Yes dear reader, just in time for Valentine’s Day CareerBuilder tells us what you’ve been suspecting all along: your office mates are mating up. If the survey is to be believed — and why not?; they surveyed 7,780 people who all can’t be pranking us — then almost 4 in 10 workers have dated someone they met on the job.

Awkward, if one of them thinks it’s going places and the other one … you get the idea. Fortunately, 31 percent of those relationships lead to marriage. (Which is no guarantee things won’t get even more awkward a little down the road. But this is the season for love, so ignore our dose of ugly reality. Or read on to the part where we tell you how Challenger, Gray, & Christmas snuck in a warning about office violence.)

HR people out there, this stat’s for you: CareerBuilder says 18 percent of office dating is between boss and their report. Women were more likely to date up than men, 35 percent to 23 percent respectively.

Of the industries reported, you just had to know that hospitality by far (47 percent) has the most co-dating co-workers. Healthcare also made the top five list, which, considering how many parents hoped their offspring would marry a doctor, is no surprise. But financial services (40 percent)? And transportation and utilities (43 percent)? And IT (40 percent)? These also made the top five? Really?

Now moving on to that warning about workers pulling a Valentine’s Day Massacre  from Challenger, Gray & Christmas (hereinafter CG&C). “Some companies are facing an entirely different problem: their workers have lost that loving feeling and the consequences can be dire,” reads the press release we got from the global outplacement firm.

“Often in situations where managers are aware of a problem between two or more coworkers, they merely look the other way, letting the employees work it out amongst themselves.  This may work in some situations, but in others, this hands-off approach can have disastrous results,” says CGC CEO John Challenger.

The press release offers a whole bunch of ideas to increase civility and reduce animosity. Missing from the list, and very conspicuously considering Valentine’s Day started this whole thing, is the free supply of large amounts of chocolate.

A Vowel Please

From the “Can I buy a vowel?” department comes Goood Job, the latest in a long line of companies entering the employee-referral-social media business we’ve talked a lot about (and includes socialcruiter, socialreferral, and many others). In short, here’s how Goood Job works: Employees can opt-in to have their company’s job postings automatically show up on their Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages. Friends can express an interest, filling in short information about themselves on a landing page, and the employee can add a comment (like “Goood guy, worked with him for three years”).

The system tracks employees’ referrals through the hiring process. The employees build up points, like a loyalty program, however you want to set it up — x number of points for referring someone who sends in a resume, y number if it resulted in a hire, etc. — and earn dinners, movie tickets, trips to Paris, the spa, or perhaps even to a spa in Paris. HP and Microsoft in Israel are using the Tel Aviv company for referrals, and Goood Job says both are considering expanding their use globally. The sweetspot, though — or shall we say sweeet spot — are companies in the few-hundred to a few-thousand-employee range, who pay around $1,000-2,500 a month, depending on company size. One client has tripled its number of referrals since using the system. As we began an early-morning demo of the product, one company rep IM’d us to say “Goood Morning.” Cute.

Short Takes

BeKnown as you with a URL all your own. Just go claim your Beknown.com/your-name-here address. Yeah, yeah, we know there are a ton of places to get a vanity addy, but as our best friend’s mother used to say, “What can it hurt?”

Remember the SHRM Members for Transparency? That’s the group that’s taken issue with some of the goings-on at the top levels of the HR professional association. We were starting to unremember them ourselves until up pops an email from the group the other day saying they’re still trying to get a second meeting going with representatives of the big group’s board of directors. The first meeting took 102 days to schedule. The second took a little longer than that. It’s now scheduled for March 4. (Go here and read all about the last meeting.)

LinkedIn closed Thursday at $76.39, down 15 cents. But after investors got a look at the report, the stock climbed up, and within two hours was trading at $83.25, up 9 percent.

The company reported fourth quarter revenue of $167.7 million, more than double its fourth quarter last year. Analysts, who had been expecting the company to finish strong, predicted revenues of $159.7 million. They also expected a 7 cent per share profit. LinkedIn reported earning an adjusted 12 cents per share.

Calling 2011 “A landmark year for LinkedIn,” CEO Jeff Weiner said the company would continue to grow this year, putting an emphasis on expanded mobile capabilities, the international market, and plans to “refresh a number of our pillar products.” Many of those are recruiting related.

Before today’s financial report and an after-market conference call, analysts projected LinkedIn would earn 57 cents a share on revenue of $828.2 million. Now, the company says it expects revenue in a range of $840-$860 million. For 2011, LinkedIn’s revenue totaled $522.1 million.

Recruitment provided half the revenue for 2011 and just over half in the last quarter of the year. The relative percentages that LinkedIn’s three product lines — recruitment, marketing, and subscriptions — contribute to the total revenue haven’t changed much since the company went public last May.

During the question and answer with analysts, Steve Sardello, LinkedIn’s CFO, said there won’t be “a lot of change” in recruitment pricing this year. Instead, the company will focus on expanding its client base and improving the penetration of the service. He said the renewal rate and add-ons grew by 171 percent, and said most customers now hold between three and four recruiter seats.

LinkedIn has been focusing increasing attention on the international market, and growth there has been slowly edging up. By the end of 2011 it accounted for a third of LinkedIn’s quarterly revenue. During the quarter the company opened offices in Brazil, India, and Japan, and translated the service into five additional languages.

LinkedIn’s optimistic outlook for this year is in marked contrast to at least two of its competitors. In the last two weeks both Monster and Dice Holdings offered financial guidance that was more conservative than what Wall Street wanted to hear. As a result, the stock of both companies saw a sharp decline.

CareerBuilder, privately held by three media companies and Microsoft, said it had North American revenue of $157 million in the fourth quarter, bringing the total to $627 million. The company publicly releases only revenue for North America. It does not release international earnings or expenses or profit.

However, Gannett’s CEO Gracia Martore told investors and analysts that CareerBuilder accounted for 82 percent of the company’s digital revenues. That revenue, the company said, was $181.5 million in the 4th quarter. She also said international revenue was up 40 percent for the job board.

If the four owners of CareerBuilder share its income in proportion to their ownership percentage of its stock, then CareerBuilder contributed $148.8 million to Gannett. (The company owns 50.8 percent of CareerBuilder.) From that figure, it’s possible to conjecture CareerBuilder had a $293 million quarter, putting it ahead of Monster. Company officials declined to comment on the figures.

It’s the second major acquisition of an HR firm in three months, and continues an Oracle buying spree that’s so far added some 70 companies at a cost of about $40 billion, according to Bloomberg.com. Last fall, Oracle bought RightNow Technologies, a cloud-based CRM provider.

The Taleo deal, however, falls far short of what SAP is paying for SuccessFactors. The German tech firm announced in December it would pay $3.4 billion for the HR vendor. The acquisition is key to “accelerating SAP’s momentum as a provider of cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure,” the company said in making the announcement.

SAP has run into delays completing its acquisition. The deadline for the deal has now been extended for a third time to Feb. 15th while regulators, principally the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., investigates the transaction. SAP said today it was waiving the requirement the investigation first be complete before the expiration of its tender offer. The company said it already has been tendered 86 percent of the SuccessFactors, enough to close the deal.

Although the Committee on Foreign Investment could squelch the deal, it’s unlikely. Delays due to investigations such as the one encountered by SAP are typical. No deals, however, have been blocked as a result, says IDG News.

The Taleo acquisition isn’t subject to those procedures, since Oracle is a U.S. firm.

