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We end this week with a collection of odds and ends and surveys from our overflowing inbox.

Our first item is especially worth reading for those of you with teenagers. (If your offspring is graduating from college this spring, skim this, but don’t miss the next item.)

Since you’re a recruiter, you already know that jobs for millennials, let alone seasonal work for 16-19 year-olds, is tough to come by. That’s not likely to change, says Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

“While teen employment is likely to see further improvement this summer, job gains will probably once again fall short of pre-recession figures,” said John A. Challenger, CEO of the global outplacement firm. Last year about 1.1 million teens got jobs. More will find jobs this summer, but not a lot more. keep reading…

For those who thought Manpower’s contract with the state of South Dakota was big, try Australia on for size.

ManpowerGroup has landed a contract with the Australian Defence Force, one that’s worth at least $400 million for five years, and could even get extended to five more. It is an extension of an existing relationship and will involve soup-to-nuts recruiting: recruitment marketing, medical and psychological assessments, offers, and more.

The Aussie Navy, Army, and Air Force handle about 20,000-40,000 candidates annually out of 16 national recruiting centers. These candidates include everything from sailors to soldiers to engineers, doctors, lawyers, and pilots.

The new contract begins in November 2012; Manpower calls it the “largest and most complex RPO program in the world.”

The company recently “crushed” Wall Street expectations of its earnings.

Monster is a winner today on Wall Street; its stock up more than 16 percent at one point after reporting earnings that were double what analysts forecast.

It closed at $8.93; up 9.44 percent.

In the first quarter, the company saved its way to a 4 cent per share profit, not including one-time expenses or income. Though less than last year’s 5 cents, the earnings reflected the commitment Chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi made in previous financial reports to strengthen the company and keep a lid on expenses. keep reading…

Dice had a strong first quarter, as quickening tech hiring boosted the company’s revenues, helping it to beat analysts’ estimates by a comfortable 2 cents a share.

Dice Holdings, Inc., owner of several niche job boards, reported earning $8.6 million on revenues of $46.1 million, or 13 cents a share. Wall Street investors liked what they heard, bidding up Dice shares by 7.18 percent. The stock closed at $10.30 and was headed somewhat higher in after-hours trading.

While the company’s flagship Dice.com accounted for the bulk of the revenue at $31.1 million, the energy industry sector saw the fastest growth, increasing to $4 million versus last year’s $3.1 million. Only its eFinancial boards saw a decline, reflecting the general softness of the financial industry worldwide. keep reading…

At next month’s Recruiting Innovation Summit, the newly introduced startup competition will feature six companies who are on the cutting edge of recruiting technology. All will be in line for the $10,000 grand prize and, maybe more importantly, a chance to network with recruiting pros and show what they’ve been working on in a demo format. If you are interested in the next generation of recruiting technology, you’ll want to make your way to the Computer History Museum on May 17 and 18 in Mountain View, California, to see what these six companies are doing.

keep reading…

Just in time for Administrative Professionals Day, CompData says salaries for executive assistants, admins, and other office support staff are inching up.

After years of stagnant pay, CompData’s BenchmarkPro survey found wages up on the order of 2 percent. Executive assistants, among the highest paid, now average $51,600 per year, up from $50,200 in 2010. Executive secretaries saw a 2.4 percent rise: $45,000 in 2010 to $46,100 in 2011. Receptionists increased 2.6 percent between 2010 and 2011, to $27,900.

“Although salaries for many administrative professionals increased in 2011, the rate of increase for most of these jobs was less than the 2011 average rate of inflation reported in the Consumer Price Index of 3.2 percent,” said Amy Kaminski, director of marketing for Compdata Surveys, a pay and benefits survey data provider. keep reading…

Always on the lookout for developers and engineers, one benefits-management firm is holding a LEGO-building contest this week near the ocean at the edge of Los Angeles, a section of town where enough high-tech companies and startups are forming that some folks are calling it “Silicon Beach.”

BetterWorks is, in short, a company that helps other companies provide rewards to employees — “happiness in the cloud,” it says. It’s opening up the LEGO contest to the top 60 applicants. They’ll be divided into teams and will build using materials provided by BetterWorks. Criteria will be announced at the beginning of the building contest, with a panel of judges announcing winners. The top three teams will get an award, and additional raffle prizes will be given out.

BetterWorks is holding the event on the top floor of a Venice beach house owned by Paige Craig. Craig is an ex-Marine, angel investor, and the startup’s CEO and co-founder. He told me tonight that this isn’t one of those contests — like, say, Sunglass Hut’s – where you’re vying for a specific job or internship of some sort. Instead, it’s just one of many events he holds for people to get together, have fun, network, and yeah, perhaps BetterWorks will form a business relationship such as a new customer or a hire. Craig tells me that if nothing becomes of it beyond some drinks, some LEGOs, and some hanging out, he’s perfectly OK with that.

