Think again.

ERE Recruiting Excellence Award applicants found creative ways to redeploy employees, including recruiters, avoiding layoffs and saving money. Others used the recession to redo their career websites, build a new employee-pipelining tool, and change its sources of hire to upgrade the technologically savviness of its workforce.

The judges were impressed. They were diligent and inquisitive, too, so to all judges, thanks.

Here are this year’s finalists. As always, you’ll hear a lot more about them throughout the year — in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, on this site, at ERE’s Fall Conference in Florida (October 25-27), and in the Spring.

As for the Spring in San Diego, there’ll be a reception Monday night where some information on the finalists will be available. The next day, the winners will be announced in front of the whole conference audience, and you’ll be able to ask them questions.

This year’s finalists, in alphabetical order within each category:

Best College Recruiting Program

EY: intern leadership conference

Rosetta: more applicants, less money

Best Corporate Careers Website

DaVita: not resting after past victories

Intuit: interactive Flash presentation

Best Employee Referral Program

Accenture: higher quality, less money

Aricent: high quality of hire

Best Employer Brand

EY: embedded in all touch points

UnitedHealth: higher new hire satisfaction

Best Retention Program/Practices

Paychex: consistent follow-up by recruiters

PNC Bank: redeploying recruiters

Most Strategic Use of Technology

AT&T: iPhone app

KeyBank: “virtual job tryout”

Tata: online campus portal

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

CACI: hiring disabled veterans

Sodexo: social media success

by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Becoming a leading-edge recruiter is an admirable goal few corporate recruiters strive to achieve. Not only must a leading-edge recruiter routinely demonstrate a marked increase in positive business impact over other recruiters, but they must consistently monitor trends, devise new approaches, benchmark against emerging practices, and constantly fight with colleagues often resistant to trying something new.

Historically, staying on top of trends and new approaches was relatively easy, as there were only a few companies isolated in a few narrow geographies that one needed to watch. The War for Talent in 1997 certainly drew a lot of attention to the practices of technology firms in “silicon hubs” like California’s Silicon Valley (home to Google, Cisco, Intuit, Facebook, Twitter, and HP) or Seattle, Washington’s, Silicon Forest (home to Microsoft and Amazon), but up until a few years ago there was no formal process to identify where leading-edge practices were emerging and who was developing them.

ERE Media’s Recruiting Excellence Awards and articles by global strategy advisors like Kevin Wheeler and ourselves, who have advised and studied the practices of companies in more than 40 nations, are helping leading-edge recruiters focus their attention where evolution is occurring.

The Hotbeds of Evolution and Innovation are Shifting

No one can argue that rapid growth of the technology sector in 1997 left many technology companies desperate for talent, and that desperation drove many charged with recruiting for such organizations to both collaborate and innovate new practices to help close gaps in supply and demand. While not cheap, importing labor and shifting work to geographies where the supply of labor exceeded the demand has been the dominant approach.

For more than a decade such solutions have helped allocate work across an emerging global talent market, but now many of the geographies that picked up work are also struggling to source qualified talent to staff available projects. While China and India may have a surplus of unemployed/underemployed people, they too have a shortage of skilled professional labor.

As global economic growth focuses on Asia, desperation of firms in Asia to keep pace with the demand for talent is driving more and more talent management focus on excellence in execution, collaboration, evolution, and innovation.

With smaller company sizes, nations like Australia and New Zealand are earning a reputation as being home to progressive companies willing to try new practices. Nations like Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, to name only a few, are channeling state investment dollars into industry-sector-focused universities and research parks that elevate public/private collaboration to new levels.

However, nowhere can one find as much focus on recruiting leadership than in India and China. Twelve years ago production standards in both nations were subpar, work ethics were questionable, and infrastructure was lacking, but today both nations have firms that excel in world-class engineering design, international trade, offshoring, and manufacturing. Over the course of those 12 years, firms in India and China have not only studied and adopted Western talent management practices, they have improved upon them if not in design, most certainly in execution.

Examples of Progressive Recruiting and Talent Management Practices

While ERE readers will need to wait until March to learn about which companies won a recruiting excellence award (with finalists announced soon), what follows are a few practices becoming common among leading employers in India based on our work and a review of the ERE Award Applications. Mentally compare this list of practices to those that are currently in operation at your organization.

General Recruiting Practices

• Prioritization of key jobs and skills. Recruiting resources focuses on the most critical 40%.
• Pre-need hiring. Talent pools mapped and individuals assessed prior to requisition opening.
• Tight integration with sales/operations to drive workforce planning. Recruiting leaders often sit side by side with sales and operations leaders during development meetings to coordinate workforce planning efforts.

Employee Referral Program Practices

• Dedicated referral teams employing a proactive referral strategy in which recruiters personally solicit the names of the very best from the very best employees and managers. (In one organization this approach produced 47% of all hires, garnered a 66% employee participation rate, and consistently produced the highest quality hires, all with a cost-per-hire 20% lower than other hiring channels.)
• Employee referral processes that target corporate alumni in order to boomerang them back. (This approach often produces better results than any other alumni recruitment effort.)
• Onsite referral fairs that allow referred candidates to receive on-the-spot interviews and/or offers.
• Online referral status tracking that provides feedback on status and alerts when a referral’s status changes.
• Established referral targets for individual managers and teams.
• Required pre-assessment of referrals by referring employee. To eliminate poor quality referrals many programs require that employees pre-assess their referral and share the assessment as part of the submission process.
• Service-level agreements that guarantee feedback to the referring employee within 72 hours of submission and help-desk response to inquiries within eight hours.

Metrics and Business-case-related Practices

• Advanced statistical analysis processes including six sigma assessment, value chain analysis, and force field analysis for assessing and improving recruiting process performance.
• Quantification of the direct-dollar impact of new hiring processes on corporate revenues. (In one example, the organization identified that reducing time-to-fill in revenue-generating positions by 40% could increase revenue by millions of dollars.)
• Development of “hiring accuracy” metrics that assesses and quantify hiring success/failure rates.
• Distributed real-time recruiter productivity measures. (One organization found that simply measuring and reporting productivity increased it 70% in one year.)

