Talk about one big family over at Monster (profile; site). When CEO Sal Iannuzzi's executive team gets together for meetings these days, the new faces are the Monster veterans; half the 10 executives are now expatriates from Symbol Technologies, the company Iannuzzi captained until he sold it to Motorola in January 2007.

The latest addition to the team is James Langrock. He's the new SVP Finance and Chief Accounting Officer, taking over from Jonathan Trumbull who had been Vice President, Global Controller and Chief Accounting Officer until May 9th. His departure was discovered in a filing Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Langrock was Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer and Corporate Controller under Iannuzzi when both were at Symbol. The other Symbol alums now on the Monster executive team are:

• Iannuzzi, who first joined Monster as a member of the board in Fall 2006 then was elevated to CEO, president and chairman of the board on April 12, 2007;

• Tim Yates, EVP and Chief Financial Officer. He held the CFO job at Symbol. Yates joined Monster in June 2007;

• Lise Poulos is EVP and Chief Administrative Officer. Her last job at Symbol was enior Vice President of Human Resources and Corporate Affairs. Interestingly, her LinkedIn profile describes her title as EVP and Chief of Staff.

• Art O'Donnell, EVP Customer Service, joined Monster in Sept. 2007, the same time as Poulos. At Symbol he held the title SVP and General Manager of the Global Services Division and Chief Quality Officer.

The others on the management team are Edward Lo, EVP of China operations; Darko Dejanovic, EVP Global Chief Information Officer and Head of Product, joining Monster in April 2007 from Tribune, Co., the newspaper publishing company and co-owner of CareerBuilder; Mark StoeverEVP, Internet Advertising & Fees; Robert Jones, VP Investor Relations, and; Evan Kornrich Acting General Counsel, who was named to the job after Monster fired Myron F. Olesnyckyj over the stock backdating scandal.

Have a boring, crappy job? Do your co-workers celebrate your birthday in the morning with a half-hearted singing of the Birthday song? Are you pegged as the guy who mooches other people's snacks from the office fridge?

Post your resume to CareerBuilder (profile; site) and your troubles will be solved.

That's the message of a series of edgy, truthy enough animated videos produced by Wieden+Kennedy for CareerBuilder.

With the intent to "engage jobseekers with our content," CareerBuilder VP of Consumer Marketing Richard Castellini says the job board's ad agency came up with the Office Worker Survival Series. Aimed at younger workers frustrated with their current job, the videos cost $20,000 each to produce and are posted to such sites as You Tube , College Humor , Metacafe and Revver .

Intentionally irreverent, even suggestive, certainly humorous, the campaign's goal is to spread the CareerBuilder brand by the online version of word-of-mouth. Get the 21-30 year-olds to post their resumes and apply to jobs on CareerBuilder and the campaign will be a success. But it's a throw of the dice whether this approach will work, which is why Castellini says this is more of an experiment than a fully-baked campaign.

"We want to see what is the best way to engage" younger workers, he says as he points out that traditional media audiences get smaller and older each year. "It's an experimental campaign."

The envelope got pushed pretty far with the fourth installment titled "Getting Your Affairs In Order. " The subtitle - "An Affirmation of Sexual Relations ..." - helps explain why blogger Joel Cheesman called it "R rated." If you watch it be aware it is full of sexual innuendo, some of it so overt it borders on the pornographic.

The video was taken down shortly after it was posted to You Tube, but not before some 400 people had seen it and apparently raised Cain with CareerBuilder. We captured it from an online site to which it had spread, just as a viral campaign is supposed to.

Castellini avoided telling us anything about the feedback, offering only that the video was "a little bit edgier than it needed to be." "I knew it was on the edge," he bravely admitted, when he gave the OK for it to go online. Now, it'll be retooled and reposted, presumably edited closer to a PG-13.

Still, the overall message of the videos has some troubling overtones, says Gerry Crispin. The well-known CareerXroads recruiting consultant told us the videos, funny they may be, send the message that changing jobs is the answer to all office problems.

"They are teaching them to solve problems by going to CareerBuilder and quitting their job," Crispin observed. "Just the kind of worker every employer wants."

While the campaign may tickle the millennials, those who act on the message and go look for another job because they aren't popular with their co-workers or their cubicle is next to the microwave are "not the kind of person I want to hire," Crispin says. "I don't think (the subliminal messages) is intentional," he adds, "But they weren't thinking very deeply about this."

Castellini's response? "Gerry's just thinking too hard. There's a multitude of reasons people change jobs." The videos are meant to be exactly what they seem, he says, light and whimsical brand builders.

Can LinkedIn (profile; site) really pull off a $1 billion funding round? As big as it is that's the number being tossed around on tech and VC blogs.

Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington reports that investment banker Allen & Co. is shopping for more funding to add to the $27.5 million that LinkedIn has raised in previous rounds over its five year life. The billion dollar valuation presumably is based on LinkedIn's estimate it will generate between $75 and $100 million this year.

Venture Beat says "good news" may be coming from the company that last fall was supposedly negotiating to be acquired by News Corp., which instead bought The Wall Street Journal. Writer Eric Eldon says sources have told him that LinkedIn has raised a new funding round, which he estimates at "many tens of millions of dollars."

Arrington says Dave Wehner, managing director at the secretive Allen & Co. is handling the arrangements. He previously handled the sale of social networking site Bebo to AOL for $850 million. According to one account, Bebo had 2007 revenues of $20 million. That would certainly make LinkedIn worth at least the billion and very likely more, since it's not only growing but has two years of profitability under its belt.

What would an infusion of "tens of millions" do for LinkedIn? Accelerate its development schedule for one. LinkedIn is working on a research component that would enable companies and others to access data mined from the 22 million LinkedIn users. It could also fund ever more off-site tools to make LinkedIn more ubiquitous still, helping it compete with Facebook, its nearest competitor. Certainly more investment dollars could fuel the site's growth overseas where it lags both Facebook and MySpace substantially.

Not that we have any special insight, but we have to wonder if an acquisition or two might be a possibility. Considering the demographics of LinkedIn users - late 30s to early 40s with an income around $100,000 - The Ladders might be a fit. That would presuppose it's for sale, something we periodically hear rumored.

The next time your phone rings it could be Monster on the other end looking for your business.

“Relentless and aggressive,” is how CEO Sal Iannuzzi described the new and improved Monster during a late afternoon conference call with Wall Street analysts. “I promise you we are not going after modest success.”

He pledged nothing short of a “fundamental redirection of sales,” which is already underway. There are more sales people on the ground and they will be “relentless and aggressive in seeking out new customers.”

The primary targets? Companies in the small- to mid-sized range. The U.S. market, he declared, is not saturated; only 4 percent of companies between 10 and 500 employees do business with Monster and only 25 percent of those over 500 employees are customers.

We will, he promised during a nearly 25-minute presentation, “compete aggressively with the goal of capturing market share.”

Shortly before the call Monster released its first quarter financials, which showed revenues flat in North America, expenses sharply up and per share earnings of 18 cents, 4 cents below the average of analysts’ estimates. Earnings were down from a year ago mostly due to sharply increased spending on marketing and promotion.

Revenue was $370.4 million vs. $329 million for the same period in 2007. All the growth came from operations outside North America. International revenue was $153 million compared to last year’s $106 million, with a portion of the growth impacted by currency exchange rates.

Monster’s chief competitor, CareerBuilder, reported eking out a 2.7 percent revenue growth. The privately owned company voluntarily reports only revenue and doesn’t break it down between U.S. and international operations. (CareerBuilder only in the last two years began to aggressively pursue global business.) Yahoo!, which owns HotJobs, does not report the job board’s revenue separately.

Although Monster’s profit dropped 43 percent, revenue was higher than expected, which softened the impact. A Bank of America analyst even commented during the Q&A portion of the call that the flat North American revenues were better than expected.

Iannuzzi and his CFO, Tim Yates, blunted some of the fallout over profits, explaining expenses will throttle back in the coming months as the global marketing push subsides. Of the $31 million spent to rebrand Monster, $18 million was spent in the U.S. and Canada with the balance spent elsewhere, but primarily in Europe.

Similarly, expenses associated with operating the money-losing Tickle, which is being closed, will be eliminated and the benefits of reorganizing the company by unifying divisions will be more fully realized. Headcount at Monster has also been decreased by 600 workers and new hiring kept in check. The company goal, Yates said, was to achieve a 25 percent operating margin by the 4^th quarter of the year.

There were two areas where Iannuzzi stuck out his neck. One was his flat-out assertion that the company has become more transparent and “honest” (his term) in regard to dealing with problems. And the other was suggesting that Monster was seeing “signs” the economy might be turning.

Speaking of last summer’s security breach at Monster that resulted in hackers gaining access to basic information on more than a million jobseekers, Iannuzzi said the way the company dealt with the problem was an example of the new corporate culture. “Monster will not hide,” the CEO said, from unexpected problems. “We moved fast to inform our clients,” he added, evidently not referring to the jobseekers whose records were hacked, since it took the company three days to act when told of the breach and several more to issue any kind of public notice.

On the possibility of market improvement, Iannuzzi said, “While things are down, there are some signs they are turning.” He hastened to qualify that saying it is “very early in the game to be able to declare a direction.”

