“While we still expect soft results for the next few quarters, we are becoming increasingly confident in improvements made to Monster’s product offering and competitive positioning, which we believe bodes well for the company as the economy improves,” analyst Monica DiCenso wrote in a note accompanying her upgrade of the stock from neutral to “overweight.”

(In stocks, unlike body mass, an overweight recommendation is good for the company. It means the analyst issuing the recommendation believes the stock price will rise.)

On the strength of the recommendation, Monster’s stock jumped $1.25 Thursday, before closing at $18.07. It ended Wednesday at $17.10.

At midday in New York today, Monster’s stock was at $18.06.

DiCenso, who put a price target of $24 a share on the stock, said in her note to investors that she believes the company “is in a better position today than in recent years to regain some market share in the U.S. and continue its international expansion.”

Monster’s revenue from its international operations has been growing steadily over the last few years. It accounts for 40 percent of the company’s 2009 revenue as of the last report. (The company will issue its financial report for the third quarter on Oct. 29. Yahoo Finance says analyst consensus is that Monster will report $216.7 million in revenues and break even on expenses.)

The Dublin, California-based company has been on a tear this year, tripling its stock price as it declared itself officially on a shopping spree. As if to prove it isn’t just blowing smoke, Taleo, Tuesday, spent $16 million buying its strategic partner Worldwide Compensation Inc., which sells global compensation planning solutions.

The deal was announced in Las Vegas at the annual TaleoWORLD user conference, where the company also unveiled Taleo 10, the newest iteration of its integrated talent management platform. Taleo unabashedly describes its new platform as “the fastest, most social, and mobile talent management system on the planet.”

It’s a major play for Taleo, giving it a product with which it can correctly claim it has an end-to-end solution.

The new Taleo 10 incorporates some of what was missing in earlier platforms, particularly a development module the company, appropriately enough, calls Taleo Development. It is planning oriented, including classic succession and personal development planning tools as well as what Taleo calls “social learning,” which is a form of internal networking.

It works with learning management systems, but Taleo, through a partnership it announced Wednesday at TaleoWORLD, is connecting Development to Learn.com. The integration will allow Taleo Development to link directly to Learn’s training courses.

Taleo 10 has one of the tightest Outlook integrations on the market, making it possible for recruiters and managers to access candidate information and even do performance reviews right from Outlook. Its still-to-come mobile uses, via Blackberrys and iPhones, will make it possible for candidates to browse jobs, apply, and even track their status.

All of that, and the other features and enhancements in Taleo 10 (Taleo says there 100-plus new ones in recruiting alone) alone would make it worth a look, but the Talent Grid piece shows the company has been paying attention to the market and figuring out how to leverage its already substantial presence.

Taking a cue from the talent network AllianceQ, Taleo has developed Talent Exchange where candidates and Taleo customers can share job openings and resumes, which the Grid calls Universal Profiles. The potential is up to 13 million candidates a quarter and as many as 500,000 jobs, should all 4,100 Taleo customers participate.

There’s also a knowledge base, built around a social network, and an iPhone-like applications store of ready-to-use products and services from Taleo, its partners, and customers. All of that handy and undoubtedly useful stuff, but the Talent Exchange may be the most valuable as companies begin hiring again.

Josh Bersin, in his overview of Taleo 10, calls its release “a very important announcement for the HR software industry.”

Buying Worldwide Compensation now enables Taleo to offer a performance management solution that directly integrates with compensation planning. The company has historically been strong in recruitment. Its roots, after all, are in talent procurement, having started life in Canada as a job board, before moving to the U.S. and introducing an ATS.

In the last several years Taleo has moved aggressively toward a complete lifecycle solution, and toward growing its market share. Acquiring Vurv in 2008 achieved both objectives. Vurv had a strong talent management platform and 1,700 customers.

Michael Gregoire

The expansion of pay-for-performance compensation was already well underway before the recession took hold, and if anything it has made companies look ever more carefully at how they dole out raises and bonuses. Having a comp management component can only strengthen Taleo’s position in that area, a goal that was clearly on the mind of company CEO Michael Gregoire when he discussed the acquisition with a Reuters reporter.

“In the performance management market we are relatively nascent and have less than 1 percent market. We would like to see ourselves (increasing the share) to mid to high single digits over the next couple of years,” Reuters quotes Gregoire as saying.

Worldwide can accurately be described as a leader in the compensation planning field. Gartner positioned Worldwide in its Performance Management Magic Quadrant, recognizing the firm’s “Best-in-Class Global Compensation Functionality, and Deep Global Compensation Expertise.”

