Forrester Research analyst Zach Thomas suggested that, “By making this acquisition, Monster is putting a real emphasis on search and they believe it will help them leap-frog the competition.” Others were less generous.

The answer has been coming ever since Monster began beta testing Power Resume Search several months ago. A few weeks ago, confident that its $100 million investment was the homerun it expected, Monster turned Power Search live, premiering it during an analyst meeting that was also webcast over a marathon five hours or so.

Tuesday, the company demoed the new search for a group of recruitment consultants and bloggers. And the result was no mere home run; think grand slam.

In a word, Monster’s new Power Resume Search is stunning. Stunning in its simplicity. Stunning in its speed. Stunning in its ability to intuit skills from a title, and to rank and rerank the resulting candidates depending on what skills and other qualities you decide important. Stunning in its potential for changing the job board business.

If you haven’t tried it for yourself, go here and test it out. What you’ll discover is that you can source candidates (if you really want) simply by entering a job title. Look at the results. Add a specific skill or a degree or some other parameter and the ranking changes.

What makes Power Resume Search different — and better — than the typical keyword resume search is that it has the intelligence to cut through the duff. The examples the Monster folks used in the demo were searches for bankers and lawyers. But try your own search, for, say a bookkeeper. Instead of getting a list of hundreds of resumes with bookkeeper in the text, you get a few dozen candidates who are bookkeepers and are most likely to be looking for that kind of work.

Trovix built its job-matching capability around context and concepts. A bookkeeper doesn’t need an understanding of Sarbanes-Oxley; a CFO does. You know that. But unless you exclude candidates with that term in their resume in a standard keyword search, you’re going to get CFO candidates with bookkeeping in their backgrounds along with accountants and … you get the idea.

It’s “the world’s best search engine,” said Monster’s Javid Muhammedali at the beginning of the demo. Google might take issue with the boast, but he is certainly on the mark when he says one of the virtues of Power Resume Search is that it is a search engine “that really helps you stop searching.”

One incidental, yet valuable feature is how a search can unearth skills not listed in the job req, which could or should be. It helps drive the recruiting process forward by arming recruiters with information they can take back to the hiring manager, Muhammedali explained.

It has some other nice touches, including how it presents candidate information and the side-by-side comparison of candidates.

Power Resume Search has a counterpart for job seekers in Power Job Search.

I ran a few job searches on a variety of different titles and got great results, which, in my case, meant fewer, but more accurate results. Monster showed this off during the demo using “business development manager” for the search with the result that all nine listings were specific to the title.

Monster points out that this search has benefits for the employer: the ad visibility improves, as does the likelihood that the applicants will be of higher quality since an ad won’t just turn up in a search because it happens to contain the seeker’s keywords.

Before you go away thinking all your sourcing problems are solved, know that this is a premium service, for which Monster will charge $845 for a two-week access. Right now, it’s a bargain at $260 for three days of searching in an area.

It’s also better at sourcing some types of jobs than others. New job terminology has to be added by Monster, though you can search for a specific keyword in a resume. And it won’t store search histories for OFCCP auditing until early next year.

Even so, it’s a big step. For Monster, it’s a $100 million-plus step. The company spent $72.5 million to acquire Trovix and $30-$35 million more integrating it into the job board. Monster intends to get back its investment and then some.

Muhammedali and Louis Gagnon, SVP Global Products, said the new search opens the door to differential pricing for resume sourcing. It probably won’t be long before Monster puts a higher price on CFOs than on bookkeepers.

Why can’t they do that now? They probably could, but the technical management is a challenge, since the resumes of CFOs and bookkeepers may well be part of the search results in a standard keyword search. But the Trovix powered search is smart enough to know that when you’re looking for a CFO, you don’t want a bookkeeper who reports to a CFO.

Narrowing down results with high precision saves time. Lots of time. And gets better results. That’s worth something.