Recruitment Marketing and Branding Related Practices

• Development of in-house recruitment marketing teams capable of supporting frequent communication design/delivery channel changes.
• Using search engine optimization techniques to measurably increase visibility of jobs and brand messaging online.

College-recruiting-related Practices

• Using ambassador programs to build relationships with top students and faculty.
• Adoption of CRM approaches that let recruiters communicate frequently with students via text messages about events in the students’ lives, such as “best of luck” messages during final exams.
• Development of robust campus performance assessment processes and metrics.
• Use of contests, quizzes, and projects to excite top students and more accurately assess them.
• Engagement of market intelligence data to identify employee value propositions that better engage students.
• Online professional training courses covering topics that improve the quality of potential candidates and attract top students to participate in the application process.
• Leverage alumni to give tech talks, classroom lectures, and on-campus workshops.
• Curriculum guidance. Many organizations work closely with academic leaders and key faculty to align curriculum with industrial need, ensuring that courses focus on practical knowledge and skill development that is immediately relevant.

Training and Development Practices

• Extensive focus on deep enterprise training, development, and leadership preparation. (One organization has built the world’s largest leadership and development training center, exceeding in size GE’s famous Crotonville facility. The 270-acre, $60-million plush facility has a hotel, food center, employee care center, theater, and research facility.)
• Overseas residential training programs. Recent grads are frequently provided an opportunity to work internationally for a period of several months prior to accepting a stationary role in their home country.

Are You Leading or Lagging?

I hope you agree that this list represents some pretty progressive practices and strategies. While India’s leadership position is certainly open to debate, there can be no doubt that staffing challenges in India and China are forcing leading firms like Infosys, Tata, Aricent, Reliance, and Wipro to focus on execution and innovation. Some might argue that lack of government regulation and lower cost of labor enable them to do things you couldn’t do in the U.S. or Western Europe, to which my response is simple: it’s not the job of a leader to whine about what they can’t do, but rather to find a way to do what they need to do.

Not all organizations in India are on the leading edge when it comes to talent management and even those that are have areas that need improvement. The point is that if you want to be on the leading edge you need to be aware of other organizations on the edge, and that moving forward more and more of the firms you need to monitor will be in India, China, and other Asian nations.

Final Thoughts

Generally speaking recruiting is a conservative profession. If you’re a “defensive type,” super patriot, or resist being data-driven, you will likely dismiss our contention that the U.S. is/has slipped into second place with regard to recruiting leadership. If, however, you are open-minded, I suggest that you revisit this list of practices and use it to help determine where your firm needs to be if it’s going to seriously compete for talent in the emerging global labor market. Companies in India, Singapore, New Zealand, and China have already started recruiting top scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and finance professionals from leading corporations in the U.S. and Western Europe. The battle is heating up. Are you more prepared to fight or give up?

At some point when the Colts and the Saints aren’t going head-to-head, CareerBuilder and Monster will go head-to-head with TV commercials that will set the tone for the great 2010 matchup between these titans of job-boarding.

We’re going to have some fun ourselves with these multi-million dollar branding campaigns. (The ad time alone is running between $2.5 million and $3 million.) A few minutes after the 6:25 EST kickoff on Sunday, our poll goes live asking you to pick the best of the two job board commercials.

I can’t show you those commercials now, because neither company has posted what will air. But here’s a preview.

CareerBuilder began building buzz months ago with a $100,000 contest for the best user-created Super Bowl commercial. After reviewing more than 1,000 submissions, CareerBuilder awarded three of the $100,000 grand prizes. Its ad agency turned them into professionally produced spots and the world began voting for a favorite.

Go ahead and vote. But don’t expect the fan favorite to actually wind up being broadcast. CareerBuilder’s little disclaimer says, “The results of voting will not affect the outcome of CareerBuilder’s choice of commercial to air during the Big Game.”

Still, it could. Here’s the video that got the most votes on You Tube.

Monster, which returned to the big game in 2009 after a six-year hiatus, hasn’t posted its commercial online, yet. It’s got that negative buzz thing going. Get the world jonesing to see it by making them wait.

That hasn’t kept Monster from teasing us, though. The company ran an ad during a playoff game two weeks ago featuring an inept Boogeyman who finds his true calling on Monster.com. The ad was great.

Within days, The New York Times was reporting that Monster’s Super Bowl commercial would feature a beaver. Said beaver, fiddling away on what appears to be a subway platform, then turned up in an online teaser. Another got posted to YouTube on Thursday, which is what’s below.

At the same time, there’s a whole website devoted to beaver-mania called fiddleafriend. According to an incredibly straitlaced business story on Monster’s hometown newspaper, the website will “allow viewers to personalize their own friendly dam-building rodent in music videos and photos.”

Hmmm. That sounds vaguely like the monkey campaign that CareerBuilder ran several years ago. So successful and popular was it, that CareerBuilder still has the Monk-e-Mail online.

We’ll have to wait to see just what Monster has up its sleeve. But heck, I’ll go out on a limb. Based on what I’ve seen, the early edge has to go to Monster.

But don’t listen to me, go here to place a bet on what ad will come out on top. (Isn’t Internet betting illegal?)  Check the odds here.  And here’s a list of all the ads that will get ranked by USA TODAY.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also revised its reports for November and December. In November, the BLS now says the economy gained 64,000 jobs, up from its previous estimate of a 4,000 job gain.

That improvement was more than offset by the bureau’s revision to its December number. Instead of the 85,000 job loss it first reported, the BLS now says 150,000 jobs were actually lost.

The report prompted Morgan Stanley’s David Greenlaw to tell Marketwatch, “All in all, we see encouraging signs of progress in labor market conditions and expect to see much better payroll performance in coming months.”

Economists had been expecting a job gain in January, but also a slight worsening of the unemployment rate. A Reuters survey said the average of the economist predictions was for a gain of 5,000 jobs. Marketwatch’s survey put the job growth at 25,000.