Gregoire foreshadowed the acquisition — and probably others — in an interview with the Oakland Tribune in August. He told the paper Taleo might spend as much as $50 million to buy companies with the technology it wants. It has $62 million in cash to shop and could, the paper reported, go to the equity markets to raise more if it needed to.

It’s a long way from the dark days of last November when the company had nothing but bad news to report. It’s third quarter financials released at the beginning of the month showed an $8.2 million loss. That was followed in rapid succession by a notice that its financial filings would be delayed pending an audit of its income recognition practices. Over the next few weeks it was hit with class action lawsuits over its accounting practices and its financial disclosures.

On Nov. 4th, the day after the financials were released, the stock closed at $14.94. The loss, though sizable, was explained by costs associated with the Vurv acquisition. By Dec. 1 Taleo was trading at $5.69.

The company has since come current with its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and resolved its accounting problems with an $18 million adjustment. It’s still facing three shareholder class action suits. A hearing on the company’s motion to dismiss it is schedules for Nov. 13th. Another lawsuit over patents is being waged with Kenexa.

Financially, the Vurv acquisition continues to be a drain. Most of the $2 million Taleo lost in the first six months of the year is due to costs associated with Vurv. But the $100k profit it eeked out in the 2nd quarter is a hopeful sign that the worst may be behind.

Yahoo Finance says Wall Street analysts are expecting Taleo to earn 16 cents per share on $49 million in revenue for the current quarter, which ends Sept. 30.  Since the beginning of the year, Taleo’s stock has been upgraded by several of the firms that follow the company with the consensus leaning toward it being a “buy.”

The company announced the Series B funding tonight. The round was led by ATA Ventures, whose co-founder and managing director, Hatch Graham, will join Jobvite’s board of directors. In December 2007 Jobvite received $7.2 million in Series A funding from a group led by CMEA Capital.

Jobvite says it grew its client count by 300 percent in the last year and now counts Accuweather, Mozilla, TiVo, Yelp, and Zappos among its customers.

One reason for Jobvite’s success is its versatility. Not only has the company built a nicely featured ATS, but it took care in the development to include the kind of networking capabilities that recruiters want. The recruiting platform allows for internal collaboration, encouraging employees to make referrals and, to the extent company culture and hiring managers allow, they can participate in the hiring process.

Making this a more active exercise is Jobvite’s behind-the-scenes job matching capability. Employees can choose to connect Jobvite to their Facebook friends,  LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers. Jobvite analyzes the profiles of those connections and suggests good matches with company openingx to the employee, who can choose to send a “jobvite” invitation to their friend, follower, or 1st degree connection.

Jobvite is an on-demand system with a yearly subscription fee priced for the SMB market and designed to be less demanding of recruiter time.

“This recession is fundamentally changing recruitment, pushing companies to become more cost-effective, innovative, and strategic. Companies are looking to the technology industry to make this possible,” says Dan Finnigan, president and CEO. “Our growth this year proves we’re serving a big need and delivering immediate ROI to our customers. With this new investment, the strong additions made to our team this year, and the on-going advancements in our technology, I’m looking forward to what Jobvite will do for our customers.”

Revenue for the quarter, which ended May 31, was $186.2 million. Last year, revenue for the same quarter was $233 million. For the year, Lawson brought in $757.3 million versus $851.9 million in 2008. Lawson, a multinational, said that revenues were negatively impacted by overseas currency fluctuations, but helped improve earnings per share (of 11 cents) by about a penny.

Adjustments for one time expenses and restructuring costs resulted in a fiscal 2009 profit of $58.7 million, or 35 cents per share, in line with analysts’ expectations.

The St. Paul, Minnesota, firm reported its fiscal 2009 financials after the market closed Thursday.

For the year, operating expenses were down $54.7 million over the previous year, not including a $20 million restructuring charge.

The company has made deep cuts in expenses. Last fall it cut 200 jobs and in May it announced an additional 150 layoffs to its 3,400 workers saving some $60-$70 million cumulatively in payroll annually. Most of the layoffs came in its European workforce.

In its financial report, Lawson did not provide full year estimates for the 2010 fiscal year that began June 1. It did estimate that its first quarter earnings would be in the range of 1 to 3 cents per share on revenue of $160 million to $165 million. The per share estimate after excluding one-time expenses is 5 cents. Analysts had been anticipating earnings in the range of 8 cents per share on revenue of $165.8 million.

Lawson’s stock was trading down 11 cents to $5.29 a share at midday, New York.

Joel Cheesman reported Monday that he received a tip from a Monster worker who claims to have seen a multi-page list of about 200 names, including the tipster’s own.

In response, Monster issued a statement that was short on details, but said, in part, “we continue to restructure, reorganize. This means that roles and skill areas that are no longer needed to support the business are restructured,” says the statement from Kathy O’Reilly, senior manager of media relations at the notoriously tight-lipped company.