The RightThing, an RPO, acquired AIRS, a technology and training firm, in 2008. About the same time, CareerBuilder launched Personified, a recruitment consulting and outsourcing business. Two months ago, recruitment technology vendor Taleo acquired Worldwide Compensation, a comp management technology and services provider.

The oddest diversification, though, has to be TalentHook’s launch of a directory of, ahem, gentlemen’s clubs and their entertainers. The company that provides resume search software to hundreds of employers now lets you search for what less euphemistically are called strip clubs.

Gentlemen’sNightLife.com claims that it has “information on over 2,400 clubs and their performers.” I did not test that claim, at least not thoroughly, though I found that the performer list was limited to only a handful of cities right now, including Las Vegas, TalentHook’s headquarters.

I did find a number of fields you won’t find in TalentHook Sphere, a resume sourcing tool that searches out resumes from the public web and pay boards. On TalentHook Sphere you find fields for experience, salary, and education, among others. On GentlemensNightLife you search for breast size, butt, and body, among others.

It looks to be a membership site, since there is a signup page and a member login. So the searches I was able to do might be limited as a preview.

I emailed Phil Gonzalez, owner of both GentlemensNightLife and TalentHook, but he didn’t get back to me.

TweetMyJobs, one of the first job distribution services to use Twitter, is now using the service and its followers to promote itself.  TweetMyJobs is running a contest that has a plasma TV or $500 as its grand prize and the only requirement for winning is to watch a video and enter. So far, so traditional. Here’s where the social media aspect comes in: The winner will be the person who accumulates the most points during the contest. Points are earned each time a person clicks on a unique link to access the TweetMyJobs site.

Contestants are emailed a unique link that can be tweeted, posted to Facebook, and shared on over 20 other social sites. The more friends, followers, and connections you have and can convince to click the link, the more points you earn.

It’s a clever contest that TweetMyJobs founder Gary Zukowski says will cost him less than $2,500 and will “show just how powerful social media can be.”

“By using social media we will reach thousands of targeted individuals in a cost-effective manner. It mirrors the service we offer to our clients,” adds Zukowski. TweetMyJobs earns its money by tweeting job postings to job seeking subscribers for a fee.

Zukowski’s contest comes amidst a boom in the use of social media for job hunting and branding. No less an authority than outplacement specialist Challenger, Gray & Christmas is counseling job seekers to profile, post, and tweet.

“We feel that these new networking tools are essential and now advise all of the job seekers going through our program to open LinkedIn accounts and to consider other services such as Facebook and Twitter,” says CEO John Challenger.

The firm cautions job seekers — and this is good advice for recruiters, too — that the various social media are not interchangeable. Nor, says Challenger, will they “replace the face-to-face connections that are critical to a successful search.”

The Challenger announcement cites a recent Jobvite survey that found some 80 percent of companies using or planning to use social networking sites for recruiting. LinkedIn is already heavily used for that purpose, but Facebook recruiting now attracts 59 percent of recruiters, according to the survey. Twitter is used by 42 percent of recruiters.

Because of the pervasive use of widgets and apps, it is possible now for a Twitter message to be simultaneously posted to dozens of sites. Likewise, Facebook status updates can be tweeted automatically, with apps then reposting the tweet to other social media including, say, LinkedIn.

Hence, the warning from Challenger that, “Social networking should be used cautiously.”

He also counsels that online networking is not the only tool. “These online connections are superficial at best. It takes a lot more work to turn them into meaningful relationships that can advance your job search. In the end,” says Challenger, “face-to-face meetings are still the most effective relationship-building tool available.”

Which brings us to Eric Barker. Remember him?  He’s the freshly minted MBA so eager to work at Microsoft that he took out an ad on Facebook to make his pitch. I wrote about him in May.

I got an email from him a few weeks ago. Still no Microsoft job, though he is optimistic: “Did hear from a MSFT recruiter. We’re trying to place me but we haven’t found the right fit yet.”