Like other major software providers, Oracle is struggling to gain inroads into the fast-growing SaaS market. With companies turning to cloud services because of their efficiency and significant cost savings over buying and installing software on in-house equipment, tech firms like Oracle have been developing their own SaaS programs. Acquiring companies with SaaS products accelerates the process.

Oracle said as much in this morning’s announcement. “Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations,” said Thomas Kurian, EVP, Oracle Development. “Taleo’s industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

Taleo offers both SaaS provisoned HR software, as well as on-premises systems. The company has about 5,000 customers and 2011 revenue of $308.9 million.

Unlike SuccessFactors, which isn’t profitable, Taleo has had two winning years in the last four. The company released its fourth-quarter and full year financials this morning, following the acquisition announcement. The numbers show the company lost 35 cents a share for the year. In 2010, it earned a penny a share. With adjustments for one-time expenses, including the costs of acquisitions Taleo itself has previously made — it bought Cytiva last spring — the company earned $1.06 a share versus 2010′s 78 cents a share.

In both years Taleo posted a fourth-quarter loss of 2 cents a share. After accounting for one time expenses, the company earned 26 cents a share, beating analysts’ 23 cent a share expectations. Its $84.8 million 4th quarter revenue was short of Wall Street’s $86.8 million estimate.

The Oracle offer sent Taleo’s stock up 17.23 percent, to $45.65 a share by early afternoon in New York. Oracle’s $46 a share offer is 18 percent above Taleo’s Wednesday closing price. SAP’s $40 a share offer for SuccessFactors was a 52 percent premium over the stock’s previous price. That differential in just two months lead TheStreet.com to suggest that the premium companies are willing to pay to get into cloud computing is falling.

“Cloud-based deal premiums are falling as investors and analysts correctly anticipate consolidation between technology giants and specialized cloud players,” says TheStreet in an analysis of today’s Taleo deal. TheStreet notes that the acquisition announcement is also lifting the stock of HR software vendors Saba, Kenexa, and Cornerstone OnDemand.

The price difference may have influenced three law firms to announce they are investigating Taleo’s acceptance of the Oracle offer. The firms are soliciting shareholders as clients. Taleo has been sued in the past by shareholders.

For being so out of fashion, so yesterday, job boards manage to come out on top or top-adjacent on nearly every source of hire study. In a Bersin & Associates survey this fall job boards tied for first with internal transfers as the leading source of all hires. CareerXroads says job boards produced 24.9 percent of all external hires in 2010, second only to employee referrals (27.5 percent).

The latest survey comes from tech vendor Talent Technology, which reports that job boards are the leading source of candidates, according to the 1,100 North American HR professionals who participated. Job boards account for 17 percent of the candidates, followed by employee referrals, which provide 15.8 percent.

What’s remarkable about the evidence is how few accept it. Even after reporting that “job boards remain popular and are used to fill 19 percent of open positions – making job boards the No. 1 source for candidates,” Bersin titled that section of the report “Job Boards: Not Dead, but Dying.”

Even more remarkable is how little the job board industry has done to promote itself. The major boards have their own, proprietary data, guarded more carefully than the U.S. does its diplomatic messages. Second tier and certainly mom-and-pop operations have little data beyond gross traffic counts. So for all practical purposes employers do their own market surveillance.

Now, finally, seven years after it’s founding by Peter Weddle, the International Association of Employment Web Sites has bestirred itself to do some serious research about the industry.

Financed by Jobg8, the job board industry’s candidate marketplace, 100 sites participated last summer in the first benchmarking survey of commercial employment sites. Before you get too hopeful about the prospects, know that none of the biggest job boards participated, the survey was designed for the benefit of the industry, and most of the results aren’t being shared publicly. Those that are may be helpful to some buyers; they’re certainly interesting. More important is that it gives individual sites a yardstick against which to measure their own results.

“It was,” confessed Matt Hoffner, president of Jobg8′s Americas operation (the company is HQd in the UK), “a lot harder than we thought … Just getting all the terms right was quite a challenge.”

Still, after struggling through some 65 questions and their accompanying 22 footnotes, the industry found:

• Three-quarters of a job board’s visitors are “window shoppers” who neither apply for a job nor register. That suggests there’s a high degree of self-selection that occurs, as the next point demonstrates.
• Job postings that direct to a company’s ATS get five applicants on average. Those with only an email address get 3.3 applications. Niche sites and those in business more than three years have slightly higher apply rates.
• Job aggregators (the Indeeds and SimplyHireds) provide about 22.8 percent of a U.S. site’s traffic and only 11.6 percent in Canada. Depending on the region, sizable percentages also came from the job board’s own search optimization efforts and their pay-per-click campaigns.
• The average site has 3.5 employees; 22 percent have one or less; 9 percent have 30 or more.
• Individual marketing expenses varied widely, ranging from 1 to 14 percent. The average is 6.7 percent of revenues spent marketing the site.

Hoffner observed that the industry is increasingly aware it needs to do a better job telling its story. From the survey discussions that took place at meetings in Ft. Lauderdale, during the IAEWS Congress in September, and in London, Hoffner said there was a “clear understanding that we can’t sit still.” The public part of the report says, “Job board owners are looking for new sales and marketing models and resources but expect that promotion and sales efforts will increase in 2012 and beyond.”

One powerful motivator for putting more effort into promotion, besides simply to stand out from the huge number of job boards in the world, is that organic traffic produces better results than that from aggregators. Says the published report: “Many participants stated that aggregator traffic was expensive and may not yield the same rate of applications or registered users as traffic from other sources.”

Board operators are also looking at a changing pricing model. Most sites still charge a fee to post a job; a few charge employers for each click. Hoffner says a “pay per applicant model came in for discussion. It’s an evolving pricing model that has the operator share risk with the customer. That’s a direction they seem to be heading toward.”

As fun as it is to judge, it was taken seriously. Some applicants used every hour of their midnight, January 6 deadline (we know — we were on the phone answering their questions) and judges used every minute of theirs (we know for the same reason). Judges wrote lengthy explanations of their choices, and some created algorithms to rank each applicant, and sent us the spreadsheets they created as living proof.

Anyhow, it sounds trite, but great work’s being done, in many cases under challenging circumstances. Some of the companies that didn’t win were so good that we hope they apply again, or share their stories on ERE.net webinars or at future conferences. As for next spring’s conference in San Diego, that’s where the winners will be announced, and that’s where they’ll take questions from you as to how they succeeded, overcame hurdles, and what’s in store next. Without further ado, here are the finalists in alphabetical order within the categories:

Best College Recruiting Program

If you’re looking for good economic/job market news, there’s this: Ernst & Young’s campus hiring is back to pre-recession levels. Already no stranger to these awards, its 200-plus-member campus recruiting team has stepped it up yet another notch. For instance, the firm:

• Launched a new campus recruiting advertising campaign in September 2011, using the tagline “See More” to encourage students to visit the career website for further information. It advertised on wsj.com, businessweek.com, Pandora, CollegeRecruiter.com, Yahoo.com, and Experience.com.
• Teamed with Millennial Media to deliver ads on smart phones to students at select schools.
• Now has more than 78,500 fans on the Ernst & Young Careers page on Facebook.
• Is on the new site CampusLive, which uses scavenger hunts, team events, prize offerings, and more.
• Is using Flexspace, a virtual reality tool, where students can see what it’s like to have a job at Ernst & Young and a life outside of work.
• Held its first Emerging Leaders Summit with about 250 students. This two-and-a-half day pre-internship program is filled with workshops on subjects like ethics in business.
• Added a Global Student Exchange Program for interns to work abroad for four weeks, in Australia, Canada, China, and the UK.