The BLS report was complicated by adjustments the bureau made to its data and the introduction of expanded reports, including reports detailing the labor situation of veterans, individuals with disabilities, and the foreign born, and more depth in other areas.

The data revisions adjusted the size of the labor force back to January 2009, which meant that the monthly job changes as first reported were too low. The revisions added 617,000 more lost jobs to the 2009 totals, making the official count for the year a loss of 4.78 million jobs. And the December number is subject to still further revision.

The BLS also reported that the number of unemployed persons by reason of job loss decreased by 378,000 to 9.3 million. Nearly all of this decline occurred among permanent job losers (which, according to the BLS, means “persons whose employment ended involuntarily and who began looking for work”). However, the long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was up in January to 6.3 million. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of long-term unemployed has risen by 5.0 million.

Other indices reflected essentially the same yin-yang as the BLS. The Monster Employment Index was down 1 point, while The Conference Board’s count of new, online jobs, showed a gain of 381,800 over December. That’s the biggest jump in new online postings since the Help Wanted OnLine Data Series began in May 2005. But the total number of jobs posted online is still lower than every month in 2008 except for December.

The Consumer Confidence Index also ticked upwards slightly, mostly due to consumers’ more positive outlook for the short term. (The Consumer Confidence Index is a composite of multiple indices derived from a monthly survey conducted by The Conference Board.)

Says Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center, “Consumer Confidence rose for the third consecutive month, primarily the result of an improvement in present-day conditions. Consumers’ short-term outlook, while moderately more positive, does not suggest any significant pickup in activity in the coming months. Regarding their financial situation, while consumers were less dire about their income prospects than in December, the number of pessimists continues to outnumber the optimists.”

For the fourth quarter, CareerBuilder reported $131 million in revenue, a 30.5 percent decline from the last quarter of 2008. For the whole year, CareerBuilder’s North American revenue was $542 million, down 26.7 percent from the year before.

As a privately held company, CareerBuilder isn’t required to report any of its financials. It releases North American revenues voluntarily and has for some years. However, the company doesn’t disclose its international income or provide a profit and loss statement.

Monster, though behind in North America, has been aggressively growing its international business. In the fourth quarter of 2009, its international revenue nearly matched its combined U.S. and Canadian revenue.

It announced that it had bought HotJobs for $225 million and that it lost money in the last quarter of 2009.

The HotJobs purchase brought it a sharp rebuke from Deutsche Bank analyst Jeetil Patel who downgraded Monster from a HOLD to a SELL. He said Monster “overpaid” for the acquisition, which will cost it $225 million. His change of heart about the company was also based on Monster’s 4th quarter loss and his belief that improvement in the job board industry will be slow.

No other analyst took as strong a position as Patel. The AP reported that Credit Suisse analyst John Blackledge, who has a “Neutral” rating on Monster, said while current operating results are not impressive, things are improving.

Meanwhile, CareerBuilder issued a four-point statement this morning, that essentially contradicts Monster’s claims of traffic supremacy, questions the wisdom of the deal, and wonders what impact regulatory review of the transaction may have.

The statement’s four points are:

• CareerBuilder is the clear leader in North American revenue and will continue to be even if the deal goes through.
• CareerBuilder has been the U.S. traffic leader since 2004 and will continue to be in the future.
• History could repeat itself and Monster will have a difficult time securing regulatory approval.
• Yahoo traffic does not monetize effectively.

In detail, here’s what CareerBuilder had to say:

“CareerBuilder is the clear leader in North American revenue and will continue to be even if the deal goes through.In 2009, CareerBuilder’s North American network revenue totaled $542 million compared to Monster’s $407 million. Estimates of HotJobs’ 2009 revenue were $80-$100 million. CareerBuilder’s positive revenue trend and associated increasing market share have been steadily increasing since 2006 when we became the undisputed market leader. As of today, even if the acquisition is approved and it is completely accretive to Monster, CareerBuilder’s $542 million revenue remains greater than the combined Monster/HotJobs at approximately $487-$507 million.

“CareerBuilder has been the U.S. traffic leader since 2004 and will continue to be in the future. Monster will most likely run the business as two separate companies with separate products and separate revenue streams. In that situation, CareerBuilder’s industry-leading 21 million unique visitors per month will remain the leader over Monster’s average of 11 million unique visitors per month. In line with CareerBuilder’s current portal traffic deals and Monster’s previous portal traffic deals, Monster should expect an additional average five million unique visitors per month from Yahoo, leaving CareerBuilder the undisputed leader in traffic in the U.S.

“History could repeat itself and Monster will have a difficult time securing regulatory approval. Monster attempted to buy HotJobs in 2001. After an initial review that spanned several months, the federal government announced it would conduct a second round of reviews. The HotJobs board ultimately chose to sell the company to Yahoo instead. This transaction will require an intense U.S. Department of Justice review. This deal could take an extended period of time to close. During that time both Monster and HotJobs will continue to lose market share to CareerBuilder.”

(Here’s some background on the previous bid by Monster for HotJobs. The deal in 2001 had gone so far that Monster even issued a press release saying it was buying the company, only to find Yahoo had outbid it. Marc Cenedella, now CEO of The Ladders, was on the negotiating team back in 2001 and posted the press release on his blog.)

“Yahoo traffic does not monetize effectively. Yahoo purchased HotJobs in 2001 for $436 million. They are planning to sell HotJobs to Monster for $225 million today, a decline in the value of HotJobs by nearly half. During the same period, CareerBuilder’s revenue has grown 500 percent, while HotJobs revenue has declined over that period of time. It is clear the Yahoo traffic does not lead to revenue growth and market share gains. We don’t expect that to change when Monster takes over that traffic.”

What’s particularly interesting is CareerBuilder’s estimate that HotJobs had 2009 revenue of $80-$100 million.

Besides being in line with the guesstimates of others in the industry, it’s an indication that the chaos at Yahoo has made HotJobs a poor cousin. While all job boards have seen year-over-year declines in revenue, even at the upper end of the estimate, HotJobs would have been losing ground faster than many others, and this would have been occurring while its traffic was surging.