However he did land a leading role in Facebook Fantasies, an official anthology of Facebook stories, where he is the subject of one of the chapters. The book publishes in February.

A new study from outsourcing research firm Everest Global suggests that while the recession is reducing the size of RPO contracts, interest is growing, especially among employers with 8,00-15,000 employees.

“RPO buyers are attracted to a value proposition with cost reduction and scalability elevated due to the current economic climate, followed by improvement of recruitment processes, access to best-of-breed options and technologies, and enhanced employer branding,” said Katrina Menzigian, Global’s VP of  Research.

Growth has been strongest among high tech and telecom firms, with the largest employers — those with more than 15,000 employees — accounting for about 60 percent of the business. North America and Europe are the focal points, but employers with a global presence are adopting RPO for their overseas operations.

In the report — Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) – Moving Beyond the Pioneer Stage — Menzigian and her co-authors observe that one of the challenges buyers and RPO suppliers have is confusion over just what recruitment process outsourcing is. The report notes that buyers consider RPO to be “synonymous” with staffing and headhunting. Though there are certainly significant similarities, RPO, say the authors, “is a much more strategic decision that requires buy-in from senior executives and a long-term partnership with the supplier to achieve business output and outcome.”

Because of the lack of clarity, RPO market entry by staffing and recruiting firms is common, though many lack the expertise, the report says. It cautions buyers and counsels suppliers that they must educate their customers about the differences between RPO and other types of recruitment outsourcing.

Perhaps the broadest message in the report is that RPO is not a niche, interim service to address a short term recruiting problem, but an increasingly important part of a company’s recruitment strategy that depends on a close working relationship between buyer and supplier.

“There are multiple drivers moving this forward,” Menzigian told me. While the anemic recovery has gotten more employers looking at outsourced recruiting, rather than adding in-house recruiters, Menzigian said another consideration is the technology. Not all companies necessarily want to manage an ATS or invest in upgrades or replacements.

The technology, therefore, is an ingredient in the strategic recruitment decision process.

If, though, there is one point to emphasize, Menzigian says it’s that the RPO space is a dynamic one, with more companies entering the space as the business grows.

Social media is rapidly becoming more than just another tool in a recruiter’s toolbox — it’s an important part of the future of the talent acquisition profession. The goal the summit is to have an industry conversation about these tools, and talk about tactics and strategies that are already in the field and working, not pie-in-the-sky ideas. And even if you can’t make it, you can still participate in that discussion.

The stream will take place on the top of the ERE.net homepage through Ustream. There is nothing that you will need to download; just come to the site on Monday morning, shortly before we kick off the event at 9:30 a.m. ET, and you will see the box. You just need to click the play button and you will be all set. There is also a chat component there, so you can talk to others watching the stream, and even those in attendance in New York.

You will also want to check out Twitter for more great conversation from the event by following the #socialrecruiting hashtag and the @socrecruiting handle. The event in June featured over 1,500 tweets sent that day alone, mostly from those in attendance, so this is another great way to join the conversation even if you can’t make it to New York.

As I mentioned, the day starts at 9:30 a.m. ET as our summit chair Laurie Ruettimann kicks off the day, and introduces our keynote speaker Fred Wilson at 10:00 a.m. ET. Fred is the venture capitalist behind many of the names you know on the Internet such as Twitter, Indeed, del.icio.us, and many others. From there the day, which goes through 5:15, will feature sessions led by recruiters who have actually already proved success using social recruiting tactics in their recruiting strategy. Check out the full agenda here.

So make sure to clear your calendar for Monday, as this is certainly something you won’t want to miss. And if you are in and around the NY area or can get there on Monday, there are still (at least as I post this) a few tickets left to attend.

In fact, most of the C-suite has seen their base take a hit, says Compdata, which surveyed some 5,000 organizations across the country to compile its proprietary report Executive Compensation. CIO pay is down 2.1 percent while COOs are down 11 percent.

