CareerBuilder (profile; site) has just bumped up its coolness factor and raised the stakes in the competition to be the No. 1 job board in the U.S.

Soon, jobseekers with an Apple iPhone (the epitome of techno-cool) can search for a job on their phone as easily as on their MacBook. And actually, it might even be easier, since CareerBuilder uses the iPhone's geolocation to identify your city. All you do is enter the relevant keywords and up pops a list of jobs. Scroll the list, jump back and forth, narrow the list with more keywords or change location, should you decide Las Vegas would be more fun than Topeka.

Once you find a job that interests you, select it and CareerBuilder emails you the link so you apply when you get home. More than one job of interest? Add it to your favorites and you get sent the whole list.

Check out the online demo to see for yourself how it works. 

CareerBuilder's Jennifer Grasz tells us the service will launch any day now and when it does, all jobs on CareerBuilder.com will be accessible. Employers don't pay extra and jobseekers pay only for the data transfer, according to their ATT contract.

Although iPhone users represent a small percentage of mobile users in the U.S. (in part because of Apple's deal with only one carrier, ATT), they are among the heaviest consumers of mobile content. How extensively they will use the new service is anyone's guess. "We are getting in the door early to tap into the potential of a user base that is expected to grow at a substantial rate," Grasz says.

Mobile job searching and even applying is more common in other parts of the world, especially in Asia where cell phones are more common than landlines and personal computers.

With the Clinton-Obama fight over, Softscape and SuccessFactors (profile; site) have stepped up to fill the void with the two HR software companies in court for the second time this year. This time the allegations include claims of corporate espionage, unfair competition and interference with contract.

The latest volley was fired today by Softscape, which claims in court papers filed in Massachusetts, where it is headquartered, that SuccessFactors hired its employees in order to learn company secrets, then used that information in the design of the latest release of its Performance and Talent Management Suite, ULTRA.

SuccessFactors, in an emailed comment to ERE, said, "Softscape's recent complaint is a transparent and groundless attempt to muddy the waters to divert attention from their own well-documented illegal and reprehensible conduct. Their claims are vague and unsupported by facts, which suggest to us they have no legitimate basis."

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Employers worldwide can now incorporate video into their Monster (profile; site) job postings, a move that extends the U.S. born trend to a global market. Monster announced the rollout of Monster Video Profile this morning.

"Video allows employers to more effectively convey their culture, values and brand, which, in turn, helps job seekers better select the opportunities they apply to - and we fully expect that employers and job seekers around the world will benefit from this tool," said Monster's global CIO and head of product Darko Dejanovic.

The company first began offering video integration in the U.S. in September 2007. Companies could integrate their existing videos into their job offerings or, if they chose, have custom videos produced by MadDash E-Media, Inc. (profile; site) with which Monster partnered. Interestingly, Monster first rolled out its Video Profile product in India almost three months earlier.

CareerBuilder (profile; site) began quietly offering employer videos late in 2006, but waited until April 2007 to announce its Video BrandBuilder program. At that time it also said it planned to rollout video resumes for jobseekers, which it did over the summer of 2007. Monster introduced video resumes in India in May 2007 but has yet to roll them out in the U.S. or elsewhere.

Today's Monster announcement extends the video integration capability to Canada, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

No mention is made of a video production partner, although the announcement does suggest that Monster is offering some production service when it says, "Video Profile offers a host of services including concept creation and consultation along with complete video production and editing."

There was also no mention of price for production or inclusion.

Battered by losses running into the millions, talent software provider Workstream (profile; site) is asking vendors to renegotiate bills as it struggles to lift its stock price above $1 a share.

A publicly traded company headquartered in Ottawa, Workstream sells a suite of over-the-web talent management products and also owns 6FigureJobs.com and Allen and Associates , a candidate focused career management firm. In fiscal year 2007, which ended May 31, 2007 Workstream had an operating loss of $11.1 million on revenues of $29.3 million. This year through the company's 3^rd quarter, which ended Feb. 29^th it had lost $15.5 million on revenues of $20.6 million.

