that AutoSearch Mobile lacks. Both apps access only a single, generic search engine: Yahoo for AutoSearch Mobile, Google for Search on the Go.

The announcement that the North Carolina recruiting blogger and widely quoted speaker sold the site popular with job seekers, as well as HR professionals, was made this morning.

The financial terms were not disclosed. Some other details, however, did leak out.  Jason Davis, CEO of RecruitingBlogs, reassured Ruettimann’s fans that she is obligated “to continue swearing. It was a major reason for all of this.”

“We’re not looking to change Punk Rock HR or move it away from what Laurie has built. It’s fantastic,” Davis said.

Ruettimann, in a video post on her site, said Davis bought the site name and its domain. She continues to post, but is also able to write for others and to continue speaking at conferences and HR events.

She told her fans that Davis, her “friend and my mentor and my adviser,” and she wrote the contract in a “really creative and clever way” to ensure that her unique point of view would continue uncompromised. Some fans expressed fear that now that it’s no longer independent, she’d be watering down her blog and her language.

As if to make the point, Ruettimann wrote about office Halloween parties advising, “I don’t care if you celebrate Halloween at work, but for the love of god, please do not ask your Human Resources team to plan the party.”

It’s admittedly pretty mild advice for Punk Rock HR. But catch the video and read the balloons, one of which says: “But I did get paid, bitches” as the ever- so-wholesome looking Ruettimann says she can’t disclose the amount.

Tepid Holiday Hiring

Elsewhere in the world of recruiting Ryla call center outsourcer says it’s gearing up for the holidays by hiring 1,500 temporary customer services reps at its Atlanta-area headquarters. Hiring is now underway and the jobs will last eight weeks.

The hiring bucks a national trend reported today by Challenger, Grey & Christmas. The outplacement firm says retailers will probably hire a few more workers than last year, but not many. And they’ll be especially choosy, since they can be, with more than 15 million Americans out of work.

Last season, 384,000 temporary and part-time workers were hired during the holiday season, which runs from now through the end of December. That was 47 percent the 721,000 hired in 2007.

“While we expect holiday hiring to improve over last year, the improvement may be slight,” said CEO John Challenger. “Retailers remain reluctant to eat into profits with higher payrolls costs and probably will be slow to add workers. With a deep and talented labor pool, retailers undoubtedly feel like they can afford to be selective.”

According to the survey conducted by Monster and Human Capital Institute, 84 percent of employers indicated they thought their were workers content because they were working. However, only 58 percent of workers said that.

For workers, the disconnect extends to their feelings about their workload, the longer hours required of them, and their willingness to give their employer the benefit of the doubt for layoffs.

“Today’s employers feel that employees are loyal due to the economic times, but the reality is they are not,” said Katherine Jones, HCI Research Fellow. “Because of this, there is a strong likelihood that when the economy turns for the better, employers could find themselves with valued employees jumping ship. This places pressure on them to put retention measures in place now.”

Monster and HCI conducted the survey in May and June to assess the impact of the recession on workers and companies. More than 700 companies and almost 5,000 passive and active job seekers participated, responding to questions about their attitudes to work, employees, their post-recession expectations, and purchasing plans.

The three-part report examines the recession’s impact from the worker’s and employer’s perspective and how the government’s stimulus program may change the workplace.

While the survey showed employers understood their workforce morale has slipped and stress is up because of the recession, it also shows that employees believe their bosses are taking advantage of the situation. Among the findings:

• 57  percent of workers believe employers are exploiting the recession to drive longer hours and lower pay from their workforces;
• Only 26 percent excuse their employers for requiring layoffs and longer hours because they believe their employer’s hands were forced by the recession;
• 58 percent believe employers are less concerned about employee retention, and 50 percent of workers are more concerned about top performers leaving than before the recession;
• 53 percent have a decreased company loyalty;
• 79 percent are more likely to be seeking jobs elsewhere.

Each of the three parts offers insights and conclusions drawn from the survey results. Equally as important is the glimpse the overall report offers of the future: Boomers won’t be retiring in the numbers once thought, thus offsetting, at least partially, the worker shortage; younger people are likely to be more inclined to seek recession-proof or at least recession-resistant jobs or self-employment, and; the general skepticism of Gen Y toward corporate America may be passed down to the following generation.