But unless you happen to hold one of those titles, don’t get all weepy over the news. The average CEO is still earning $346,000 in base pay a year. COOs average $214,000 and CIOs average $175,300.

Only CFO base pay was up. Not much — barely 1 percent — but it was up. The press release from Compdata doesn’t say what the average CFO earns, but it does offer some industry examples: “The average base salary of a Chief Financial Officer in the insurance industry is $232,200, while CFOs in healthcare earn $208,900. The utilities industry pays their CFOs $194,900 on average, compared to those in banking and finance, $191,500. CFOs earn the least in the not-for-profit industry, $173,900.”

Lest you think that these numbers are skewed by the inclusion of some of those highly compensated C-people, even modest-sized firms with 500-1,000 workers pay their CEOs an average of $361,300. At a company with under 100 workers the CEO averages $264,700.

The $600 report has much more information than this, of course. It covers 65 job titles — including HR — and has the data arranged by region and industry, covering bennies like company cars, travel expenses, stock options, and the more usual health, life, and other insurance coverage.

If you decide, despite the decline in salary, to climb up the alphabet titles, keep an eye on your company’s succession plan. Or, if there isn’t one, get one started.

Korn/Ferry says more and more companies are developing them; so many, in fact, that the giant talent management firm issued a press release saying it has seen a 400 percent surge in its CEO succession planning consulting work. And that’s just in the first six months.

The company didn’t offer a number, but it did say, “This is more than twice the number of succession planning projects in the prior two years combined.”

It currently is at work on more than 25 CEO succession planning projects.

“With increased government business regulation, the turbulent business environment and real-time examples of corporate boards that did not have immediate CEO replacements at the helm, we are seeing a significant increase in corporate boards planning for CEO succession,” said Joe Griesedieck, vice chairman and managing director of Korn/Ferry’s Board & CEO Services.

You can choose to have some or all your tweets posted to your LinkedIn groups and vice versa. This is a boon for recruiters who now can more easily reach their entire network with news of jobs and opportunities, while job seekers can use it to enhance their personal brand.

“More and more, people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways,” said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, in a video he made with LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman.

Stone likened the deal to “bringing the peanut butter and the chocolate together to make the perfect combination,” which explains our use of the otherwise inscrutable graphic from the LinkedIn site.

The two services, of course, serve different purposes and different constituencies. Twitter users tend to be younger and tweet about social activities. LinkedIn is very specifically focused on business networking.

The integration takes these differences into account, giving Tweepl a choice where there tweets go. Use either #li or #in to post your tweet to your LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn messages will generally go to all your Twitter followers, unless you choose to post only to LinkedIn.

I tried to set this up several times last night and this morning, but got error messages. Some of them were the usual Twitter overloaded kind, but the others were likely the result of the rollout. According to the original announcement, the integration will take a few days to complete, accounting for the lack of a setting on Twitter itself for the LinkedIn connection.

You can also set up an account on Ping.fm. This is a free service that lets you organize all your social media sites so you can post to some or all simultaneously. In addition to LinkedIn and Twitter, the Ping network includes Facebook, Diigo, Yammer, Plaxo, MySpace, and 39 other sites.

The LinkedIn/Twitter integration comes on the heels of announcements over the last couple of weeks that Twitter messages will now be indexed by Bing and Google. Search results now include tweets.

“Soon hundreds of thousands (and, eventually, millions) of geographical .jobs domain names will come online,” boasts the website, Universe.jobs. It’s home base for what the partners are calling The Dot Jobs Universe, a heady name for the job boards that will officially make their debut in January.

These boards are powered by the DirectEmployers Association, a recruitment focused consortium of employers that includes many of the top brands in the U.S.  The job boards will have occupational or geographic Web addresses or addresses that are a combination of the two.

Some of these are already launched. There’s NewYork.jobs, Boston.jobs, India.jobs, and more. A video on the Dot Jobs Universe site offers other possibilities; FloridaNursing.jobs, for instance.