When Monster (profile; site) reports its first quarter performance Thursday afternoon, the results will speak as much about the state of the U.S. economy as the company's success at controlling expenses and boosting sales.

Wall Street analysts expect the company to report sales of around $363 million for the quarter, earning it an average of 22 cents a share, down more than a third from the same quarter the year before. And the per share earnings estimates have been dropping since the beginning of the year when the average of the analysts' estimates stood at 41 cents per share.

Although the company has been furiously building its global business, more than half its sales still come from North America where, as every recruiter knows, hiring has slowed to a crawl. This is especially evident in such industries as finance, manufacturing, real estate, retail and hospitality, where Monster's own Employment Index shows each of them off from their year before highs by as much as 20 percent.

The Monster Employment Index can almost be considered a proxy for the company's North American performance. Growing consistently through the end of 2006, the Index began flattening out in spring, 2007 fluctuating for months in a range between 183 and 189. In December it plummeted to 169. Previous seasonal adjustments never were more than three or four percentage points. (December is the yearly low point for recruitment job postings, which is what the Index measures.)

Simultaneously, Monster's North American sales were also flattening. The fourth quarter of 2007 showed a decline in sales from the third quarter, the first time in five years that had happened. Only robust growth in Monster's international business kept the company growing.

Since the start of 2008 the economic news has only gotten worse. Net job growth has not kept pace with job market entry. Combined with layoffs, that's pushed the national unemployment rate up to 5.1 percent. In March 2007 it was 4.5 percent.

It wouldn't be much of a stretch under the circumstances if North American revenues were flat or even below the $184 million of the same period in 2007. Growth in the international segment is likely to again drive the company's growth.

Monster's misfortune is that neither of its two biggest competitors release much or, in the case of HotJobs (profile; site), anything about their financial success. CareerBuilder (profile; site), privately owned by a group of newspaper publishers, voluntarily reports revenue, which, for the last quarter of 2007 was $183 million only a rounding away from the $182.6 million of the same quarter in 2006. HotJobs revenue is aggregated with other divisions in Yahoo!'s financials, so is unknown. Industry sources speculate though that is has grown significantly as has its traffic in the last 18 months.

Other players in the recruitment arena seem to be less directly affected by the weak job market. ThinkPanmure analyst Nate Swanson released a report a few weeks ago with the curious title "Connecting The "Disconnect": Be Greedy." In it he mentions two of the HR software companies he follows - Taleo (profile; site) and Success Factors (profile; site) - and reports they are expected to meet or exceed earnings for the year. Of the sector, Swanson says, "We continue to hear of very strong demand within the performance management space, which has been the hottest, fastest-growing area of the HCM sector for the past 12-24 months."

Taleo and SuccessFactors are expected to report their first quarter financial performance later in May. Kenexa (profile; site ), another major HR software vendor, is scheduled to report on May 12^th.

Jobster (profile; site ) pulled a rabbit out of the hat Thursday, announcing that its investment group has come up with $7 million in a fourth round of financing.

This latest "D" round of financing brings to $56 million the total amount invested in the company since its founding. Even before the latest round, Jobster's hometown newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer , called the company one of the most heavily funded consumer startups in the nation.

The uncharacteristically terse, two-sentence statement said simply that the company had gotten the money and the investors include Ignition Partners, Trinity Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Reed Elsevier Ventures. Nothing was said of the company's financial position or how it planned to use the money.

In light, however, of the company's heavy losses it is likely that the $7 million infusion will be used to cover operating expenses. In the four years since its January 2004 founding the company burned through some $46 million, most of it coming from the same group that put up the latest round.

A letter sent to earlier this year to stockholders and those holding stock options, detailed the company's financial position. The letter said Jobster lost about $11 million in 2007 and had less than $3 million in the bank. It also said it was seeking additional funding.

Since the departure in December of its founder and former CEO Jason Goldberg, Jobster has assumed a low profile. Past funding rounds were accompanied by widely distributed press releases, entries on the company blog and interviews with the CEO. This announcement doesn't even mention the name of the current CEO, Jeff Seely. 

UPDATE 4/18: Hans Gieskes clarified the H3 change in ownership today, explaining it amounted to a realignment of the shares of the company that solidifed his control. "I've taken back control," Gieskes said, hastening to add that it was not a hostile matter.

There are no new owners; the firms that provided the venture capital are still invested in H3, and there's no change in the business model.

______________________

There's a change in ownership at H3.com (site; profile), the high-paying online referral program founded by former Monster president Hans Gieskes.

In an email, Gieskes confirmed the reports that started circulating late last week. "We had some internal changes in ownership," Gieskes wrote us. "Nothing glamorous."

H3 had been rumored late last year to be for sale before Gieskes told blogger Joel Cheesman at the end of January he was discussing a sale with "a number of parties."