That certainly lends support to CareerBuilder’s fourth point about the value of the traffic. “It is clear the Yahoo! traffic does not lead to revenue growth and market share gains,” CareerBuilder’s statement says. “We don’t expect that to change when Monster takes over that traffic.”

Them’s fighting words, but probably a bit overstated. Yahoo’s internal struggles over what business it wants to be in — and its C-suite shake-up — certainly diverted focus. And, of course, HotJobs has been for sale since at least the summer of 2008. Monster, incidentally, began making a serious run at the company at least as long ago as October 2008 when it signed an NDA with Yahoo! No wonder at yesterday’s analyst conference call Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi said, “This was a long and interesting negotiation.”

While CareerBuilder didn’t think much of the purchase, Dice Holdings CEO Scot Melland had a contrary view. He told me the deal “has the potential to be a win-win for both” Monster and Yahoo.

The devil’s in the details, of course, but Melland says Monster will get a big traffic boost and picks up some 600 media partners that have strong local sales teams. Even accounting for the overlap in customers, Monster will see revenue growth.

For its part, says Melland, Yahoo manages to shed an asset it no longer considers core to its business, while getting a brand-name player for its career channel. And it gets paid for the traffic.

Melland wouldn’t discuss whether Dice had taken a run at the HotJobs deal, though more than one industry source told me it had. However, he said the HotJobs acquisition would have little impact on Dice, which operates a few niche job boards, including the technology focused Dice.com and one for the financial industry.

For the broader industry, Melland said he thought the impact would become clearer over time. It does make Monster a much stronger player, he said.

The $225 million deal gives it HotJobs, a presence on Yahoo! sites in the U.S. and Canada, and partnerships with some 600 newspapers and media outlets.

No wonder that Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi told Wall Street analysts in a conference call this afternoon, the purchase makes his company the “No. 1 global firm in our industry.”

Monster’s closest rival CareerBuilder may not agree, but Iannuzzi’s comment is no idle boast. Monster’s overseas revenue is on a par with its North American revenue. (In the 4th quarter of 2009 it had international revenues of $88.5 million. Revenue from the U.S. and Canada was $90.9 million.

Uncharacteristically, CareerBuilder did not respond to requests for its North American revenue (the only number the privately held company provides). However, in the third quarter it had North American revenue of $135 million to Monster’s $95.2 million.

The company also did not respond to an email request for comment on the HotJobs acquisition.

In terms of pure traffic counts, the HotJobs acquisition plus the agreement that keeps HotJobs on the Yahoo! homepages in the U.S. and Canada for three years, pushes Monster ahead of CareerBuilder, which has held the lead for several years. No other career site in the world comes close.

The most recent U.S. traffic numbers I’ve seen put Monster and HotJobs at a combined 32.3 million to CareerBuilder’s 21.7 million. Even though Monster won’t hold onto all that traffic — there is overlap among the job boards — it will be ahead when the sale closes and the dust of systems integration settles.

Monster will pay Yahoo! for the traffic it sends to the career channel, which is a fairly typical arrangement. How much Monster will pay wasn’t disclosed, but without Yahoo providing traffic, HotJobs wouldn’t have been worth much.

The “traffic deal,” Iannuzzi said, “will establish a No. 1 traffic position for Monster in the U.S.”

The newspaper network that comes with the sale probably helps more with the traffic than with sales. However, even today, newspapers still have a sizable (if diminishing) piece of the recruitment pie, especially with smaller and regional businesses and local staffing firms. These are the employers who call into the newspaper to place an ad or go online at the newspaper’s career site to do the same.

Reaching the smallest advertiser directly is not cost effective, yet with a White House focus on boosting hiring by small businesses and so many of them in the U.S. that they are the long tail of employment, Monster’s new newspaper partners will certainly help it there. CareerBuilder, owned mostly by three newspaper companies, has only a fraction of the more than 1,000 dailies and weeklies that are now in Monster’s orbit.

Globally, there are important benefits, too. Monster gets the exclusive right to negotiate with Yahoo’s overseas properties to power their career sites and buy traffic. The U.S. and Canada traffic deals becoming a “template,” Monster’s CFO said.

There’s no doubt Monster will pursue those deals. Iannuzzi made it very clear he has been shifting resources to strengthen the international business and that he sees opportunities in South America and Eastern Europe.

While the HotJobs news grabbed the headlines, Iannuzzi focused much of his attention during the analyst call on Monster’s new products and site reengineering. This week, Monster officially launched 6Sense search technology, which it built out of the Trovix architecture it got when it bought that job-matching firm 18 months ago.

The brains behind its Power Resume Search and PowerSearch, 6Sense is a hit, Iannuzzi said during the call, with customers as well as seekers. The first major improvements Monster introduced in years came under Iannuzzi’s watch. In January last year, Monster introduced career mapping tools, community groups, and other services to encourage job seekers to stay with Monster even after finding a new job.

A few months later, a pre-beta group of recruiters got to test the new resume search. It was a hit, helping them to find candidate resumes that matched their needs far better than did the standard (and long-time) keyword search. It got rolled out in beta in the fall and I was bowled over by how effective it is.

Since then the job-seeker version was introduced and that, too, is a (big) step up from Monster’s “Standard Search,” as the company calls it now.

Now, three months after becoming generally available and some six weeks into selling the higher-priced Power Resume Search to contract customers, Iannuzzi told the analysts, “What we are seeing is very encouraging … based on six weeks of selling … vast majority of what we are selling is 6Sense technology.”

Curiously, he went on to say 6Sense can be a tool to make recruiters more efficient because it cuts search time, making searches far more precise. But he also said it’s a threat to the industry for that same reason. “The recruitment industry,” Iannuzzi said, will have “to reconsider their business model in light of what we have developed.”

What to make of that very pregnant comment? Iannuzzi didn’t offer any help on that: perhaps because he didn’t want to; perhaps because the conference call ended at that very point.

While we wait to see what others and the market make of that, the financial markets bid up Monster’s stock price slightly in after-hours trading. Evidently, the news of the acquisition and the new product success were positives, despite the cautions from Iannuzzi and CFO Tim Yates.