In November the company was notified by NASDAQ, where its stock trades, that it was in danger of being delisted by the exchange because the per share price had fallen below $1 for 30 consecutive trading days. On May 20^th, with its stock closing at 50 cents a share, Workstream got a six month extension from NASDAQ. It now has until Nov. 17^th to lift its per share price above $1 for 10 consecutive trading days in order to remain a listed stock.

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They call it My Perfect Gig (profile; site ), but you may be tempted to think of it as My Best Gettable Candidate. You'll be forgiven if you do because after you strip away all the hype from all the matching sites that are sprouting like rainy season mushrooms, the matches they come up with and the candidates who get hired only occasionally fit every job spec to a T.

"We're creating a common language," explains Chris Hill. "It helps makes sense of job reqs and makes it possible for recruiters to have a dialog with hiring managers."

Hill is My Perfect Gig's SVP of marketing and product management. The site is MyPerfectGig.com, launched in October 2007 by founders Mark Dane and Charlie Jutkiewicz, both founders of BrassRing now owned by Kenexa (profile; site).

Last week, in advance of today's official unveiling ofMyPerfectGig.com after months in public beta, Hill gave us a tour of the company's capabilities. To call it a job matching site is technically correct, but too limiting. What impressed us most wasn't the fact the system can take the requirements in a job req and find candidates with matching skills. Instead, it's the intelligence and market data that the SourceView product makes available.

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To the pantheon of teams like Martin and Lewis, Ben and Jerry and (Ted) Kennedy and (John) McCain, add Ramer and Steckerl. Today the two announced the merger of Arbita (profile; site) and JobMachine , their respective companies.

Shally Steckerl, perhaps the best known sourcer in the world, built JobMachine into a leading consultancy for the training and development of recruiters. Don Ramer, a 35 year recruiting veteran, founded RecruitUSA, possibly the first online posting service company, which has since become Arbita.

Now the two companies will join forces, offering their clients products that span what Ramer calls "two magnetic poles." "We're combining the two poles of thought."

Arbita provides job posting distribution services, enabling companies to select the most productive places to post job openings from among thousands of different job boards around the world. The 30-person company tracks the results, providing recruiters data to help them maximize the ROI of their ad spending.

Job Machine works at the other end of the pole, teaching recruiters how to find and qualify candidates who might not even consider looking at a job board, let alone search for another job. Steckerl's five-person firm also consults with companies that want to develop a stronger sourcing component to their overall recruitment strategy.

Though Steckerl - and Ramer - disdain the "passive / active" terminology ("I don't believe in the term," Steckerl tells us.), it's a good way to distinguish the two companies. Arbita focuses on active candidates; Job Machine on passives.

So what brought the two companies together in a deal both insist is not a sale?

""We're brothers of a different mother," says Steckerl, explaining that a strategic recruiting program needs to encompass both passive and active candidates. "When Don and I started talking I knew I was talking to a brother. Both of us know a good talent pipeline gets fed from different places."

Combining the two companies means their clients can tap into broad expertise with the assurance that the solutions are the best fit. As Ramer explains the synergy, "It's really possible to serve the customers by offering a spectrum of solutions."

It was Steckerl who went shopping for a partner, after doing some soul-searching about the future of JobMachine. His choices boiled down to "grow the company organically, or join forces with an organization or not grow at all," Steckerl told us.

To grow, he needed help with the administrative and sales functions. Not growing would be to stagnate, he says. However, he didn't want to sell the company or take in investors who could end up running things.

"I won't be told what to do," he told us as he jokingly said he wanted to "continue to be the rogue mercenary."

Arbita's business emphasis meant the two companies didn't compete and each would benefit from the knowledge of the other, Steckerl says. Plus, he adds, "Don's the only one who didn't want to buy me out."