There are fewer sad things to observe than a once-great firm sliding into mediocrity. You might not be accustomed to hearing the word “sad” and “business” in the same sentence, but I really do find it sad when great startup firms lose their energy and eventually become lumbering giants.

If you’re familiar with the legendary business book by Jim Collins, Good to Great, you already understand the concept of how firms can move from merely being good to becoming great. You might not be as familiar with it, but there is a similar shift that occurs when once great firms become simply … good firms. I call this slide “the Great to Good downward spiral.”

If you’re curious about the factors that cause this tragic downward spiral, or if you feel that your current firm is headed downhill, please read on. keep reading…

Finally, Friday!

If your week was as long as ours, you’ll appreciate that today’s roundup isn’t going to take too much of anything seriously. We had enough of that serious stuff when we had to write out four-figure checks to the U.S. Treasury. So we’ll put the business stuff after we introduce you to Ronald Gulick.

He claims to be “a normal accounting and finance recruiter by day.” We’re going to leave that up to you to judge, after you check out Ron’s video. Spend even a few minutes with it, and you’ll appreciate why he says, “My wife always tells my friends that if they saw me at work, they would not recognize me.”

In what has to be the understatement of the week, Ron tells us, “I am a non-traditional thinker. I love new ideas. I don’t like the norm.”

“NO other recruiter has my skills (in rapping AND recruiting combined),” Ron tells us in an email, “and this is a huge differentiator between me and the competition.  Many of my clients and candidates love my videos ”

Why do them?, we wondered. “Attention, plain and simple,” Ron says, being as honest and direct as we wish the world’s politicians would be at least some of the time.

Without further introduction (Ron asked us not to involve his company in this, but, shoot, you guys are recruiters; if you can’t find Ron you might rethink that whole career path thing), Here’sssssss Ronnie: keep reading…

More evidence this week that the recovery in the U.S. is holding its own. The Conference Board reported that its Index of Leading Economic Indicators increased for the sixth consecutive month in March, a sign of “economic momentum.”

“Despite relatively weak data on jobs, homebuilding, and output in the past month or two, the indicators signal continued economic momentum. We expect a gradual improvement in growth past the summer months,” says Conference Board economist Ken Goldstein.

The LEI index is a predictor of future economic conditions, and though the rise in March was .3 percent, lower than the .7 percent in February, it points to continued improvement. A second index, measuring current economic conditions, also rose in March; the sixth consecutive monthly increase for the Coincident Economic Index. The .2 percent matched the February rise and was ahead of January’s .1 percent increase. keep reading…

BranchOut announced today that it got $25 million in new funding, raising the total investment in the professional networking service to $49 million, and spurring talk the nearly two-year-old company is positioning itself to take on LinkedIn.

Besides the cash, fueling the talk today on startup blogs and Silicon Valley news sites is the company’s dramatic growth spurt. Now at 25 million registrants, BranchOut says it has been adding 2 million members a week since since launching its mobile invites app in February.

“It’s unprecedented to see this type of growth, which makes BranchOut one of the most-used apps on Facebook,” said Tim Chang, a managing director at Mayfield Fund, which lead the Series C investment. “I’m excited by the opportunity BranchOut has to introduce the notion of a professional social network to the 90 percent of the population that is not on LinkedIn.” keep reading…

We mentioned that awards honoree AT&T had added a military skills translator to its career site. The latest to do so is Ryder, which today is launching a website section for hiring veterans that also includes a translator feature.

On the Ryder site, service members enter what’s called a “military occupation code” or a “military occupational specialty code” to see what open jobs might match what they’ve done in the military.

Ryder has said it’ll hire 1,000 veterans by 2013. It has 670 jobs open, and about 8 percent of its current workforce is made up of veterans.

What if you set out to change the business world and found a company with endless opportunities to do it?

That’s the first question Walmart asks job-seekers when they head to its new careers site and military microsite, and perhaps an appropriate one for a chain with about $444 billion in sales and 2.1 million employees.

Corporate Recruiting VP Mike Grennier says the company had multiple goals with the new site, which involved a partnership between recruiting and marketing, and countless meetings and much input from multiple divisions from e-commerce to Sam’s Club. It also used the agency TMP.

Walmart wanted a site that was authentic, with real employee photos, “speaking to candidates like they spoke to customers,” Grennier says. It wanted something clean and simple, with as few clicks as possible. It wanted to improve the candidate experience, reduce the time it takes to navigate the site, and make sure people are captured, not lost before they leave. The company wanted to showcase its technology expertise, something Grennier says the scrolling style used on the main page helps do. In addition, Walmart wanted to be easily able to update the content on the back end.

Grennier says the site is a “work in progress”; for example, the company has made it mobile-friendly, but would like to make it even friendlier. keep reading…

A new “virtual career network” allows health care employees, and those who want to work in the field, to find out more about health jobs, and search for them. It’s a joint operation between the Labor Department in the U.S., and an association of community colleges. It was funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — the stimulus bill — and was built with content and other help from the Defense Department, the DirectEmployers Association, and others.