The first quarter, the one we’re in, is going to be a challenge. They expect, in Iannuzzi’s words, “A rough quarter from a P and L perspective.” The rest of the year, though hardly smooth sailing, should be better.

The deal includes a three-year agreement in which Monster will power the career channel on Yahoo’s homepage in the U.S. and Canada. Yahoo will continue to manage the 600+ newspaper advertising and content consortium it has put together over the last several years. Monster, however, will get the recruitment advertising, giving it a print and online network of more than 1,000 daily and weekly newspapers across North America.

The financial terms were not detailed in the press release, but are likely to be one of the topics to be discussed at a 2 p.m. PST conference call with financial and other analysts. That conference call was scheduled weeks ago to coincide with today’s release by Monster of its 4th quarter and 2009 annual financial results.

Monster’s financial report, released at the same time as the announcement of the HotJobs deal, shows revenue was off for the quarter by 27 percent and off 33 percent from the same periods in 2008.

For the 4th quarter, Monster lost 2 cents per share or $2.1 million. The average of analyst estimates had been a loss of a penny per share.  After accounting for certain adjustments, Monster’s pro forma performance was in line with the analyst average.

For the year, Monster posted a $18.9 million profit, which translates into earnings per share of 16 cents.

If that’s what hospitals are like in Canada I’ll be certain not to get ill if I’m north of the border, but apparently as a recruiting tool, it worked pretty well. The video has been viewed more than 60,000 times since its online release in mid-September. And the hospital received some 2,600 resumes within the first few weeks after its release, which equalled the number it received in the previous six months. It also managed to make 200 hires.

Dancing seems to be a popular theme when it comes to recruiting. Here’s a recruiting video from the Japanese Navy that features a group of dancing sailors. I don’t know how successful that one has been in recruiting sailors, but it makes me wonder if the Japanese Navy could win a skirmish with, say, the Canadian Navy.

Unusual recruiting practices aren’t limited to other countries. The University of Tennessee has some interesting ideas when it comes to recruiting for its football program. The University has been using recruiting hostesses, who often travel far to attend high-school football games and to “influence” players the University is interested in. The approach seems to have worked well since Tennessee has managed to recruit several top players. One recruit summed it up: “You don’t want to go to a college where they ain’t pretty.” However, the NCAA is investigating the practice.

I’m surprised the University’s diversity officer hasn’t insisted that they have recruiting hosts as well; after all, why make potentially discriminatory assumptions about the candidates. That may well have happened had the Volunteers’ head coach, Lane Kiffin, stayed with the program since he liked to motivate his new recruits by having his coaching staff rip off their shirts and do a chant, in what he described as his version of “topless recruitment.”

It’s too bad that Lane Kiffin won’t be recognized for his recruiting prowess. Since he quit Tennessee for USC after just one year, the city of Knoxville is planning to name a sewage treatment plant for him.

It was an improvement over the $104.7 million loss the company posted for 2008. However, that loss included a $167 million downward adjustment for goodwill. The 2009 report includes a further $33.3 million goodwill reduction.

Without the goodwill hit and some additional minor and one-time charges, Kenexa earned $15.9 million last year on revenue of $157.7 million. That’s down from 2008 when the company earned $36.6 million on revenue of $203.7 million.

Kenexa’s numbers, released this afternoon, mirror the HR technology sector’s as a whole. Although most companies in the sector are privately held, the public ones have generally reported quarterly earnings in 2009 below those in the previous year. Most companies have also reduced the value of their goodwill.

In releasing the quarterly and annual numbers, Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan said, “As we enter 2010, we continue to believe that Kenexa’s financial performance will remain consistent with recent quarters as the unemployment rate approaches stability, which is currently expected to occur around the middle of the year. As this occurs, we believe that Kenexa is well positioned to begin scaling its quarterly revenue run rate.”

The company said it expects revenue in the current quarter to be in the $38 million to $40 million range, resulting in net income between $2.2 million and $2.6 million. For the year, the company expects revenue to be in the $160 million to $168 million range and income between $14.5 million to $18.5 million.

As a barometer of the political economy, the employment report is closely watched, which will be especially true this week, coming on the heels of a State of the Union speech in which every other paragraph seemed to mention the word jobs. Friday’s release will offer the best indication yet of how much improvement there is in the jobs picture.

While many economists expect the report to show flat job growth — itself an improvement over the last two years of almost monthly job losses — there is a growing feeling of hope it might show the economy added jobs.

The Conference Board’s monthly report on job openings released today showed the number jumped 382,000 over December. According to the report, there were 4.024 million jobs advertised online in January. That’s the most since November 2008 and is the third month in a row that openings grew.

Contrast that with what happened in January 2009. That month the Help Wanted OnLine Data Series report showed openings dropped by 473,000 over December 2008, which itself had 509,000 fewer listings than the prior month.

It’s a positive sign that companies may be willing to finally fill some of the positions that have been frozen.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing index from the Institute for Supply Management rose in January for the sixth consecutive month. The 58.4 is the highest the index has been in five years, strong support for the GDP report from last week.

That’s good news, as is the ISM’s manufacturing jobs index, which came in at 53.3 in January, the highest in nearly four years.

Coming up Wednesday is ADP’s monthly jobs report, compiled from its payroll data. The ADP National Employment Report is a harbinger of the BLS release that comes two days later, though it often differs significantly from the numbers the government issues. (The ADP report counts only private payroll data, while the BLS includes public payrolls as well.)

By then the financial news services will be reporting their surveys of economist predictions of what the BLS report will show. The Wall Street Journal today took a first shot at it, reporting Morgan Stanley expects the report to show the economy added 75,000 jobs in January. The Journal also said the unemployment rate would edge up slightly to 10.1 percent.