No details about the ownership change are available. Gieskes told us in the email he wasn't ready to discuss it: "I’m not really in the position / inclined yet to make a public comment at this stage. It’s really no big deal; we’re a modest size company with interesting patents and slow but steady success and vindication."

One of those successes Gieskes directed us to is a $15,000 referral reward for a VP position at Ning , Marc Andreessen's social networking start-up.

Gieskes launched H3 in 2004.

UPDATE 4/10: Multiple sources have confirmed that former Monster exec Neal Bruce will be going to work for First Advantage. No official word yet from the company, but sources inside the company said he reportedly will be working with the ATS group. Recruitment blogger Joel Cheesman first reported Bruce's new employer Tuesday.

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Veteran Monster (profile; site) executive Neal Bruce has left the company where his last assignment was vice president of the global innovation group.

A popular speaker at recruitment conferences, Bruce emceed the awards banquet last week at ERE's San Diego Expo that was attended by his boss, Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi. He gave no hint then that he was leaving the company where he's worked for 4 and-a-half years, joking with Iannuzzi as he introduced him to the audience.

It was over the weekend that Bruce announced his departure in a short email to associates and contacts.

A former recruiter for Ernst & Young, Bruce was director of global staffing for PTC when he joined Monster in August 2003 as vice president of alliances tasked with building alliances with vendors. In September 2007 he moved to the innovation group job.

During his tenure at Monster Bruce became the face of the company to the recruiting industry, building bridges to users and mending fences with vendors and others who felt slighted by the heavy-handedness of the company in previous years. His success is borne out by some of the testimonials on his LinkedIn site.

Well known sourcer and blogger Dave Mendoza, once critical of Bruce, came to regard him as a friend and thought leader. In his recommendation of Bruce on LinkedIn Mendoza writes:

Monster (profile; site) has signed a deal with MSNBC to power its career channel, including the popular Todayshow.com site.

Announced this morning and already implemented on the MSNBC site, the deal puts the Monster brand and its jobs listings in front of the 35 million unique visitors to the popular news and entertainment site.

Monster wouldn't say how much it will pay MSNBC, but five years ago CareerBuilder (profile; site) committed up to $150 million over five years to power Microsoft's MSN family of sites, including MSNBC. The site is a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC Universal News. Almost at the same time, CareerBuilder closed a similar, four year deal with AOL for $115 million.

In both cases CareerBuilder outmaneuvered Monster, which previously powered the career channels for both companies. The traffic from MSN and AOL catapulted CareerBuilder well ahead of Monster and into first place among all career sites. So successful has that deal - and others since - been for CareerBuilder that Hitwise, an Internet measurment company, reported in February the job site had 12.96 percent of the jobseeker market share compared to Monster's 4.32 percent. (HotJobs (profile; site) was second to CareerBuilder with 11.18 percent.)

Thus the new deal with MSNBC may be a sign of the more aggressive marketing posture promised by Monster's CEO Sal Iannuzzi. He told financial analysts in a conference call last year that the company would be investing in marketing, as well as in technology enhancements.

What is especially interesting about this deal is that Microsoft is a part owner of CareerBuilder. It bought a 4 percent share last year from partners Gannett, Tribune and McClathcy for an undisclosed price that might have been in the range of $60 million, based on a $1.55 billion valuation set in the course of a public realignment among the newspaper partners.

At the same time it was buying into the partnership, Microsoft concluded an extension and broadening of its multi-year traffic agreement with CareerBuilder. The deal with a price tag of up to $443 million (depending on the amount and quality of traffic) extended the agreement to power MSN's US sites until 2013. Of the total, up to $110 million was committed to broaden the arrangement to include Microsoft's European sites, which had been powered by Monster.

In May 2007, when the traffic deals and CareerBuilder equity stake were being announced, ComScore MediaMetrix statistics showed that MSN sites collectively accounted for 25 percent of CareerBuilder's traffic. AOL provided about another 20 percent.

We couldn't tell from the data how much traffic MSNBC accounted for, but it's clearly a gain for Monster. The press release announcing the deal included a quote from Joan Blackwood, Monster's Senior Vice President of Marketing, saying:

“Joining forces with msnbc.com builds upon our business strategy of expanding the points of distribution for our market-leading career management resources through strategic alliances. By aligning with brands such as msnbc.com, we’re able to provide employers with an even greater audience of active and passive job seekers."

Yahoo! is getting REAL with its job search results, presenting them now according to how well they match a jobseeker's search criteria.

Job boards all generally present listings the same way: Job descriptions are matched to a jobseeker's keywords. The results are then displayed in order of posting date. Now, Yahoo! HotJobs (profile ; site) is starting to display the results in terms of relevancy, meaning that the recency of a listing is less important than how it meets both the jobseeker's criteria and Yahoo!'s own algorithms.