Employers who are members of the DirectEmployers Association will have their jobs posted to these sites automatically, with their corporate logo, at no cost. Non-members who own a .jobs address will also be permitted to post jobs for free.

There’s no indication on the site of what happens to employers who are neither members of DirectEmployers nor holders of a .jobs address.

When I spoke with Sowash a few weeks ago, he said they might have to pay a posting fee or have some limitations. “The rules haven’t been hammered out,” he said then.

However, the partners are selling premium placements on the sites. At rates ranging from $1,500 to $5,000 an employer can buy a listing position for a year on one or more sites. The more sites you buy, the lower the per site cost.

Placement.jobs explains how it works and takes your order. Members of DirectEmployers get preference in ordering these premium positions. A webinar is scheduled Nov. 17th to detail the .jobs Universe and the premium positioning program.

The relationship between DirectEmployers and Employ Media has raised eyebrows and apparently prompted enough questions that Ray Fassett, VP of operations and policy with Employ Media, felt compelled to blog about it.

“Why has .jobs chosen DirectEmployers Association to lead this project?,” Fassett writes in a blog on the Dot Jobs Universe site. “By offering an answer to this question publicly, I think I can dispel some myths that have come to my attention from commentators in other forums.”

“Let me be clear that .jobs has not provided the DirectEmployers Association with an exclusive. .jobs has not provided DirectEmployers members with an exclusive. So let’s dispel these myths right out of the gate.”

Fassett goes on to list six points that apparently made DirectEmployers an attractive partner. These include its non-profit status, the quality of the management team, its board of directors, and the participation of Fortune 1000 companies.

The argument that there’s no exclusive seems weak, if not plain wrong. Rules on the Employ Media site itself say only company names can be registered; occupational and geographic names are “reserved.” While DirectEmployers doesn’t own the addresses for the new job boards, it manages them, collects the money, and provides special opportunities for its members.

There’s no evidence that other job boards or organizations were invited to offer proposals for making use of the occupational and geographical domains held by Employ Media. Indeed, there’s even some question whether they can be used at all.

Tom Embrescia, CEO of Employ Media, told me that DirectEmployers approached him with the idea for the universe of job boards. The conversation turned earnest about the time Embrescia publicly floated the idea of selling off the reserved names.

When Employ Media and the Society for Human Resource Management, which sponsored the domain, applied for the designation, they said a .jobs address would only be issued in the name of the requesting company. That condition — and others, including adherence to the SHRM code of ethics — was written in the agreement by the approving agency, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Steve Rothberg, founder and president of CollegeRecruiter, wrote in a post, “This new domain was promoted as only being available to employers to promote their own jobs. Clearly that hasn’t been the case.”

However, Gary Rubin, SHRM’s Chief Publishing and E-Media Officer, said in an email, “SHRM is responsible for ensuring that Employ Media is complying with the terms of their charter with ICANN… The names that you have cited such as atlanta.jobs and sales.jobs appear to be in compliance with the terms of the charter.”

ICANN’s Chief gTLD Registry Liaison Craig Schwartz told me in an email, “…it’s not possible for ICANN to police every name in every registry and more importantly it’s not our responsibility to do so. What ICANN is responsible for is to ensure that its contracted parties are in compliance with their agreements. To that end, I will be following up on your inquiry (about the appropriateness of the use of geographical and occupational terms) with the appropriate staff at ICANN.”

I put the same question to Embrescia: How is it Employ Media can allow these domains to be used, when the agreement with ICANN says, “These (geographical and occupational terms) restricted lists are in addition to the restriction that .jobs domains comprise only trade names or commonly-known names?”