• Sign up for this week’s free webinar on Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET – The Art of Identifying and Recruiting Passive Candidates: Next Generation Search, led by Krista Bradford. Krista will share her secrets of this next-generation search so you can fill searches faster, better and more affordably.
• If you are on the search and placement side of the business, check out the just announced agenda and speaker roster for the fourth annual Fordyce Forum 2010 taking place in Las Vegas from June 9-11. Over fifteen big billers and industry experts will share their success strategies on how to increase your billings and improve your process. And register by Friday to lock in the $400 early bird discount.
• On the events front, both SourceCon 2010 & ERE Expo 2010 Spring are quickly approaching next month in San Diego. SourceCon, the premier sourcing event for our industry takes place March 14-15. Corporate recruiting leaders are getting ready to converge on San Diego for the 10th annual ERE Expo on March 15-17.
• During breaks at the Expo in San Diego, we’d like to show some of your videos. Make a 1-minute or shorter video of you telling your favorite recruiting story — it could be the most heartwarming advice or experience you’ve had, one that made you proud of the profession — or, it could be bad behavior by a candidate (or a manager!) during an interview, an employer brand gone awry, a botched recruitment ad campaign, or something else. Email Todd Raphael (he prefers PG-13 or cleaner) the Youtube embed code and we’ll pick some of the best to show at the upcoming conference.

If you have questions about any of this, please post them in the comments below. Have a great week!

US.Jobs site with social elements displayed

In a blog post about yesterday’s DirectEmployers meeting, publishing industry analyst and consultant Peter Zollman called it “a valuable information session.”

Recruitment consultant Gerry Crispin, who attended this morning’s second session, described it as a useful meeting that left him “very satisfied that the intent (of the creation of the dot-jobs domain) I have consistently written about … is reflected in what DirectEmployers is doing.”

The meetings they and a few others — perhaps a dozen in all — attended in Indianapolis were called by the DirectEmployers Association to answer questions and explain the non-profit recruiting consortium’s plans to build-out tens of thousands of recruitment sites all with an Internet address ending in .jobs.

Zollman reports in his blog post that next week 25,000 of the sites will go live. The “number will increase exponentially on an ongoing basis,” writes Zollman, until every community in the U.S. over 5,000 population has a job site for itself.

Those geo-focused sites will be supplemented by occupation-specific jobs and, where there is demand, geo-occupation-specific sites. The number could potentially reach the millions, says the information site for the project, Universe.jobs. Some of these sites launched a few months ago in beta. Here’s one for Atlanta and one for sales jobs. Other sites are detailed here.

Crispin, an early supporter of the creation of the .jobs domain, said he was encouraged by the focus of DirectEmployers in the development of the recruitment sites. “DirectEmployers intends to focus in on how to build it out as to how ICANN intended it,” he said.

(ICANN is the Internet group that decides naming conventions and authorized .jobs, a top-level domain. Details of the request by the Society for Human Resource Management and Employ Media to ICANN to create the domain can be found here.)

Crispin explained that the job listings on the DirectEmployers sites will all be real jobs from real companies, which was one of the goals in creating the .jobs domain. Another was to make it easy for job seekers to find corporate career sites. But in all cases, in order for a .jobs address to be awarded, the company had to agree to abide by an ethical code.

While what DirectEmployers is building looks and sounds like job boards, Crispin said it’s not. “At the end of the day, it’s not job boards … It’s something more.”

He was boarding a plane out of Indianapolis (where the meetings were held) so he didn’t have  much of a chance to explain. But looking at the .jobs sites, it’s clear they have evolved from their first iteration back in October. There’s a social element to them and a connection into social networks. Click into the FOLLOW tab in a job post and you can get a listing of employees on LinkedIn.

The project may well continue to evolve. Crispin said its future is “not set in stone.”

I get nearly free health care and pay only a pittance (relatively) for great child care. My cost for education is small. Since I work on average, 35 hours a week, I have time for my family and recreation, which includes free gym access and a summer camp for the kids. Oh and I have no fear of being laid off.

So who am I? Did you say citizen of Sweden or some similar place? Nope. I’m an employee with SAS, America’s best place to work, as declared by Fortune magazine.

Fortune’s annual list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” was announced last week and is published in the Feb. 8th issue of the magazine. Not a lot of surprises on the list, though NetApp dropped to seventh place, probably because of its layoffs. That opened the way for SAS, which has never had a layoff, to claim the top place.

Fortune has been producing this list for 13 years and SAS has been on it every time. It’s the first time SAS was ranked #1, though the company is regularly in the top five or 10 best companies.

Last year’s second place winner, investment firm Edward Jones, held onto the spot. One of the few financial firms not to have had layoffs, it did sell its British unit and froze salaries, but managed to continue profit sharing.

The listings and the short corporate synopses highlight benefits and pay. Fortune doesn’t forget to mention the little things that help define a company culture. Things like executives at Nugget Market washing the cars of associates at an employee appreciation event, and how loyal animators are to the collaborative spirit and openness at DreamWorks Animation, which, incidentally, catapulted from 47th last year to 6th.

Fortune also highlights six of its top 100 companies that have never had a layoff.

Monster ad from Wired

Monster fired the first shot in the ad wars Sunday with a commercial during the AFC championship football game featuring the Boogeyman and a new tagline.

Bad at his job scaring children, the Boogeyman searches Monster and finds his perfect fit as an accountant. As he settles into his cubicle, the words “New precision job search” appear followed by the tagline, “Get a Monster advantage.” The new tagline replaces “Your calling is calling.”

Precision Job Search is the branded seeker product powered by Monster’s overhauled back-end search engine. Power Resume Search is the recruiter version. Both come out of beta on Feb. 2, the official launch date of 6Sense, the branding Monster is applying to the semantic search engine it built out of technology it acquired when it bought Trovix.

Over the last year+ Monster has been introducing new career-focused tools and features, like its career-mapping service and social communities organized around professional careers.  Over the summer, it tested its semantic resume search with a number of recruiter clients, then began offering it and the seeker search as options in the fall.

After a demo of the search tools in November, I wrote “Power Resume Search is stunning.” On the seeker side, I’ve found Precision Search (Or is it PrecisionSearch. Monster references it both ways.) to be an equally big improvement over “Standard Search.”