The company calls the new system REAL, which stands for relevance, engagement, availability and location. Some of these elements were already being used to present results. Jobseekers on HotJobs, and on other boards, have long been able to search by locale and job title, adding keywords to narrow the results.

Now, Yahoo! has finessed its search system to consider:

• Relevance: Matching text in job titles and descriptions to the keywords candidates use;
• Engagement: Measuring how well candidates respond to the job listing;
• Availability: Determining that the positions displayed are still unfilled;
• Location: Showing jobs in a location of interest to the candidate.

The better a job posting fits the criteria, the higher it will rank in the results list. How Yahoo! will determine if a job is filled is not clear, but the other criteria will depend on how well recruiters write job descriptions. To help them, Yahoo! has posted a REAL Playbook detailing dozens of tips to get better results from their listings. Among them are such suggestions as: keep postings short, 150-250 words; avoid "gimmick" headlines in favor of plain descriptive job titles.

In announcing the new search results system, Yahoo! said it has already resulted in 25 percent more applies per posting, a metric that measures volume, but doesn't necessarily translate into applicant quality.

However, Jeff Kinder, senior vice president and HotJobs general manager, says, "Yahoo! has shown that relevance matters in search results, and it's powerful to apply Yahoo!'s search technology to HotJobs and see immediate and significant performance improvements. We believe Yahoo! HotJobs has a distinct advantage as online recruitment evolves and insights and technology play increasingly important roles."

When you're looking for a needle in a haystack - and what recruiter isn't? - use a magnet. The same goes for sourcing candidates and getting a quick primer on who they are and where they've worked. In this case, the magnet is an 8-year-old specialty search engine with the appropriately descriptive name ZoomInfo .

Scouring the Web for information on individuals and companies, ZoomInfo gathers it, indexes it, compiles it and presents it in a neat package. Like many search engines, the work is done entirely by computer. So it has limitations. Still, ZoomInfo makes it a snap for recruiters to develop candidate lists simply by entering their criteria.

But, says Tad Goltra , VP and GM of ZoomInfo's recruiting business unit, recruiters have found plenty of other ways of using what is rapidly becoming the largest business search engine in the world. "Recruiters are a big part of our business," says the former Monster exec.

Talking with ERE recently, Goltra shared these innovative uses and talked about plans for making ZoomInfo even more accessible to non-corporate recruiters.

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Jobster, the bold recruitment startup from Seattle that leverages social networking to find quality workers, is about to receive yet another round of funding, which it apparently needs to keep it in business.

In a letter sent to investors, most of whom are employees and former employees holding options, the company says it lost about $11 million in 2007 and has less than $3 million left in the bank. The new round of funding will add to the shares held by investors and that will mean the value of the shares and options held by others will be diluted.

Since January 2005, just months before Jobster went public, the company has garnered $48 million in venture capital from Ignition Partners, Mayfield, Reed Elsevier and Trinity Partners. The company's hometown newspaper, the Post-Intelligencer, said the funding made Jobster one of the most heavily funded consumer Internet startups in the nation.

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Jigsaw changed its slogan last month, eliminating mention of the business cards for which it became famous as a resource for recruiters.

Now, instead of saying "Buy and Trade Business Cards" the Jigsaw tagline is "Complete, Collaborative Business Information." The change reflects the evolution of Jigsaw, according to its co-founder and CEO Jim Fowler, who joined us in a podcast recently to tells us the company is broadening its reach.

In the 8-minute podcast, you'll hear Fowler tell us that recruiters are the most active networkers among the 400,000 members of its community; that sales people are the biggest users; and that Jigsaw is going beyond what is on the face of a business card to include data about the employee's company itself.

In the last several months, Jigsaw has rolled out new products specifically for companies. Jigsaw Team, introduced in September, is a corporate account shared among the participating employees. Jigsaw Clean is a service that cleans corporate CRM databases, discarding dated, departed and duplicate contacts and updating the ones still good.

It's also added rewards for updating business contact information.

But all this activity doesn't mean a change in focus for the company that declares its mission to be the mapping of every business on the planet.

Listen below to CEO Jim Fowler discuss where Jigsaw is today and what the future may bring.

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AIRS, the recruitment technology and training company that introduced "peeling back" "flipping" and "x-raying" to the recruiting lexicon, has been acquired by RPO servicer TheRightThing.

The deal was finalized last week and will be announced this morning.

Speaking with ERE in advance of the announcement the CEOs of the two companies were ebullient over the deal.