The other finalist is the U.S. Navy, and it’s actually doing the kind of “go beyond the campus career center” campus recruiting we all talk about so much. In 2011, it implemented two new recruiting strategies that significantly improved the NUPOC program. NUPOC — the Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate program — involves recruiting college students and graduates with science and engineering backgrounds for five-year positions to work on nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, become instructors at the Navy Nuclear Power School, or engineers at Naval Reactors Headquarters.

With the first program, the Navy funded trips for 121 educators to experience a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier or submarine, visit a submarine learning facility, and interact with sailors. The goal is for faculty to then tell their students, and other professors, about these opportunities.

Also, the Navy Recruiting Command partnered with a group called the University Engineering Alliance — formerly the Big 12 Engineering Consortium — allowing the Navy to provide keynote speakers for engineering summits, nuclear experts for classroom presentations, and otherwise work with faculty to present material in classrooms.

In the end, 242 students were hired through NUPOC program last year, and the accepted applicant’s average GPA was up 5% to 3.43.

Best Corporate Careers Website

You may not have heard of RMS, but one judge says that its website is “hands down, one of the best sites I’ve seen. Graphically and emotionally intelligent, not too heavy on graphic elements. Tells the story. Interaction. Heads and shoulders above all of the other sites.”

The organization has more than 950 people and is in the field of catastrophe risk modeling. It overhauled the career site to make it clearer to people what the company does. Equally important, it wants others to self-select out if they don’t fit.

Its Live Chat allows people to interact in real-time with someone on the talent acquisition team. It released the new site on May 8, 2011. In the 12 months prior, it averaged 12 hires per month. For the six months after, it averaged 20 hires per month.

This category has, appropriately, shifted over the years; for instance, this year’s applicants, in many cases talked about their mobile initiatives. UnitedHealth Group, one of this year’s finalists, is no exception.

It built its mobile site with similar goals as others like Matt Jeffery talked about: engage candidates, don’t just let them search. Using GPS technology, the site can find candidates local events (and directions to those events) or jobs near where they live. Candidates get Twitter feeds during career fairs and recruiting events.

In year one of the mobile site, UnitedHealth had 213,000 unique mobile visitors on the site. The healthcare company also says that “read rates” are much higher for mobile phone users than for candidates it sends emails to.

Back to engagement: it measures that a number of ways, including pages per visit and whether people return — and about 35% of all traffic (whether mobile or to the normal corporate careers site) comes from return visitors.

It has been particularly happy about using smart phone recruiting to find people globally, such as in India and the Philippines. By using mobile technology to simplify (and personalize) its workflow surrounding recruiting events, the company has saved more than 200 recruiter hours, and more than tripled the hiring rate of new candidates from these events.

Best Employee Referral Program

Accenture again is a finalist, after winning last year. One of its recruiting leaders spoke at last fall’s Expo (see video below). Since winning last year, it focused on:

1. Strengthening its global employee referral platform, which has an interface with Taleo, and allows employees to search for open jobs, share them through social media, track the status of their referrals, and more.
2. Increasing the number of quality referrals, through LinkedIn’s Referral Engine.
3. Creating an “employee referral concierge service for senior executives” — including a dedicated team that looks after senior exec referrals and provides extra service.
4. Creating a dedicated global team to pull daily “pipeline reports” and monitor referrals. Local recruitment leads receive weekly updates about the referral candidates in their pipeline.
5. Improving the referral experience; for example, employees receive a thank-you email from senior leaders for their referral contribution to Accenture.

It received more than 200,000 referrals in 2011 and hired just under 20,000 people through the program. Said one judge: “Its referral mobile app shows that it is two steps ahead of its competitors when it comes to technology.”

Improving Enterprises is what we March Madness fans would call this year’s “Cinderella Story” in the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards. Even after its recent growth, it has only 148 employees.

Briefly, the way its referral program works is this: if employees refer someone, they get a point. Points add up and are paid on a quarterly basis. Points are considered when the software-developer distributes its profit share. Top performers are recognized at Town Hall meetings.

It has a ‘Two by Tuesday” program designed, the company says, to mitigate “extremes in the ebbs and flows of recruiting.” On Tuesday, it spreads the word of the most important company openings. People have a week to submit referrals. There’s a race to be the one who refers the most, with daily updates provided.

The company might get 100 referrals in five days, with two or more hires made.

There’s a lot more: open houses, pizza parties, several mini-conferences on the weekends, Monday Night Football and Movie Nights, all aimed at having referred candidates show up.

It also works a lot on having a really good workplace, and has won a number of awards for that. In 2011, it hired 54 top-level technology consultants from referrals, with a team of three technology recruiters. Around 90% of hires come from referrals and the related marketing programs mentioned above. Interestingly — very interestingly — it believes that people who were referred, but who didn’t join the company, have resulted in more than $3 million in additional revenue in the last two years. This calculation includes such things as whether the candidate ended up referring business to Improved Experience even though they weren’t hired.

Best Employer Brand

“This year marked the most dramatic employer brand shift our company has ever seen.”

Hotels planned for Russia

That’s what Marriott says about its global brand launch, done mainly by a team of three for under $200,000. It’s aligned with the company’s consumer brand, which is about “opening doors to a world of opportunity.” The “Find Your World” employment value proposition is similar.

In fact, though developed for job candidates, the tagline is being used by Marriott’s consumer marketing a bit, too.

The brand was launched with a video contest among employees, which attracted 200 submissions in 11 languages. And, it’s localized. So the China careers blog, for example, communicates the message in a different way than in other countries.

As you may have read, Marriott launched a Facebook game, now being played in 128 countries, to showcase work at the company and the “find your world” message.

Sodexo is moving from more of a foodservice company to a solutions/partner sort of company. A great example is its energy management services business, which involves energy audits and consulting for clients. It’s new for Sodexo, and competitive.

Sodexo quickly launched an enhanced employer brand aimed to be compatible with the new, consultative/solutions consumer brand. In the 2011 fiscal year, it hired about 50 specialized and tough-to-recruit professionals within a few months. Doing that involved positioning itself as an expert in the energy field, which involved such things as guest blog posts on websites for the energy industry and having people speak at industry conferences.

Hiring manager satisfaction at Sodexo went up from 4.49 on a 5-point scale in 2009 to 4.56 in 2011 (recently rising to 4.63). Its quality of hire increased from 4.37 on a 5-point scale in 2008 to 4.53 in 2011 (recently hitting 4.56).

For years a leader in social media recruiting, it is relying less on job boards and paid ads, which has saved it money. Traffic to its career site is up nearly 325% since 2008. Employment engagement is up and company finances are strong.

Best Retention Program/Practices

Broward Health, a healthcare system based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, faces what many medical facilities have been contending with: a shortage of nurses and allied health professionals. It’s putting part-timers, working as few as 21 hours a week, on its health plan and paying 65% of their premiums.

In a nutshell, its other retention programs include:

• A competitive and comprehensive total rewards program.
• Identity theft protection.
• Employee discounts for massage therapy.
• Up to 10% provided to employees with five or more years of service who have reached the maximum of their salary range.
• Overtime pay and bonuses for eligible RNs, allied health and other clinical positions to work additional shifts.
• Continuing education courses regarding leadership and staff development; E-learning courses for clinical, computer applications, compliance, safety education and mandatory licensure.