He didn’t respond to the question. But in the blog post on the Universe.jobs site, Fassett writes, “The question for us has been, since inception, how can geographic and occupational names exist in .jobs to serve the interests of the global human resource management community? I admit many did not realize this question was out there…

“We are working in cooperation with SHRM. We are approaching our community as ICANN expects us to do. I also fully admit there is not a single definitive answer to this question. But there are answers. Our obligation is to select one or more.”

The Board’s Employment Trends Index rose for the second consecutive month in October, and is now at 89.3, up 0.7 percent from the revised September figure. It’s still down significantly from a year ago, when the index was 104.5.

The improvement, said Conference Board senior economist Gad Levanon, foreshadows an end to job loss, but not an immediate, strong, uptick in hiring.

“The Employment Trends Index has likely turned a corner in September, and the historical relationship between the index and employment suggests that job losses will end in early 2010,” said Levanon. “While layoffs have certainly declined in recent months, we still expect to see employers adding hours to their existing workforce before hiring will strongly increase.”

Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which issued its October jobs report on Friday, show little change in workers’ hours over the past several months. Since June, the average number of hours worked weekly in the private sector has been steady at 33. In the manufacturing sector, weekly hours have ticked up by 30 minutes since June and now stand at 40 hours a week on average, with 3.2 hours of overtime work weekly, an improvement over June’s 2.8 hours.

• We are just a week away from the second #socialrecruiting summit, taking place next Monday, November 16 in New York City. There are still a few tickets left if you plan to attend in person. If not, stay tuned for more information on the live streaming that will take place next week. Either way, make sure to clear your calendar for next Monday to participate in the conversation about the intersection of social media and recruiting strategy.
• On Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, tune in to our sister site, FordyceLetter.com, for this week’s new episode of Fordyce TV led by Shally Steckerl – If You Need a Sourcer, Part I. In this session, Shally takes us through how he built some of the world’s most successful sourcing teams.
• Sign up for this week’s free webinar on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. ET – Quick and Free Ways to Source Executive Talent Online also led by Shally Steckerl. Shally will talk about strategies for attracting executive talent, presenting a diverse range of candidates that meet and exceed requirements, filling positions quickly, and free online tools that can facilitate the process.
• The speaker list continues to grow for ERE Expo 2010 Spring taking place in San Diego from March 15-17. Stay tuned for more information about the agenda, and make sure to reserve your spot today and take advantage of the early bird discounts in place. And if you are a sourcer, make sure to save the date for SourceCon 2010 which will take place in San Diego from March 14-16. Stay tuned for more info on both of these exciting events, and let me know if you have any questions about either of them.

I hope you have a great week, and feel free to leave any questions you have in the comments section below.

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.

Click to enlarge

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.”

Let’s start with retention. Take the percentage of surveyed employers (26%) who now say they are “significantly more concerned” about retention of key employees than they were before the economic crisis hit and the percentage (39%) who are “slightly more concerned” — add them together, and you find that almost two-thirds are more concerned about top-talent retention than before.

On to salaries, benefits, hours, layoffs, and hours.

Salaries: Now, 54% of the companies that have made salary freezes are planning to restore them over the next six months, according to the Watson Wyatt survey of 201 large U.S. employers. That’s a big-time improvement. In August, 33 percent said they were going to unfreeze salaries. In June, 17 percent said they would.

Meanwhile, almost half of companies plan to reverse hiring freezes in the next six months.

Benefits: According to the survey, “of those reversing reductions to 401(k) matches, 70% will restore the match to its previous level.” Many of those reversals are planned for some time over the next year. On the other hand, the benefits news for employees is bad when it comes to healthcare. Watson Wyatt says that of the companies that have increased employees’ contributions to healthcare premiums, two out of three say those increases are here to stay.

Layoffs: More than one in five companies think they’re going to do layoffs during the rest of 2009 and 2010. At least that’s better than in April, when almost 50 percent said they were planning layoffs.

Worker hours: More than 80 percent of employers that instituted a reduced workweek expect to reinstate full weeks in the next 12 months. Most of those plan to bring back the hours over the next six months.

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.”