"We're giddy about this," Terry Terhark, CEO of TheRightThing declared early in the conversation, followed by AIRS CEO Chris Forman pronouncing the deal "A great thing for both companies."

A pioneer in online sourcing, AIRS will continue as an independent brand; its headquarters staying in the 200-year-old barn in Wilder, VT. Terhark and Forman, whose new title will be president of AIRS, said there will no layoffs and, in fact, both are looking to increase the 62 person staff as TheRightThing begins to market the AIRS product line.

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Now here's a conundrum: On Wednesday Taleo reported the best quarter and the best year it's had in, well, in years. On Thursday, a day the market was actually up, Taleo's stock closed at $17.12, down 18.4 percent.

Why?

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What's better than having the business card of a software developer at Apple? Knowing that he was part of the UI development team for the iPhone. And therein lies the business model for Myndnet.com, a $1.75 million VC financed startup that pays a bounty for such knowledge.

Myndnet made its debut in September at DEMOfall07, a showcase for promising new products and companies, where it received warm coverage from the technology writers. Quietly growing since then, Myndnet has a few thousand members now signed up and responding to requests like a recent one for the name and contact information for ERP software buyers.

That one is still active on Myndset, so if you want to make a quick $40 all you need do is join the club and pony up your contact information.

Says Myndnet's marketing chief Steve Zivanic, "We've had members make $1,000."  Another member, says Zivanic, is taking his family and the nanny to Disneyland on his Myndnet earnings.

At the moment, with only 17 requests up on the site, it's difficult to see how you could make a living providing contact information, as some of the early reviewers suggested. On the other hand, it is easy to see how a recruiter, marketer or sales manager would find Myndnet a valuable tool when looking for specific individuals.

Though it bears some resemblance to Jigsaw and LinkedIn Answers, Zivanic insists Myndnet is far more useful.

"Jigsaw gives you a title, a name and a phone number. If you're sourcing for the scalability developers for YouTube, a title isn't going to tell you that," he explains. Whether or not Myndnet has enough scale itself to pull that off today is debatable, but it doesn't cost to find out. Recruiters pay only if contacts are delivered and accurate. The minimum charge is $40 per name.

If Jigsaw is hearing the footsteps it hasn't said, though it just discarded its old tagline "Buy and Trade Business Cards" in favor of "Complete, Collaborative Business Information." We don't know what that means and the company didn't respond to us, but it wouldn't be much of a challenge for Jigsaw to implement its own bounty program. The company claims a community of 350,000 members and it already has a message board with a "Datajunkies" forum where requests for specific contacts are routine.

Jobing has picked-up its ninth acquisition in four years as it continues its march from a small, Phoenix job board to a player on the national jobs scene. The deal for WorkMetro, a San Jose, Calif. based job board was announced Monday.

WorkMetro had a presence in 22 markets across the U.S. mostly in the South and Northeast. Although the company has been struggling for some time, it has promotional arrangements with cable operators in many of its markets. Both the local emphasis - each WorkMetro market has a separate web address - and the TV partnerships fit with Jobing's own strategy. Plus, it gives Jobing a footprint in the northeast where it previously had only a limited presence.

Under the leadership of CEO Aaron Matos, a former recruiter and HR director, Jobing has gone from a publishing company division with sales of under $3 million to a private, equity-funded company with revenues of more than $22 million. Acquisitions, including WorkMetro, and organic growth should push Jobing's revenues well over the $30 million figure in 2008. Its traffic ranks it among the top 25 career sites in the U.S.

Besides its focus on local market jobs, Jobing.com invests heavily into developing locally focused community content. Its sites have blogs written by local recruiting professionals and hiring managers and Jobing promotes the use of video better than any other jobs site in the U.S. The company maintains its own video production facilities in Phoenix and offers employer branding videos free as part of a subscription package.

The WorkMetro relationships with local cable operators and TV stations will help Jobing expand the reach of the videos, which now mostly appear only on the job site itself.

WorkMetro, founded in 2003, initially grew rapidly fueled by partnerships with the local operators who provided promotion in exchange for a revenue share. The company staffed offices in each of its markets, just as Jobing does. Unlike Jobing, however, WorkMetro failed to gain traction and for the last year has been consolidating operations and reducing staff. WorkMetro had fewer than 20 employees when it was sold, compared to Jobing which has about 300.

When Monster Worldwide released its year-end financials Thursday it told a story of trouble at home and stunning growth elsewhere, that mirrored world economics. But it also heightened the mystery behind the most recent departure of a key Monster executive.

Steve Pogorzelski resigned abruptly two weeks ago; his departure announced only after he was already gone. That kind of treatment is usually reserved for failed or disgraced executives. But in Pog’s case, as he was known around the New York headquarters, his division at Monster – international careers – delivered the only growth the company saw for most of 2007.