Its 2011 turnover rate was 9.2%.

The Support Equipment & Aircraft Launch & Recovery Equipment Department — part of the Research & Engineering department of the Naval Air Systems Command — began hiring again after many years of limited entry-level engineer and scientist hiring. There were what it calls “delays, confusion, and lost opportunities in the hiring process, and success was dependent upon an individual supervisor’s knowledge of the hiring process and determination.”

A Workforce Development Team was established to overhaul the antiquated recruiting process. Now, candidates at career fairs are screened based on qualification requirements — GPA, communication, prior technical experience, professionalism, career compatibility — and interviewed. The new workforce team notifies candidates of continued interest, and schedules an on-site visit within two weeks. It keeps in touch with them throughout the process, offering a personal touch onsite and even after the decline of an offer, trying to see what went wrong.

The 10-member team’s focus is expanding into mentoring, internships, and more, helping to hire 50-100 engineers and scientists annually. It’s prescreening more than 2,000 candidates and interviewing more than 200. What it calls hiring “cycle time” – the time from the initial meeting of the candidate at the career fair to the offer of employment — is down 80%, diversity is up, and more than 400 new engineers and scientists have been hired since 2006, with a 80% acceptance rate and 95% retention rate.

Best Military Talent Program

AT&T provides localized job notifications to the Transition Family/Support Centers of all branches of the military. In 2011, it participated in more than 50 traditional and virtual military career fairs.

Its recruiters reach out to military transition offices, Army alumni programs, and elsewhere. It created a program where veterans working at AT&T provide job search assistance to veterans applying for AT&T jobs.

It’s working on a Marine Corps job-shadowing program with Camp Pendleton in southern California.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s educating hiring managers and recruiters on the value of veterans, how to make heads or tails out of military jargon on resumes, and on the myths about veterans’ ability to integrate into corporations.

AT&T has added a number of features to its http://att.jobs/military site. It worked with Direct Employers to pilot and offer a military skills translator on the site.

T-Mobile provides assistance on resume, interview, and job search skills at Army career centers, and at military events. Through the Army’s Partnership for Youth Success program it provided interviews to 42 transitioning soldiers and 10 career opportunities.

Online its T-Mobile Military Talent Network helps transitioning military receive communications from the company; the database includes more than 350 people.

The company also provides health benefits for people called to active duty beyond what’s required. It has received a number of awards, honors for helping wounded veterans, and for being a military-spouse-friendly employer.

Most Strategic Use of Technology

Last year’s winner in this category, Informatica, is back, and better. It uses a cloud-based format and user-friendly dashboard for viewing such things as the time it takes to fill a job.

It’s showing the company’s leadership that the talent acquisition department is doing what it needs to do within its budget, and meeting objectives like time to fill, costs, and who’s in the pipeline.

And — since it not only has a slick system but its metrics are strong — it’s making a case as to why the internal recruiting model and not outsourcing is the way to go.

Informatica has improved the candidate experience; improved its interview scheduling; and in its words, “dedicating ourselves as an organization to stop using archaic tools.”

UPS is one of the answers to the questions: is anyone actually hiring someone from Twitter? Does recruiting by text message work?

It found job boards, print, and radio to be working so-so. So it turned to new technologies. It launched an ad program for people to respond to job openings with text messages from mobile phones. And they did by the tens of thousands.

UPS has had success with Twitter pages and a mobile-friendly career website.

Everything integrates with its applicant tracking system, and, the company notes, “with trackable URLs only  … no candidate self-selection or recruiter bias.”

UPSjobs.mobi drove more than a half-million page views in its first four months and the average time spent on the mobile site was 1 minute and 34 seconds, with 2.74 average page-views. The Facebook page attracted 18,000 fans in two years and 36,600 by the end of 2011.

What’s different about UPS is not that it uses social media but the degree to which it uses so many technologies together, and does so much tracking — like with its packages. In 2010 a minimum of 955 hires that its ATS could track were delivered by UPS through social media and mobile marketing integration. In 2011, between text messaging, QR codes, Twitter, Facebook, mobile phone recruiting, and social media networks, almost 3,000 hires were made.

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

Last year’s winner CACI didn’t exactly rest. It worked on improvements in areas like employee mobility, alumni hiring, and college recruiting. It also experimented with new ideas like personalized coaching for hiring managers and recruiters, implementing “just in time” coaching for managers. Says CACI: “When a candidate reaches certain hiring milestones, an automated email is sent directly to the hiring manager containing links to ATS and interviewing training modules. This has enhanced manager knowledge throughout the hiring process, decreased recruiter time to train, and increased our quality of hire.”

It hired a Personal Recruiter Coach to develop and implement individual recruiter learning plans, like improving people’s LinkedIn skills. CACI reports that “over 50% of our recruiters have seen an increase in offer acceptances and hires due to their coaching.”

CACI added QR codes to its marketing materials; mobile visitors have doubled. It has worked on search engine optimization, increased marketing to its talent community, and improved its social media recruiting. Facebook followers increased 172%, LinkedIn followers increased 813%, and Twitter followers increased 2,600%.

It implemented software that matches candidates to positions by extracting relevant data from candidate profiles, such as skill set and clearance level. It saves recruiter times and lowered days to fill. Cost per hire is down to $2,863 — 13% down — and company revenue is up 14%. Said one judge: “They were able to show more meaningful results than others, with improvements in speed, cost, and revenue.”

Informatica enhanced how managers request requisitions, how candidate feedback is given, and how employment offers are generated; “all systematically and in complete contrast to the ‘paper and pencil’ which preceded in prior years,” according to the company. It developed a recruiting dashboard for the corporation’s executives, allowing leaders among the different company divisions to see how its talent acquisition organization is doing.

Like CACI, it has done a lot of SEO work. Its “resource scorecard” was created to evaluate recruiter effectiveness against set targets.

Managers have been trained better on interview skills. Recruiter training has increased, something the company believes has helped it win three recent awards for sourcing.

It has found ways to reduce administrative work in the requisition creation process and in scheduling interviews. It revised offer letters, and started a global background check process. Results include decreased time-to-fill from 114 to 68 days; increased hiring manager satisfaction; a 100% increase in career site traffic; and reduced time to fill by 70 percent.

Said one judge: “I’m impressed by the great work done at Informatica — their significant leap into technology, their cloud application, and their talent mapping tools.”

Dogs and babies came out on top. They were the stars of four of the top five favorite ads in the USA Today Super Bowl Admeter. The M&M commercial ranked 4th.

However, it was a such a mediocre crop of ads this year that more than a few newspapers used the word “Yawn” in their headline of the coverage. The Associated Press report said: “The Super Bowl may have been a nail biter, but the ads were a snooze.”

“What’s notable about this year versus others is that advertisers played it safe. As a result, we saw fewer standouts, but we also didn’t see as many costly mistakes,” said Tim Calkins. He’s clinical professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University who each year leads the school’s Super Bowl Advertising Review.

The panel’s top pick was the M&M ad. CareerBuilder, which ignored criticism over its use of chimpanzees, got a “B” grade from the panel. The USA Today audience ranked it in the middle of the pack.

The company was blasted last year by animal rights activists who complained about the use of chimps, who, they said, are taken young from their mothers and are mistreated or abused as they’re trained for commercial work.

CareerBuilder, knowing it would face another round of negative publicity, opted to go ahead anyway.