Even before the merger is complete, which is expected early in the summer, the two companies have begun to work together. Eventually, Arbita will handle JobMachine's accounting and related administrative details. Both companies will offer the other's services and products. The name JobMachine will continue and Steckerl will continue to run it as a separate unit.

Jobfox (profile; site) has been named to Red Herring's Top 100 in North America list of tech startups.

Hundreds of companies vie for the distinction of making one of the tech business magazine's lists, both for the prestige value and the very real notice they get from investors and tech industry insiders. Companies nominate themselves, or, in some cases are nominated by others. For this list year's list, 800 companies were reviewed, according to Jobfox, with the top 100 chosen on the basis of financials, subjective criteria, quality of management, execution of strategy and dedication to research and development.

"Jobfox is changing the way professionals and employers connect with each other," said Rob McGovern , CEO of Jobfox. "Millions of job candidates visit Jobfox as a smarter way to advance their careers. Thousands of corporate recruiters now subscribe to Jobfox as a more efficient and cost-effective way to hire quality professionals."

Launched in July 2005 as Mkt10, the job matching site later changed its name to JobFox as it began to expand beyond the Washington, D.C. market where it first tested its approach to recruitment. It works by matching candidates, who complete a series of qustions about their interests, skills, background and expectations, to jobs and companies, which also complete a corporate profile.

"Jobfox puts the spotlight on top professionals instead of job listings," said McGovern, who founded Jobfox after selling CareerBuilder (profile; site), which he also founded and lead, in 2002.

Earlier this year, Jobfox was recognized as an Official Honoree for the 12th Annual Webby Awards. Jobfox was also named a 2008 most promising startup by American Venture Magazine.

CollegeRecruiter.com has become one of the first if not the first commercial job board to stop selling access to its resume database. The redesigned site which launched over the weekend still collects resumes from jobseekers who want to submit one, but it no longer allows employers to search through them.

With the security of resume databases increasingly being threatened, Steve Rothberg, president and founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, told us there was no cost-effective way for his site to protect jobseekers.

"Resume searching was profitable, but not profitable enough to spend the money to make it secure," he explained to us, adding, "This isn't about ID theft." The security threats he and other job board operators worry about most come from legitimate companies who farm resumes for marketing purposes. They aren't looking to hire candidates, but to sell to them. Resumes have also been collected in order to be resold in bulk to other job boards.

Even though Rothberg says it's not a significant loss of revenue, it does represent 5 percent of total revenue, an amount in the tens of thousands of dollars. Sites such as Monster make upwards of 30 percent of their revenue from selling resume access. It's one of the few areas where user generated content has been successfully and significantly monetized on the Internet, so it's unlikely many job boards will follow CollegeRecruiter's lead

Candidates will still be encouraged to post their resume in order to receive job alerts and targeted emails. And employers will still be able to solicit candidates by going through CollegeRecruiter. These targeted emails are sent by CollegeRecruiter to opt-in jobseekers whose resumes match the employer's need. The employers don't know who gets the emails unless the candidates actually apply.

Ending resume searching may be the most dramatic change in the relaunched CollegeRecruiter site, but the most visible is the home page, which reflects what Rothberg described to us as a "minimalist" approach to job searching.

Although the current trend is for job boards to be more of a career center, Rothberg says, "I don't buy it." Jobseekers, he says, "Go to our site to connect with employers."

So the homepage now features Google-like search and a handful of text links to other content. More content, in fact several thousand pages of content including articles, resources and topical blogs, are still available on the site. As Rothberg explains, "Those who want it can find it easily."

Another key change, also reflecting the minimalist approach, is in how candidates apply for jobs. They provide their name, email address, location and resume and in some cases they don't even need to list their location. The streamlined process leverages the ability of most ATS systems to parse out relevant details from a resume, obviating the need for the usual fill-in-the-blanks application.

The changes, says Rothberg, were made to "Maximize the number of candidates to use our site for the reason they use a job board - to look for a job."

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.

_________________

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.