Dissect Monster’s robust 19 percent revenue growth for the 4^th quarter of 2007 and you quickly see it came from the 45 percent growth delivered by global sales, the division Pogorzelski headed for two years. Revenue from the U.S. and Canada grew a paltry 3 percent.

The numbers reported by Monster Thursday look like this:

With those kinds of numbers, it’s no wonder that Chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi made a point of telling analysts during a conference call Thursday evening, “The international business remained a solid performer in the quarter and throughout the year and was the main driver to our overall corporate margin expansion. Our plan is to continue to aggressively build on our leading market share in Europe, India and South Korea by investing in product, technology and marketing in these growth markets.”

Later, Iannuzzi detailed more of the company’s global aspirations: “We’ve seen terrific growth in traffic, seekers, job postings and resumes throughout the year on a quarterly basis in countries like Turkey and Mexico. In 2008, we will continue to further develop smaller markets in Eastern Europe, Poland and the Czech Republic in particular while we consider additional geographic expansion.”

Unsaid was that the show will have to go on without Pog. Indeed the only reference to the 10 year veteran Monster executive came in response, ironically, to an analyst’s question about progress toward reducing churn in the company. Iannuzzi merely mentioned that he had left and went on to note that a number of changes have been made among senior management.

Meanwhile, despite the overall growth in Monster’s revenues, its 36 cents per share earning disappointed Wall Street which had predicted 38 cents. What caused the lower than expected earnings were severance payments to workers laid off since last summer and other costs associated with the reduction in force; payments to lawyers and others working on the investigation into the backdating of stock options and $3.4 million paid in connection with a security breach in August.

When former Monster CEO Andrew McKelvey got a break from prosecutors last week, it came at a price. He had to admit to a federal judge that he and others at the company routinely backdated stock options over a seven-year period and that he had approved filing false company financials.

That much is widely known. But with the agreement to defer his prosecution, based on his terminal pancreatic cancer, a sealed criminal complaint was made public . The 17-page document offers a look at how the backdating of stock options came to become almost routine at Monster and a tool to cut costs and make budget.

While the criminal complaint names only McKelvey, it specifically alleges there was a conspiracy to commit fraud at the company and that “others known and unknown” participated. One of those “others” is Myron F. Olesnyckyj, the former general counsel of the company who pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors. Although no others are named, the complaint makes clear that prosecutors believe several Monster executives were involved in the backdating and that the Human Resources Department carried out the orders.

For example:

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Here’s a twist on recruiting promising candidates: Pay them to interview with you.

That’s the premise behind Notchup.com, a recruiting Web site that launched this month. It promises to deliver quality, passive candidates, the kind of worker who is happy where they are, but who, like any smart networker, is open to new opportunities.

The quality part of the candidate equation comes from Notchup’s screening process that lets in only candidates who “will be attractive to companies and receive offers to interview,” or so says the Web site, which goes on to explain that the criteria includes graduation from a top U.S., international or other highly regarded school, experience with a Fortune 500 company, fast career climbers and workers at startups backed by first rate venture capital firms.

Once in, the candidate gets to set their interview fee with the help of a calculator. Just how that works is nowhere explained, but we suspect it takes into account standardized headhunting fees for the candidate’s industry and career position.

Will companies use the site and pay candidates for interviews? Notchup claims that among others, Google and Yahoo already are. Though with the site officially in Beta chances are good the listed firms are getting comped to test the system.

Meanwhile, judging from the response to an article on TechCrunch about the launch, potential participants are already thinking of how to game the system. One poster, representative of several comments, observed: “Here’s a thought….will this create an army of would be employees whose sole job will be to get interviewed by all these companies and make a living?”

We didn’t get to speak with anyone from Notchup.com, however, there is a description of a feedback and rating system. Recruiters rate candidates on how seriously they took the interview and on the accuracy of their resume. Presumably, serial interviewers will get tagged as such and won’t be pursued.

Today’s admission by former Monster chairman and CEO Andrew McKelvey that he participated in a stock backdating scheme that cost the company $340 million is only the first act curtain in a criminal investigation that appears likely to ensnare other executives from as far back as 1996.

In federal court in New York this morning, McKelvey admitted he “along with others at Monster Worldwide, Inc. routinely selected prices for stock options grants based on historical dates when Monster’s stock price had closed at, or near, a low point, resulting in grants of in-the-money stock options.”

Stock options allow employees to participate in a company’s financial success. But in Monster’s case, prosecutors charged that McKelvey and others backdated options so they would be immediately profitable when granted. The price difference represented compensation to the employee and should have been reported. But it was not.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney in New York City, which prosecuted McKelvey, declined to discuss the status of the case or to say whether other company executives were being investigated. However, a statement by the Securities and Exchange Commission said its investigation into the stock backdating continues.