“The chimpanzees were brought back by popular demand.  It’s been a very successful campaign that job seekers identify with and act upon,” said Jennifer Grasz, a spokesperson for CareerBuilder.

Last year, the chimp ad ranked sixth in the USA Today poll. This year’s version, in which a human is sent on a business trip with a team of prank-pulling chimps, ranks 26th.

And just in case you were wondering, The New York Giants beat the New England Patriots 21-17. The game was a repeat matchup of 2008 when the Giants also beat the Patriots.

This morning’s monthly report from the U.S. Department of Labor blasted through even the most optimistic of expectations. The jobs gain would have been the largest since May 2010, except that the Labor Department’s data group adjusted 2011′s jobs numbers. Now, only March (+246,000) and April (+251,000) had stronger numbers.

January is the second consecutive month to beat estimates. Economists predicted anywhere from MarketWatch’s tepid 121,000 to the more optimistic 182,000 in the Bloomberg survey. None of the widely reported surveys saw a decline in the unemployment rate.

Indeed, the unemployment rate, which has been declining very slowly since hitting a peak of 10.1 percent in late 2009, is now at the lowest point since February 2009. The government report also put the number of unemployed at 12.8 million. A year ago it was at 13.9 million.

While governments continued to cut jobs — federal jobs were cut by 6,000 and local government cut 11,000 positions — the private sector added 257,000. This was more than 50 percent higher than the ADP estimate earlier in the week.

Most sectors added jobs. Manufacturing accounted for 50,000 new jobs. The services sector as a whole added 176,000 workers, with much of the gain coming in what the government calls “professional and business services.” This includes temp workers and employment services (+33,200) and accounting and bookkeeping services (+12,500), likely due to ramping up for tax season.

Healthcare, a consistent growth area, was up by 30,900 positions. Leisure and hospitality, another growth area for several months, was up by 44,000. Even the battered construction industry managed to add 21,000 jobs during the month.

Only finance (off by 5,000 jobs) and the Information sector (-13,000) lost workers. The latter sector includes far more worker categories than computer professionals and data processing, although these areas also lost workers. The bulk of the loss — 7,900 — came in the motion picture and recording industry.

On top of the strong January numbers, the revisions by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics resulted in improving the overall hiring numbers for 2011 and further. For November and December alone, the BLS revisions showed 60,000 more jobs than initially reported.

Finally, the government said average hourly wages for all non-farm workers rose 4 cents during the month to $23.29. While the average workweek for all workers was unchanged in January, the manufacturing workweek increased by .3 hours to 40.9 and overtime increased to 3.4 hours.

The overall report was so strongly welcomed it sent stock futures soaring before the market opening. The Dow Jones Industrial average futures jumped 95 points.

One cautionary note: The Monster Employment Index, which tracks jobs posted on career sites and job boards, including Monster, has been declining since October. For January, the Index stood at 133, down from October’s 151. The Conference Board, which also tracks online job postings, showed an increase in January, as it did in December. But the total online listings are still not as high as they were in April last year.

One suggestion: You might want to keep a glossary of acronyms handy. Those of you who can correctly identify ANSI, ATS, SaaS, and SMB — you are excused from the glossary requirement.

Freshening Stale Resumes

When a resume is stale, but the skills and experience are just what the hiring manager ordered, what do you do? You call, you email. You don’t hear back. Or if you do, you find out they’re perfectly happy in the new job they started six months ago.

There goes your time-to-fill right down the drain.

Of course, the bright move (watch what we did there) is to keep up with your prospects. BrightMove, the talent acquisition and staffing software vendor, thinks so, too. So just this week the company added a “Social Bar” to its toolkit. With a click of the ‘sync” button, BrightMove will pull in your prospect’s updated info from Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites.

Now you know without waiting for that callback that your prospect has a new job and a better title than what you’ve got to offer.

Sure, this is something you can do on your own. And, you will, the first time you pull up a resume. Once you tag it, the process is automatic. BrightMove’s COO Mike Brandt says everything could have been automated — no human touch required — but then no system is smart enough to know which of the hundreds of Michael Brandts on LinkedIn is the one in question.

It won’t make sense to make the effort for every resume you get. But for your hot, if not immediately placeable prospects, tagging them when you get them and letting BrightMove update them for you, is, well, a bright move.

Jobaline

Matching, as anyone who has ever dated or recruited can attest, is an imprecise art. Yet that doesn’t stop anyone from insisting there’s enough science about it to improve the odds.

For hiring, I won’t argue against it, which is why when I checked out Jobaline last year I admitted not knowing quite what to think. Besides the usual requirements matching and ranking, Jobaline introduced a “seriousness” quotient. On the theory that the more interested and committed a candidate is to a particular job, the more time they will spend filling in all the info the employer demands.

Whether there was any validity to a seriousness ranking, even the founder wasn’t prepared to say.

A year later and Jobaline, as they say, has gone in a different direction. Today’s Jobaline is a sort of job board servicer, where employers post jobs for free, then get to review the basic info about applying candidates. When you see what you like, you pay.

Founder and CEO Miki Mullor calls it “pay-to-pick.”

The Interviewer Who Fell Asleep

There’s nothing like explaining to an interviewer just what it is you can do for the company to make a difference — only to discover they’re sound asleep. That’s a pretty clear hint of what your job prospects are like.

Alas that happened to poor Irwin, who was on his first interview after graduating college. Turns out the interviewer was a narcoleptic who, after snoring away for a few minutes, awoke and resumed where he left off.

I don’t know if Irwin got the job, but he did win $100 from OneWire for telling the most memorable interview story in the firm’s contest. OneWire, as we noted in last week’s Roundup, is a sourcing, tracking and, most significantly, matching system for the financial industry.

Quick Hits

Unrabble, the un-resume, SaaS ATS for the SMB market (we are partial to acronyms here at ERE), has just introduced a free version. It doesn’t do a lot, but it will give you a taste of a world without resumes.

Looking for a way to measure your branding efforts, or the performance of your career sites (besides just counting apps), or your social media significance? Here’s a list of 20 free tools. The list is intended for marketers, but then, isn’t that what we’re all becoming?

SHRM’s latest ANSI standard proposal is available for comment. The draft proposal is on workforce planning.

Hours after the company reported it nearly doubled its fourth-quarter profit over the same quarter in 2010, meeting Wall Street’s expectations, its stock price took a 16 percent beating. In afternoon trading in New York, Dice Holdings was selling for $8.40 a share, down $1.59 on the day.

Last week Monster’s stock took a 20 percent hit after it missed analyst profit expectations and announced layoffs. The company earned 11 cents a share, rather than the 12 cents Wall Street expected. Yet, the company grew revenue for the year by about 14 percent and turned 2010′s loss into a 37 cents a share profit.

Dice, however, not only met the Street’s per share earnings prediction, but its $47.36 million in revenue was slightly ahead of what analysts expected. For the year, Dice reported revenue of $179.1 million versus $129 million in 2010. Profit for the full year was 49 cents a share. In 2010 it was 28 cents.

Those results did little to cushion the company’s 2012 prediction that revenues and earnings will come in below analyst expectations. For the current quarter, Dice says it expects revenue of $46 million and net income of $7.1 million. Analysts are looking for  $46.83 million in revenue and per share earnings of 13 cents.

For the year, Dice is looking at revenue of $197 million. Wall Street wants $201.1 million.