Perhaps most immediately, there may be a mass turnover of employees, especially of top performers, once companies begin hiring again.

The 1,800 word article begins, “Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.” It goes on to argue that alternatives like Twitter, social media, texting, and other communications forms are eating into email’s dominance.

The most telling point in the article comes from Jeff Teper, a Microsoft VP, who says that email was overused in the past. “Now, people can use the right tool for the right task,” he says.

To put it another way, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Recruiters, however, should be wary of too quickly abandoning email. No less an authority than Nielsen, the user analytics company, says social media usage appears to actually increase email usage. Hitwise, another analytics and business intelligence firm, says Twitter’s usage may have hit a wall. Though it can’t count the number of Tweets being sent, indicators such as accesses to Twitter profile pages and on-site searches suggest the site “Twitter appears to have hit a resistance point as of April 2009.”

The Nielsen review, a quick study to test the common belief that social media usage decreases email use, demonstrated the opposite. Blogged John Gibs, VP media analytics at Neilsen, “It actually appears that social media use makes people consume email more, not less, as we had originally assumed -– particularly for the highest social media users.”

That said, there are some generational differences in email usage. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that teenagers have decreased their usage of email. Comparing usage in 2004 with that in 2008, the Pew survey discovered 73 percent of the teens using email at the end of last year versus 89 percent in 2004. One reason, of course, is the rise in texting during that period.

Contrast that with usage by Americans at the other end of the demographic scale. Says the report, “Fully 74 percent of Internet users age 64 and older send and receive email, making email the most popular online activity for this age group.”

Even so, the Pew report observes, “Instant messaging, social networking, and blogging have gained ground as communications tools, but email remains the most popular online activity.”

It is worth noting that while  social media usage, generically, continues to grow, it is no guarantee that individual sites will. A year ago MySpace.com had two-thirds of the U.S. social media traffic. Today, it has less than a third, while Facebook’s share of the traffic tripled from 19.9 percent to 58.6 percent.

Meanwhile, time spent on MySpace declined 12 percent. On Facebook, it rose 23 percent.

“While we still expect soft results for the next few quarters, we are becoming increasingly confident in improvements made to Monster’s product offering and competitive positioning, which we believe bodes well for the company as the economy improves,” analyst Monica DiCenso wrote in a note accompanying her upgrade of the stock from neutral to “overweight.”

(In stocks, unlike body mass, an overweight recommendation is good for the company. It means the analyst issuing the recommendation believes the stock price will rise.)

On the strength of the recommendation, Monster’s stock jumped $1.25 Thursday, before closing at $18.07. It ended Wednesday at $17.10.

At midday in New York today, Monster’s stock was at $18.06.

DiCenso, who put a price target of $24 a share on the stock, said in her note to investors that she believes the company “is in a better position today than in recent years to regain some market share in the U.S. and continue its international expansion.”

Monster’s revenue from its international operations has been growing steadily over the last few years. It accounts for 40 percent of the company’s 2009 revenue as of the last report. (The company will issue its financial report for the third quarter on Oct. 29. Yahoo Finance says analyst consensus is that Monster will report $216.7 million in revenues and break even on expenses.)

JIGSAW

The business intelligence and sourcing site has upgraded its community forum, giving it a cleaner look and implementing such to-be-expected features as tagging and contributor ratings. Tags are especially welcome, given that forum posts aren’t easily searched.

No one is going to mistake the new community platform as avant garde; think of it as functional, especially so if it adopts the name “The Corner,” which is beating out “Puzzleville” in the name voting.

The company also has an iPhone app that’s going into beta. Jigsaw is looking for iPhone users willing to provide feedback to the team in exchange for being the first to use the new app to “search, download and export contacts directly.”

CEO LONGEVITY

Challenger, Gray & Christmas say CEO turnover has slowed since the dark days of September 2008 when the outplacement firm recorded 140 CEO departures. Last month, the firm counted only 105 departures.

Since the beginning of the year, 939 CEOs have left their posts, a 17 percent decline from the 1,132 departures announced through September last year.