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Taking the industry by surprise, CareerBuilder this morning launched a new talent management consulting and employment branding firm it calls Personified .

Headed by Mary Delaney, formerly chief sales officer for CareerBuilder.com, the new company says it works in four key areas:

• Acquisition, providing an RPO service for continuous and large scale hiring, as well as consulting on internal procedures and processes;
• Employment branding;
• Workforce culture, with a focus on creating a diverse workplace;
• Training in recruitment, leadership, sales, diversity, and project management.

“That’s a pretty big area,” says Peter Weddle , executive director of the International Association of Employment Web Sites and a nationally known recruitment consultant. That CareerBuilder would launch such a company is “not surprising, but it is interesting. There are forces that argue for it and forces against it.”

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Smart as a fox. That’s an even more apt description of JobFox now that it has another $20 million in the bank and is expanding into six more U.S. cities and Australia.

Already in Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., where it first launched in 2005, Jobfox will open new offices in Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle in the next six months.

The Australia expansion is fueled by a partnership with Fairfax Digital’s MyCareer.com , the second largest job board in Australia and New Zealand. MyCareer will incorporate JobFox’s matching and branding technology in the early part of this year.

"The rapid growth of Jobfox is due to the tremendous receptiveness from job candidates and corporate recruiters," is how CEO Rob McGovern explains it in the press release announcing the company’s good news.

The matching and candidate promotion site has gotten at least $40 million from investors since McGovern first began developing it in the spring of  2005. It launched that July with the confusing name of Mkt10 and the promise to be a different kind of job site.

That it is, even though the name and some of the fundamentals, including the user interface, have changed. McGovern, the founder and former CEO of CareerBuilder who sold it for $200 million in 2000, describes JobFox as “the e-Harmony of jobs.” That describes more than the obvious matchmaking features,  suggesting that a good fit depends on both parties making clear what they want in a relationship.

JobFox demands more of employers than the usual bland job description, insisting they fill out a profile similar to what the candidates do. The site also lets candidates know who is looking at their resume and even creates a controversial trackable resume, that can provide that information even when posted to other sites. Some recruiters and job boards have complained about the lack of privacy in reviewing resumes.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson led the $20 million financing round, which also included Menlo Ventures and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) .  

We can’t tell if it was the last one to launch in 2007 or the first one to announce in the new year, either way the world has another job board. ITarchitectjobs.com is a niche site specifically for jobs in a narrow slice of the high tech world: IT architects, a specialty that is one part technologist and more parts communicator, planner and business strategist.

You may be thinking “Aren’t there plenty of sites to post jobs like this” and the answer is certainly yes. Dice , IEEE , Craigslist all come to mind. So what will get tech companies to post to this site? In a word, free. For the next three months, posting is free for the first 100 companies.

That may not mean much since the site has little traffic and the press release announcing its launch and the free posting program offered no insight on how it would build an audience. The 35 jobs on the site include one that must have come from a recruiter pitching a member of the ITArchitectjobs team.

Still, filling a req for a information technology architect is not easy, so go ahead and post to the site. As our grandma used to say, “What can it hurt?” But do it before the U.K. based company actually begins trying to collect the 50 pounds per post fee. That's almost 100 American dollars at the current exchange rate.

UPDATE (1/10/2008): ItArchitectjobs director, Amer Mahroof, emailed us to say that the odd job posting we mentioned has been removed and "and have contacted the company in question to let let (them) know that they were in breach of our terms by posting that particular position."

Monster is launching a worldwide branding campaign complete with TV ads that evoke memories of its darkly effective 1999 campaign “When I Grow Up.”

The 2008 version is tagged “Your Calling is Calling.” Breaking just as the new year begins, the campaign seems aimed at the dissatisfied passive job-seeker needing just a nudge to move into the ranks of the actively searching.

“Monster’s new brand is designed to resonate with ‘life enthusiasts’,” explains a company spokesman. “The brand is designed to position Monster as a resource for helping this group reach their life goals; by extension it also promises employers access to, and better visibility before, top talent around the world.”

How the campaign will resonate in parts of the world where cultural pressures are more to fit in than to break out remains to be seen. However, in the U.S. and U.K. where the first TV commercials and print ads began appearing this week, the message may well prove as effective as the 1999 campaign, which helped propel Monster to the head of a crowded online recruitment pack. The memorable TV spots had stark black and white video of children talking into the camera with lines such as: "When I grow up, I want to be a brown nose”; or, “I want to be in middle management.”

The ad, which first appeared during the 1999 Super Bowl, has been voted one of the 10 all time best ads. keep reading...