In the announcement of the company’s financial results, Chairman, President, and CEO Scot Melland called 2011 “a terrific year for the company.” Calling 2012 “a more uncertain recruiting environment,” Melland said he expects the company to grow.

“Our strategic priorities are unchanged: expand the number of customers using our services, capitalize on the global opportunity in our energy vertical and serve more markets around the world.”

On the Fresh & Easy home page — the company home page, not the careers home page — the words “A Great Place to Work” (as opposed to “jobs,” “employment,” or “careers”) take you to the carers page.

That’ll take you to the redesigned careers page, which includes videos, a q-and-a about the interview process, a blog, and more.

Fresh & Easy is recruiting employees and interns on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The company — which despite its growth is not without challenges — plays up its low energy use, and its food that avoids trans fats, artificial flavors and colors, and high-fructose corn syrup.

Among the players already in the ring are BranchOut, the first to build a business networking presence on Facebook, Monster’s BeKnown, and LinkedIn, the reining leader. (Facebook had its own big news Wednesday, filing for its much anticipated IPO.)

Like BranchOut and BeKnown, Glassdoor leverages a user’s Facebook data to find connections at companies in which they have an interest. These can then help provide a direct line to the recruiter or hiring manager. It works simply by using your Facebook login.

Setting Glassdoor apart is the wealth of information it has collected about tens of thousands of companies that’s hard or even impossible to find anywhere else. From its beginning as a place where workers could review their company (or former company) with sometimes no-holds-barred bluntness, Glassdoor has broadened its scope, providing just the kind of information job seekers want: job listings, salaries, interview questions, company background, those unvarnished opinions — both pro and con — and now, who among a person’s Facebook connections has an in.

Branded “Inside Connections,” the new service adds networking to the Glassdoor features, making the site, as Tim Besse, co-founder and vice president of product and marketing, said, “The most complete listing of information about jobs.”

It’s that completeness, Besse argues, that gives Glassdoor the advantage over all other careers networking sites, including, he insists, LinkedIn. “The two most trusted ways to find out about a company,” says Besse, “People you know and, two, people who worked there.”

LinkedIn has both, but if you aren’t connected to one of them, that won’t be much help. At Glassdoor you could always see what people had to say about an employer. Now, you can also see who among your connections works there.

“We have all the tools,” Besse adds.

LinkedIn’s advantage is the completeness of its user profiles. Because it is oriented toward careers and business networking, LinkedIn users tend to be thorough in posting their professional information and prompt in keeping it current.

Facebook users tend to provide only limited employment information. While data is hard to come by, Glassdoor says a survey it commissioned shows 65-70 percent of Facebook users have entered at least some employment data. However, Besse points out that Facebook’s Timeline will prompt ever larger numbers of people to complete their profiles and provide more details.

(Timeline was announced at Facebook’s f8 conference in the fall. Its rollout has been slow, but its anticipated impacts are large and have been discussed in detail by marketers, researchers, and others.)

A post on the Harvard Business Review site about the impact of Timeline on careers notes, “If you were holding onto the idea that Facebook could be your personal haven while you build your professional profile on LinkedIn, it’s time to let that fantasy go. The Timeline offers an opportunity for you to tell the story of your career in a uniquely compelling way, so you need to consciously tackle the challenge of building a propersonal profile that will position you appropriately in the eyes of employers, clients, or colleagues.”

If Facebook users do as the writer suggests, then sites like Glassdoor stand to benefit and it won’t matter that LinkedIn has locked out BeKnown, BranchOut, and others, refusing to share its data.

Besse, in that case, could realize his goal: “I am out there to build the world’s largest and most trusted” career site.

Its plans includes TV ads, movie ads, billboards, newspaper and magazine advertising, and of course the career site, featuring people lifting up their shirts to show military uniforms underneath.

The site plays up the potential for good benefits, travel, community involvement, and personal growth — the latter, for example, exemplified by the prominent quote from a reservist on the site saying: “I wanted an opportunity to step out, try new things, and push myself.”

The Australian Army hopes to use the campaign for at least three years.

In the paperwork submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook said it expects to raise $5 billion from the public sale of its stock. That’s based on the registration fee it paid. The New York Times says it could end up raising much more.

Facebook reported in its S-1 filing that it earned $1 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion, most of it coming from advertising. It reported having 845 million monthly active users as of the end of the year, a 39 percent increase over the year before. In the U.S., Facebook saw a 16 percent bump over 2010, ending last year with 161 million monthly average users, or about half the country’s total population.

Its average daily user count is 483 million, meaning more than half those who visit the site in a month do so every day. The company also reported 425 million monthly mobile users, a number it expects will grow with some of it replacing PC access.

With numbers like these it’s not surprising that employers have been flocking to build Facebook profiles and encourage their workers, customers and others to “like” them.

Recruiters began embracing Facebook years ago, seeing it as a way to expand the reach of their employer branding. Many began by combing through Facebook profiles as part of candidate vetting.  Now, companies regularly see Facebook as both a branding tool and a way to develop prospect communities.

Increasingly, Facebook is becoming a sourcing tool. BranchOut, which launched on Facebook 18 months ago, enables users to create business-only networks that can be accessed by recruiters. BeKnown, launched by Monster last summer, is similar.

Both BranckOut and BeKnown also connected with LinkedIn. But not long after the BeKnown launch, LinkedIn shut off access. That hasn’t put much of a damper on either site. BranchOut has about 2.7 million monthly average users. BeKnown has 260,000.

A third site is poised to announce its own Facebook connection later tonight, Pacific time.

Indeed the January number came in below the average of 182,000, which is what economists in a Bloomberg survey were expecting. A Dow Jones Newswires survey however put the number right at 170,000.

The ADP report also adjusted down the December numbers from the initial 325,000 to 292,000.  Nearly all the January gain, says ADP, came from companies with fewer than 500 workers, and all but 18,000 of the new jobs were in the service sector. Manufacturing added 10,000 workers during the month.

A year ago, ADP said 190,000 private sector jobs were created in January.

This morning’s report, says Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at Miller Tabak, “compares to the 2011 monthly average of 160,000 and thus points to a continued recovery but the mediocre pace this far into a recovery still remains frustrating,” He estimates that Friday’s official report from the U.S. Department of Labor will show 165,000 non-farm jobs created in January.

The ADP National Employment Report, produced jointly with Macroeconomic Advisers, is closely watched by economists as an indication of what the official U.S. Labor Department jobs report will show. The government report is usually released on the first Friday of every month.

The two reports rarely match, largely due to differences in methodology. The government report also includes public sector employment. ADP’s report does not. However, as the Globe and Mail (Canada) said in reporting this morning’s report, “Take the number with a large pinch of salt, but pay attention to the trend.”

That trend, though, is hard to read. While there hasn’t been a negative month since September 2010 (when census layoffs influenced the numbers), job gains have hovered around 100,000 for most of last year. Only in four months did the official numbers break 200,000. In three months, they were well below 100,000.

Like the job numbers, other signs are positive, if tepid. The Conference Board last week said its Leading Economic Index improved slightly in December  to 94.3. It was the third consecutive monthly increase in the index. (The Board also announced changes in how the index is calculated.) This morning, the Board’s monthly count of jobs posted online showed 61,300 more jobs in January than the month before. It’s only the second increase in job postings in eight months.