Now, Monster is making a full-court press (or should that be a blitz) to promote 6Sense and the other features. Monster will air a second commercial, this one featuring a beaver, during the Super Bowl, and will also announce its choice of a new Director of Fandemonium during the game. Print ads in tech and business magazines like HR Executive, Wired, and Fast Company have already started running.

“This isn’t just the launch of an advertising campaign. It represents a commitment to help people make clear progress in finding the right job,” says Ted Gilvar, executive vice president and global chief marketing officer at Monster. “We know that people want help — whether it’s a more efficient way to search for jobs or helping them connect with others through specialized career networks.”

CareerBuilder will make its sixth Super Bowl appearance with an ad selected from among those submitted in a contest. Three commercials were eventually picked out of some 1,000 entries and were each awarded grand prizes of $100,000.

The idea was that the public could then vote for their favorite, which might be selected as the one CareerBuilder airs as its second quarter commercial. However,  one of the three — Worst Seat — has been nixed by the network. The commercial is pretty gross, showing a cubicle worker entertaining (some) of his colleagues by passing gas. So, of course, that’s the video embedded here.

“CareerBuilder has had a very successful track record with advertising in the big game and we are confident that all three concepts selected would play well with the big game audience,” said Richard Castellini, the job board’s chief marketing officer. “We made a strategic decision to change our advertising approach and leverage the creative minds of consumers across the country. Our decision paid off when we were flooded with a large number of very high caliber ideas, which played a major role in our decision to pick not one, but three.”

A company spokesman told me, “We have not announced any plans for our marketing past the big game.”

• Sign up for this week’s free webinar on Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET titled Workforce Planning: Connecting Business Strategy to Talent Strategy. This session will be led by Ed Newman of The Newman Group. Ed will provide insight into what makes an effective workforce planning strategy and how workforce planning fits into overall talent strategy.
• This Friday is your last chance to register for SourceCon 2010 at the best discounted rate of just $795. If you haven’t yet checked out everything that will be taking place in San Diego from March 14-15 go to www.sourcecon.com/2010. This is a unique & rare opportunity to learn the secrets from some of the worlds best sourcers, and one you won’t want to miss!
• San Diego is also home to the 10th Annual ERE Expo 2010 Spring conference, taking place right after SourceCon from March 15-17. The agenda is brand new and better than ever, so if whether or not you have ever been to one of our previous Expos, don’t expect a repeat performance! Check out the agenda and speaker roster at www.ereexpo.com. And let me know if you would like to come to both SourceCon & ERE Expo, as there are discounts available.
• During breaks at the Expo in San Diego, we’d like to show some of your videos. Make a 1-minute or shorter video of you telling your favorite recruiting story — it could be the most heartwarming advice or experience you’ve had, one that made you proud of the profession — or, it could be bad behavior by a candidate (or a manager!) during an interview, an employer brand gone awry, a botched recruitment ad campaign, or something else. Email Todd Raphael (he prefers PG-13 or cleaner) the Youtube embed code and we’ll pick some of the best to show at the upcoming conference.

If you have any questions about anything I just metioned, please leave them in the comments below. Have a great week!

Although the program has been underway since October, the meeting later this month is described as an informational session. The invitation that was emailed last week says the intent is to answer questions that have come up.

In an email Q & A, Direct Employers Executive Director Bill Warren says the Jan. 28th meeting will show some of the sites, describe the analytics that are built into the job board platform, and answer questions.

Bill Warren

Warren asked me not to disclose the names of the 29 invitees, but it includes many easily recognizable names of recruitment leaders, as well as several job board CEOs, a few industry writers, and others, including ERE’s CEO David Manaster.

Since industry launches and new product introductions are commonly handled by webinars and previews in advance of launch, I first asked Warren what he’ll be showing and doing at the in-person event.

ERE: What’s the purpose of the meeting? What will you be showing?

Bill Warren: The purpose of the meeting is to answer any and all questions a group of industry experts might have about the .jobs build-out. We are not so vain that we think anyone really cares about what we are doing. However, we have had many phone calls with questions about what we are doing and how we are building out the domains. We will be showing not only how the domains are being built out, but also the analytics platform and how we are integrating with social media. Two long-time, well-respected industry experts suggested that we do this.

ERE: Since your .jobs buildout is well under way and ads have been appearing on the sites for months, why do this now?

Current Boston .jobs job board

Warren: The .jobs build-out is far from being well under way. It was suggested that we invite a group of industry experts to Indianapolis to demonstrate the .jobs platform after we had a working model to show them. We should have a working model with a significant number of domains built out by January 28th. The ads have been on the sites about 30 days. Why do this now? Again, it was suggested that we do it after we had a significant number of domains up and running.

Initial version of Boston .jobs job board.

In a follow-up asking for clarification Warren wrote back, “When I said, ‘The .jobs build-out is far from being well under way’, I meant we had only built-out 200 geo-specific domains thus far. The .jobs platform is still in ‘Beta’ and ads were put on the ‘Beta’ URLs in November for testing purposes.”

ERE: The personal expense to the invitees to attend includes hotel and airfare. What’s the value to them to attend this meeting? Why is it necessary to do this in person?

Warren: Each invitee would of course have to make their own decision as to whether or not their attendance is worthwhile. I’m sure some will not attend because they do not consider it worthwhile and I certainly respect their decision. Because of all the questions we have received, we wanted to offer these individuals the opportunity to see the same presentation, to ask questions, and to hear questions from others. It could have probably been done as a webinar; however, I thought a webinar would be too impersonal for the level of this group.

ERE: What are you expecting in the way of outcomes?

Warren: Nothing more than industry experts having an opportunity to see a demonstration, ask questions, hear questions asked by their peers and, most importantly, get answers to any questions they might have. Again, the meeting is in response to the suggestion of two individuals who have a long-term investment in this industry and for whom I have tremendous respect.

ERE: How will whatever feedback you get affect your rollout and plans?

Warren: We are always interested in being good stewards of the .jobs platform and would carefully consider any and all recommendations we receive. These individuals are experts with a tremendous understanding of, and respect for, our industry. We value their feedback and will try to work with them in any way possible in the future.

ERE: How was the list of invitees decided?