Health care CEOs have the biggest worries when it comes to job security; 151 have left their job so far this year, the most of any sector. Government/non-profits are next with 116 departures.

RISESMART

This Silicon Valley HR startup is rightfully boasting about the latest member of its board of advisers. Pat Pittard, the former chairman, president, and CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, signed on to RiseSmart’s board, saying, “I believe in what the company is doing, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

RiseSmart has been getting noticed for its imaginative blending of traditional outplacement services with 21st century technology. The company stripped outplacement of the group coaching, counseling, and consulting to focus on the job getting. Services are delivered online and by phone, keeping overhead to a minimum.

Considering the cost and the focus of the program, it’s not surprising that Pittard called RiseSmart’s business model “disruptive.” He said it is “transforming how corporate outplacement works – leveraging technology, along with a laser-like focus on results, to squeeze out the inefficiencies of traditional outplacement services.”

First announced two years ago in August and almost as quickly blocked by the courts, the “no match” rule required employers to fire workers who couldn’t resolve discrepancies in their Social Security information. The rule took its name from the letters the Social Security Administration sent to employers informing them there was no match between SSA records and what the employer provided.

Homeland Security laid out a fairly rigorous series of steps that, if followed, immunized an employer from legal consequences for hiring the “no match” worker. Termination of the employee was one of the steps when a mismatch couldn’t be resolved.

The AFL-CIO, ACLU, and other worker and immigrants’ rights groups sued and won a restraining order preventing the “no match” rule from being implemented. Other groups, including agri-businesses, farm owners, and some builders also opposed the rule, despite its safe harbor provision.

Among the arguments the groups made was the existence of errors in Social Security records, and that the rule would keep employers from hiring foreign-born workers, or those who appeared to be, rather than risk a no match ruling.

With the court siding with the labor groups, and the growing emphasis being placed on the E-Verify program, not much has happened with the no match program. The U.S. Social Security Administration has even stopped sending no match letters.

Finally in July, Homeland Security threw in the towel, saying it would rescind its proposal. That was done Wednesday when the government published a final rule in the Federal Register. The recession takes effect on Nov. 6th.

“It’s a good best practice to have,” counsels Christopher Olmsted, a specialist in labor and employment law and partner in the San Diego firm Barker, Olmsted & Barnier. Now, in the wake of a new federal appeals court decision, proper vetting is “even more important,” he says.

Last month, the 2nd District Court of Appeal based in New York, said an employer is liable for the misdeeds of its hiring agents, even if it considers them independent contractors.

Said the court: “We hold that an employer may be held liable for discrimination by third parties, including independent contractors, that the employer authorizes to make hiring decisions on its behalf.”

The case arose when a candidate was rejected for a job showing apartments to potential tenants because, the candidate alleged, he was too old.  Michael Halpert, the candidate, sued Manhattan Apartments, the rental company. But it said it wasn’t liable because one of its  independent contractors was involved and under previous decisions it wasn’t responsible for the actions of a third-party recruiter.

The New York Appeals court rejected that contention and ruled, “If a company gives an individual authority to interview job applicants and make hiring decisions on the company’s behalf, then the company may be held liable if that individual improperly discriminates against applicants on the basis of age.”

In Olmsted’s view, an RPO or HR outsourcer given authority to make hiring offers, would become an agent of the employer. And under the law the employer is responsible for the actions of the agent.

At the other extreme is simple name generation or application screening where all candidates meeting the job requirements are submitted.  “If they are just shuffling paper, then there’s no hiring authority involved,” Olmsted says.

But what about those (very common) situations where a third party is retained to source and screen candidates? Or conduct a first interview? Or rank them, and present the list?

That’s where things get murkier, he agreed. “The case does very little to tell when this agency agreement arises,” he says. “As soon as the recruiter is given some responsibility… then the question arises.”

In an analysis he wrote for the law firm’s website, Olmsted advises, “When hiring recruiters or other service providers, engage in ‘HR due diligence’ by confirming their understanding of and commitment to EEO practices.”

Technically, the opinion of the New York appeals court applies only to federal courts in the second district. However, like Olmsted, attorneys across the country are advising employers to be especially careful when hiring outside recruiters.