Economists, now, are not expecting any surprises in Friday’s government report. The Wall Street Journal says economists are expecting it to show 125,000 new jobs and no change in the current 8.5 percent unemployment rate.  Reuters puts the number at 150,000. And Bloomberg, which wrote a long piece this morning about growing optimism in the financial markets and among economists, says the Friday jobs report will come in at 145,000.

Over the years it has come to be accepted that the average number of new hires coming from employee referral programs is somewhere between SHRM’s 24 percent (for non-exempt positions) to about a third. Some programs do much better.

From CareerXroads now comes evidence that the hires from employee referrals are undercounted.

“Referrals permeate the recruiting process more than we think,” says recruiting consultant Gerry Crispin, a CareerXroads principal.

He and his partner, Mark Mehler, surveyed their clients and others about employee referral programs and found that most of the 50 respondents have a referral program, most pay a bonus of some kind, and on average 28 percent of their external hires are referrals.

Most of the results, says Crispin, were expected. However, in comparing data from that admittedly limited, and unscientific survey with the early results of the consultancy’s annual Source of Hire study, “we’re finding referrals are a part of every source or almost every.”

For instance, rehires, a small, but steady source of hires, include a sizable percentage of individuals referred by employees. The rehires may first come to the attention of recruiters through a referral, but when they’re onboarded, the source of hire tends to get reported as a rehire.

It’s a “classification issue,” explains Crispin. A similar situation occurs with sourcers. They will be reported as the source of a hire even when they identified a candidate as a result of a referral from an employee.

Crispin and Mehler included an early indication of the pervasiveness of employee referrals in their survey results, posted online here at SlideShare. The numbers are still being crunched for the forthcoming source of hire survey (tentatively to be titled “Channels of Influence”), so there’s no data cited for the contribution referrals make to these other sources.

However, the share of the pie that referrals make to the total hires attributed to these other sources is labeled. As Crispin observed, “With just what we can count, referral programs make a big contribution.”

Much of the other data in the survey report will be useful to recruiters for comparing their own results. The surveyed companies, the report preface notes, are “large, highly-competitive firms.” Some make upwards of 10,000 hires a year. More, though, make 1,000 or less.

Big or small, two-thirds of the respondents offer a bonus for every referral hire. Most common (44 percent) is $500 for a non-exempt hire. One-in-five will pay $1,000 and a few more (28 percent) will pay that for difficult to fill non-exempt positions.

It takes about 10.4 referrals on average to make a hire. Some companies are either so picky or get so many referrals that only one referral in 25 or more results in a hire.

One other significant stat coming out of the survey is that the majority of employers don’t give the referred candidate any special treatment. Of the 39 percent that do, the comments cited in the results suggest that many don’t do much more than review the resume or application.

On the other hand, 85 percent of the employees who made a referral will get a thank you whether or not a hire is made.

One of the survey’s only surprises, Crispin said, it that employers that don’t dedicate staff to managing and promoting the referral program actually do better than those with staff assigned.

The 53.6 percent of companies that divvy up the work among the recruiting staff average about 33 percent of hires from referrals. Those with some dedicated support average about 24 percent.

“It’s counterintuitive,” Crispin agreed. The result could be just an aberration. Or, he speculated, it could be spreading the work means there’s more overall time invested in the program. Or, it could be the “silo effect” effect, that is when one person is tasked with a job, everyone else leaves things up to them.

“Now that I’ve seen that,” Crispin notes, “I’d be curious to see if someone could replicate it … for now, it’s just an artifact.”

The EEOC said total new complaints during fiscal 2011 were just slightly ahead of 2010. Last year it received 99,947 claims compared to 99,922 the year before. It also reported taking in $455.6 million through its administrative program and litigation.

Released last week, the stats show charges of retaliation by employers against workers who raised discrimination issues accounted for 37.4 percent of the commission’s workload. Complaints alleging just violations of Title VII (discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, and national origin) accounted for 31.4 percent of the complaints.

Retaliation claims are rising faster than any other category of complaint, up 10 points in the last decade. Race discrimination claims, historically the most frequent, were the second-most commonly received complaint by the EEOC. They’ve hovered around 36 percent for years and last year represented 35.4 percent of the total charges.

(Note that a charge may contain multiple discrimination claims. The percentages represent the charges that include a specific discrimination claim.)

Retaliation claims may well continue to climb this fiscal year. Announcing a lawsuit earlier this month, an EEOC regional attorney in the New York office said, “We will pursue vigorously retaliation claims against employers whose managers would rather not comply with court orders and fire individuals who object to threats based on their religion and bias based on race.”

Mintz Levin attorney Martha Zackin, discussing the retaliation charge statistics, bluntly declared, “Retaliation claims are here to stay.” “ Recent developments lead us to conclude that this trend will continue, in 2012 and beyond,” she said, citing Department of Labor retaliation guidance under the Fair Labor Standards and Family and Medical Leave acts.

After retaliation and race, sex, disability, and age charges ranked third, fourth, and fifth respectively. However, while charges of sex and race discrimination declined, age and disability claims increased over 2010.

The EEOC said that its enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act “produced the highest increase in monetary relief among all of the statutes: the administrative relief obtained for disability discrimination charges increased by almost 35.9 percent to $103.4 million compared to $76.1 million in the previous fiscal year. Back impairments were the most frequently cited impairment under the ADA, followed by other orthopedic impairments, depression, anxiety disorder and diabetes.”

It’s called “Get Hired,” it’s backed by private equity investors, and it’ll be free, at least for now.

The company, which has raised $1.75 million, has been building up a list of job-seekers and employers, and then contacting signers-up to send them a distinct URL to use in spreading the word via Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. “The more friends you invite, the sooner you’ll get access,” Get Hired tells them.

To explain what this site does, it helps to provide a super-brief history. Suki Shah had started a company around the time you don’t want to start a company — about when Lehman Brothers collapsed. Called Statacor Biosciences, it specialized in nutritional therapy and dietetics.

Not only were the times challenging, but Shah realized while hiring people that HR practices were, too — “even more archaic” than physician practices, he says. He found the job boards’ prices to be “mind-blowing” and found himself inundated with many hundreds of applications when hiring for his new firm, which has grown to 25 employees in seven states.

So Shah had applicants record an audio, minute-long explanation about heart disease, to see how they’d sound to a patient, or to a sales prospect. Instead of hundreds of applicants he now had maybe 30 good ones for a job, and could go through them quickly. He added video, too.

This takes us into 2010. Shah felt that he was onto something. In 2011 it was time for his brother to run the other company and for Suki to focus on making money off of this video-audio-more-to-come business.

What is launching today is supposed to replace a job board and an applicant tracking system — particularly for a company that finds that about $400 for a job listing on a job board to be expensive. Job candidates can find jobs, record video or audio (Shah says that when given the chance to talk about their strengths on video or audio, they’re anxious to), upload a resume, references, and more. They can see who has viewed their profiles, and can receive interview requests through the system.

For employers, the system can push jobs out to people using social media, a little bit like other systems you’ve heard about, like Jobvite. Employers can look at candidates’ video or audio profiles, set up video pre-screening questions, ask text-based (written) screening questions, and interview people online. It also enables you to schedule interviews.

Thinking of all the other companies launched in recent years, I asked Shah: “Haven’t other people built stuff like this?”

He smiled, and shook his head horizontally in the ‘no’ motion. “That’s why I built it,” he says. He says — quite excitedly — that the biggest job boards are “archaic.” Their price, the number of resumes people are bombarded with, etc. – he feels it’s all designed more for quantity than quality.