Warren: It was based solely on the recommendations of the two individuals who suggested we have the meeting. If anyone was left off the list that should have been included, I’m sure it was nothing more than an oversight.

Last week, as she was looking forward to her first day on the job today with the international recruitment advertising and acquisition firm, DeVaughn was all excitement and, well, as befits a CEO, enthusiasm.

“My heart is in social media,” she says. “The people at Hodes are incredibly smart about using social media and they are working with some of the biggest and best companies. That’s what’s so exciting about what I’m going to be doing. I can have a bigger, broader impact and work with really great people.”

She actually said a lot more about her new job, but, like trying to sketch the scenery from a bullet train, the best I could do was catch every third or fourth sentence. It was enough, though, to get a sense that DeVaughn preaches what she practices.

She is one determined woman who knows how to set goals and achieve them. Too many people, she told me, “not-work instead of network,” playing Farmville or Mafia Wars on Facebook.

It’s not a strategy, she says, if you don’t have goals that can be measured. Whether it’s candidates that apply, conversions that occur, hires that are made, or relationships established.

When she launched her own short-lived social media consultancy last summer, she wrote that she “stayed up many nights actively net-WORKING in-person, not social NOT-working. My activities were aligned with strategic business goals. Also, I was fortunate to have mentors who gave me honest advice.”

It was that grit and determination — plus, of course, the smarts to make it happen — that lead her to switch from a career in hospitality, to start over learning the ropes in recruiting.

DeVaughn grew up in a large family in Iowa, the daughter of a Korean mother and business owner father. She left after high school to seek her fortune, eventually landing in Phoenix where she worked as an executive assistant to the owner of a small chain of sports-themed restaurants and night clubs.

Along the way, she discovered recruiting and it was love at first sight. Determined to learn the craft and become a career recruiter, DeVaughn moved to Atlanta and a job as a receptionist with a legal, finance, and professional staffing and search firm that promised her the chance to recruit.

“I came here (to Atlanta from Phoenix, where she began her recruiting career) and I didn’t know anyone,” she recalls. “I had to quickly learn and build a network. I did and I’ve learned from every person I met.”

She learned quickly, building a LinkedIn network that now numbers more than 19,000 connections. While she’s proud that her network size has enabled her to source candidates without ever paying a fee, DeVaughn talks about the personal relationships that are at the heart of a core network.

In building her Atlanta network, DeVaughn would attend professional and social HR meetings, especially SHRM-Atlanta, where she is now executive vice president of communication and PR.

“I would do research,” she explains. “I knew who I was going to meet before I went to those events. And I knew something about them.”

By 2006 she had won the Rookie of the Year award, was officially named a Rising Star and moved on to Atlanta’s Talent Connections where she met her mentor, Tom Darrow, the company’s founder. DeVaughn credits him with nurturing her passion for networking and encouraging her entrepreneurial drive, supporting her launch of Social Precision.

A blog and a consulting sideline at first, she made Social Precision a full-time consultancy last summer with her as consultant, trainer, and chief enthusiast officer.

In an email before we spoke, DeVaughn wrote:

“Many people didn’t know if it was the best idea to leave a successful and wonderful recruiting firm where I was still generating commission with stable clients. There were several recruiters and HR professionals in transition. Why would I volunteer to join them?”

Darrow encouraged her to follow her heart. And that lead to a chance meeting with some Bernard Hodes executives who attended a presentation she gave on LinkedIn. One thing lead to another and the offer was made to help lead social media strategy on an international scale.

“How often does this kind of opportunity come along,” DeVaughn says. “I’m just so very grateful to all those people who have helped me so much. I would not be where I am without my network. By network I mean my family, my business family, friends, savvy colleagues, all the people I meet.”

Looking forward to the start of her new job DeVaughn said, “Social media is one small part of a comprehensive recruiting strategy, but it is such an important part that I don’t think you can really say you have a recruiting strategy without it.”

Convened by President Obama, the forum is focused on the gap in technology between the private and public sectors.

Craig Newmark, founder and owner of Craigslist, Manpower CEO Jeff Joerres, and Monster chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi are sharing their suggestions for improving government efficiency, improving customer service, and maximizing the return from the government’s investment in technology.

In advance of the forum, Iannuzzi joined with three other CEOs of leading technology companies in publicly praising Obama for “consistent efforts to ensure that innovation becomes integral to how our country operates.”

Iannuzzi, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, Jeff M. Fettig, chairman and CEO of Whirlpool, and Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe Systems, in a commentary posted on Huffington Post, say, “It’s time to modernize government — streamline what works, and eliminate what doesn’t.”

The men echoed President Obama’s own lament that government has fallen woefully behind the private sector in using technology to streamline operations and speed the delivery of public service. In a White House statement, President Obama says, “I want us to ask ourselves every day, how are we using technology to make a real difference in people’s lives.”

In their commentary, the four CEOs say, “As the pace of innovation accelerates, so will the distance between the technological promise of the private sector and the practice of the public sector. Along the way, we risk losing billions of taxpayer dollars, opportunities to serve those at risk and in need, and transparent insight into the operations of our democracy.”

“Indeed, the time is ripe for a real public-private partnership initiative aimed at driving innovation and sustainable job growth.”

The company’s customers got more than 15 million responses from ads placed on free job boards and with the job aggregators in 2009. Google Base was the most requested free board among eQuest’s 20,000 clients. That makes sense since the help-wanted listings are integrated now with standard Google search results.

The data points are contained in a press release issued by the company this week.

Craigslist was the fastest-growing destination for eQuest customer job postings, tripling the volume of 2008. The most popular city destinations were the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando, and Phoenix. All but Orlando charge to post jobs.

CareerBuilder and Monster, however, still hold the lead by a mile over other posting sites, says eQuest. A majority of clients want their jobs posted at one or even both sites. And no wonder. eQuest says “in a sampling of 400,000 unique jobs posted to each board between June 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009, both Monster and CareerBuilder garnered staggering traffic numbers, totaling almost 200 million viewers in just six months — well above the traffic stats of any other online job source.”