Goodwill, Jewish Vocational Services, and SER-Jobs for Progress National got grant money to help people at local training centers use the site; for example, to make sure there are enough Internet connections and career coaches.

Job seekers can learn about health-related classes and career paths, and do job searches. I did searches for dental hygienist, physical therapist, and other jobs, and got some decent results from Kaiser and elsewhere, though some of the jobs it pulled were from 2011 and even 2010.

What’s old is new again, as companies rediscover retiree re-staffing as a way of retaining the experience and skills of their Baby Boomer workers.

“Companies are losing way too much experience with the retirement of the Baby Boomers,” says Greg Doersching, founder of Bullseye Recruiting Process. “Some companies are sucking that experience back in on contract. They don’t have enough people to replace all of that experience.”

Doersching told Top Echelon that retirees will be the “contract candidate pool for the next five to 10 years, especially in areas like IT and Engineering.”

Cathy George, owner and founder of C.G. & Company in Odessa, Texas, says retiree re-staffing has been picking up steam in West Texas as the pace of hiring there has quickened. Previously it was mostly smaller firms that would rehire their retirees, but now, she says, the big service providers have entered the picture.

Besides simply finding enough talent to fill all the jobs, George says an almost even bigger challenge is housing the new workers. “There’s plenty of work, but no place to live,” she says, which is another reason the petroleum industry in the area is rehiring retirees. keep reading…

Regular readers of this roundup, and of ERE, will be so very not shocked to know that there is a new website calls itself the “eHarmony of talent.”

But before we get to the love, we turn to the latest installment in the epic saga we call .JOBS, or, if you prefer, Dot JOBS.

To  refresh your memory and bring you up-to-date, this is the story of how .jobs, an Internet extension like .com or .net, became the focus of an international legal dispute when the wholesaler of .jobs addresses began to lend it out to DirectEmployers Association, which uses it today for its job board universe. That wasn’t the intent back in 2005 when SHRM and Employ Media (the for-profit registrar/wholesaler) when they partnered up to convince the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to create the new extension. keep reading…

Employee engagement ranks high on the list of human resource challenges, yet fewer than half the companies in a survey by SHRM and Globoforce said they track it.

Of those that do, more of their HR professionals say workers are rewarded according to their performance, that managers are effective in acknowledging and appreciating employees, and employees are satisfied with the level of recognition they get.

These are some of the findings of a twice-yearly survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management in collaboration with  employee recognition vendor, Globoforce. The most recent survey looked at: keep reading…

While all eyes last week were focused on the disappointing March job numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the report contained a curious blip that might be nothing more than a statistical aberration. Or it could be an early signal of employment trouble ahead.

The usually robust growth in temp jobs took a breather in March. Temp jobs dipped by 7,500 during the month, the first time since June the monthly employment report registered a decline. Out of a temp workforce of some 2.5 million, the drop is practically unnoticeable. But considering that staffing jobs grew by 91,300 in January and February, a reduction of any size is significant.

Recent history is also a factor. Looking at April 2011, the monthly jobs report said 251,000 jobs were created, the biggest rise since the census hiring of 12 months earlier. But that same report also showed the first decline in temp jobs in 19 months. Then in May, the economy added a mere 54,000 jobs. It was months before the pace of hiring returned to what it was in the first quarter of the year when 662,000 jobs were created.

Cautious employers can be forgiven therefore if they react as if last week’s Labor Department report were an omen. keep reading…

LinkedIn is introducing something it calls “Targeted Updates” and “Follower Statistics” with a select group of early release partners, kind of like it tested the “Pipeline” product with a charter group.

First, let’s talk Pipeline. Talent Pipeline.  keep reading…

The Value of Offshore Recruiting Teams

Corporate recruiting departments and staffing firms have a continual need to lower costs while increasing recruiting productivity — and some recruiting organizations have turned to outsourcing. Outsourcing can take many forms including retaining a U.S.-based recruitment process outsourcing firm, sending job orders to staffing agencies, participating in split-fee recruiter networks, or hiring U.S.-based contract sourcers and/or recruiters.

A less-expensive solution being implemented by progressive U.S. companies is partnering with an offshore recruiting firm. Most offshore recruiting firms have recruiting operations in India. The cost of an offshore sourcer or recruiter is generally about one-third to one-half the cost of a U.S.-based contract sourcer or recruiter. Offshore recruiting firms allow U.S.-based in-house recruiters to offload time-consuming, but important tasks, such as candidate sourcing and screening. With the additional time, in-house recruiters can work on and close more open positions, focus on complex tasks requiring the greatest skills, provide a more positive experience for candidates, and delight hiring managers by presenting higher quality candidates.

You Cannot Outsource Your Problems

Offshore recruiting is not a magic tonic. A dysfunctional recruiting department will not suddenly have success by outsourcing — whether the recruiting functions are outsourced to a U.S.-based or an offshore firm. keep reading…