So let’s get on with it: Guess who says they want to grow their influence at the top corporate levels?

HR you say? Sorry, not the answer we were looking for. The answer comes from MarketingCharts, which says, ”An overwhelming majority (79%) of global CMOs say they want their influence in business strategy and development to grow.”

Here’s another factoid from the article, which is based on a survey from Forrester Research and Heidrick & Struggles: 89 percent of CMOs identified visioning and strategic thinking as a top competency. There now, don’t you feel better?

Here an ATS, There an ATS

Is there anyone left in the world who wants an ATS and doesn’t have one? There’s no reason for that these days, what with an ATS in every price range.

At the free end, there’s Zoho Recruiter, if all you need are the basics. For our money (actually no one’s money) there’s SmartRecruiters, which is a surprisingly full-featured, sophisticated ATS that’s priced at an even-more-suprising free.

At the other end of the scale, a company can spend upwards of a million on a enterprise, in-house talent acquisiton system that handles reqs, posts jobs, parses, sorts, manages, and stores hundreds of thousands, even millions of resumes you will never look at.

Despite this virtual cornucopia of systems, humanity’s indomitable drive to build a better mousetrap leads to the near monthly launch of just one more ATS. The latest to find its way into our inbox is Zartis. It’s a minimalist SaaS ATS out of Ireland that’s aimed at the SMB market. (Got all those initials?)

Zartis offers more than Zoho, and less than SmartRcruiters. That would be fine except for one thing: Zartis is mostly fee-based. What you get for free is a single open job allowance, which makes it more of a S than an M market tool. If you have more jobs and want more functionality — like posting jobs to aggregators — you have to pay.

Bottom line: Check out Zartis if you’re curious, then choose SmartRecruiters.

Since the ATS door is now open, OneWire got some strokes in an investment report from Feltl and Company, an investment banker and advisor. The report includes long excerpts from a discussion between analyst Scott Berg and OneWire President and COO Brin McCagg.

Berg obviously was impressed. “Overall,” he writes in his report, “We believe OneWire is creating an intriguing and unique approach to talent acquisition software and we are quite excited to track its progress in the coming years.”

We (our royal usage here refers to us — another use of the royal pronoun!), we wrote about OneWire in 2009,  not long after it was launched by founders McCagg and Skiddy von Stade. (Von Stade heads the financial executive search firm FS von Stade and Associates.)

OneWire was then, and still is, both intriguing and unique. It stands between the applicant and a corporate ATS, though an ATS isn’t a required component. It functions as a matching system, with the players completing profiles far more detailed than a mere resume.

It borrows from social sites, networking, and classic job sites to create a rich database of prospects that, as we (there’s that royal pronoun again) said in the 2009 article, if you want a Harvard grad who was on the crew team with international banking experience in pharmaceuticals, OneWire will find everyone who fits and rank them for you.

OneWire is being used by hundreds of financial firms and many Fortune 1000 companies. If you need another reason to take a look, consider that OneWire was named “One of America’s Most Promising Startups” by BusinessWeek. Here’s one more: OneWire has gotten $30 million from individual investors, a fundraising method intriguing and unique enough to warrant Mashable attention.

Monster’s stock price was down almost 20 percent at lunchtime in New York, a drop of $1.79 on the day. Trading below $10 for so long that Standard & Poors moved the company out of its S&P 500 stock basket in December, Monster’s price is now right at $7.19 a share.

The jobs advertising company, which yesterday laid off 400 employees, issued its fourth-quarter and full-year financials this morning before the markets opened. Despite growing revenue by almost 14 percent for the year, the company fell short in the final quarter. It earned 11 cents a share versus the 12 cents analysts were expecting. Monster’s revenue for the quarter also fell short, coming in at $250 million instead of the $259 million average estimate of Wall Street analysts.

Compared to 2010, Monster was profitable, earning 37 cents a share for the year (after allowances for one-time and similar expenses). In 2010 the company lost 7 cents a share.

Looking ahead, the company is not optimistic about where the job market is heading. Bookings (posting and search contracts) are expected to be down 6 to 10 percent from the 1st quarter of 2010. Part of the explanation for the decline is that there were strong signs of economic recovery at the beginning of 2011 leading employers to anticipate adding staff. But the economy sputtered, slowing hiring.

Now, with employers carefully monitoring headcount and with surveys suggesting that if hiring accelerates at all, it will be in the second half of the year, Monster says it expects its revenue will be lower this quarter than the year before. The outlook, says the company’s report, is for a 3 to 7 percent decline in revenue.

“First quarter earnings are expected to be in the range of break-even to $0.04 per share,” the company says.

However, from a purely employment view, posting and search revenue actually was up globally. While North American revenue (principally the U.S.) declined 2 percent in the last quarter, Monster’s international revenue grew by 8.3 percent. For the year, revenue from its international operations was up 23.3 percent, and is now approaching parity with North America.

The biggest revenue reduction came from Monster’s advertising income. Monster said earlier this year it would be getting out of the advertising business, so the decline here was to be expected. For the fourth quarter, Monster’s advertising revenue was $21.3 million, a 34 percent reduction from the year before.

The layoff of about 7 percent of its 5,700 employee workforce is expected to save about $100 million annually.

Said Sal Iannuzzi, chairman, president and CEO, “We are taking difficult but necessary steps to implement cost savings initiatives that will provide us the flexibility to enhance our marketing and sales efforts to continue to improve long-term growth prospects and profitability.”

Next week, CareerBuilder will release its North American revenue for the fourth quarter and full year. The privately held company voluntarily releases only select data. LinkedIn, now the leading recruitment competitor to both Monster and CareerBuilder, will report its financial results on Feb. 9. Dice Holdings, operator of Dice.com and other niche boards, will report its results Feb. 2.

That’s a remarkable number, which, even if is skewed by respondents with very in-demand skills, would still go a long way to explaining why you’re not getting calls back. In fact, the survey shows that IT professionals are picky about whose call they will return.

The best thing a recruiter can do when leaving a message or speaking with a potential candidate is to be as detailed about the job as possible. Hearing details about the specific job, the team, the nature of the work, and the company culture is the kind of information that would lead 88 percent of the survey respondents to return the call.

Less important, but still high on the list for the IT professionals surveyed, is the professionalism of the recruiter and the reputation of the company.

“The best recruiters take the time to get to know the client and the candidate in detail. He or she with the most intelligence wins the matchmaking process,” says TEKsystems Director, Rachel Russell.

The findings come from the company’s quarterly IT Professional Perspectives Survey, which surveyed 2,424 IT workers last quarter about how they look for jobs. First, when a tech worker begins to consider a new job, they take stock of their skills, goals, and interests. Then, 96 percent say they hit the job boards.

“Job boards are the quickest way for IT professionals to feel like they’re getting out there and searching for a job,” says Russell. “But given that so many people are on the job boards, it’s a hard place to stand out.”

Perhaps knowing that, once a tech job seeker finds interesting opportunities, the next step for 72 percent of them is to network with other professionals. At some point, many will work with a recruiter. According to the survey, 59 percent say a recruiter is the main resource; 54 percent say colleagues; 53 percent say friends; and, 46 percent rely on their networks.

Recruiters who help job seekers, even if they don’t end up placing them, may still reap rewards. With 45 percent of the survey respondents saying they have 10 or more top professionals in their network, recruiters who remain accessible, helpful, and professional may be able to get a referral. The survey found 65 percent of IT professionals willing to share names if they had a positive experience with the recruiter.