The announcement contains no direct confirmation of an impending layoff, nor does it provide any numbers or other specifics. It also has not, so far, been distributed on any of the financial or business services that companies typically use for announcements of this sort. Nevertheless, at lunchtime today the company’s stock was trading just under $10 a share, down almost 7 percent from Monday’s close of $10.68. Meanwhile the market as a whole was down much less, with the Dow off 1.2 percent and the NASDAQ off 1.4 percent.

O’Reilly said she doubted the company would have more to say than what was in the emailed announcement, though she agreed to try to obtain clarification on the reference to the restructuring being in support of “the changing needs of our customers.” We asked what those changing needs are and what the company’s strategic direction is now.

In the first quarter of this year, Monster posted a $10.3 million loss on revenue of $132 million compared to a profit for the same quarter the year before of $22.6 million on revenue of $228.7 million.

The action, brought in federal court in Pennsylvania by Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP, claims that between May 8, 2007, when Kenexa issued its first quarter report and Nov. 7th of that year, when the third quarter financial report was released, it “failed to disclose material adverse facts about the Company’s true financial condition, business and prospects.”

As a result, the law firm claims that shareholders who bought stock between those dates lost value when on Nov 8th, the day after the third quarter results were announced, the stock plummeted 40 percent, dropping from $27.84 per share to $16.61 per share. That day, 8.4 million shares of the company traded hands. The average volume in the weeks before was around 300,000 shares.

A Kenexa spokesperson could not be reached for comment.

Coughlin Stoia is a 190-lawyer firm with offices across the country that specializes in class action litigation on behalf of investors and consumers.  The firm was lead counsel on behalf of Enron investors, suing banks and others that backed the energy firm. Coughlin Stoia has also played a key role in cases as diverse as an antitrust action against the NASDAQ exchange, settling it for more than $1 billion, and in litigation against tobacco companies.

In the Kenexa case, Coughlin Stoia says in a press release that the company:

“… failed to disclose the following adverse facts, among others: (i) that sales cycles for the Company’s Employment Process Outsourcing (“EPO”) and assessments lines of business were lengthening, causing sales to be pushed out and revenue growth to slow; (ii) that the Company was experiencing problems with its international sales and would need to revamp that sales force; (iii) that the Company was experiencing problems with a significant EPO client such that the client was requesting to be released from its contract with the Company; and (iv) based on the foregoing, defendants lacked a reasonable basis for their positive statements about the Company, its earnings, operations and prospects.”

No specific amount of damages is detailed in the complaint.

Kenexa’s stock was trading at $13.47 at midday today, down 38 cents from Thursday’s close. For 2008 Kenexa reported losing $120.9 million, mostly due to a writedown of company goodwill, which many HR tech and services vendors have been doing. For the first quarter of this year, Kenexa posted a $33.6 million loss, after another goodwill hit of $33.3 million. Not counting the writedown and certain other minor one-time expenses, Kenexa would have had a $3.9 million profit from operations.

The stock price dropped 8.7 percent at the opening from Friday’s close of $12.45. It has since recovered and at midday in New York, the last trade price was back to where it was.

However, the comments by analyst John Janedis accompanying the downgrade may have a lingering effect. In downgrading the stock, Janedis bases it on his belief that “the slope of the eventual recovery will be flatter than anticipated.” He doesn’t see much economic steam being built until 2010. Even when hiring does begin to perk, the company’s “future earnings power will be below the last peak due to structural changes in the industry.” The discounting that all the major job boards are offering now will have have a significant impact, Janedis says.

Though the note doesn’t provide details, the structural changes that recruitment advertising is undergoing include the shift to niche job boards, an emphasis on employer career sites with search engine marketing to drive traffic directly to the company site, and a flirtation with social media. Had it not been for the economic collapse, the flirting might now be a full-fledged relationship.

If Janedis is right — and many economists agree with his prediction of a slow recovery and a soft improvement in hiring — then more recruiters will be experimenting with search engine marketing and with social media recruiting, since the pressure to fill jobs won’t be as keen as it was just 24 months ago. If they find success there, then Monster and its competitors won’t be able to bump prices and discounting will be the norm.

With that scenario in the background, Janedis writes, “We think MWW’s business will have earnings of $0.69 in 2012, or 52% below the $1.43 peak in 2007. We are currently modeling 10.6% operating margins in ‘12 vs. mgmt’s previous target for ‘08 of 25%.”

As a public company, Monster’s finances are reported on a quarterly basis. Yahoo, which owns HotJobs, is also a public company, but chooses not to separately disclose HotJobs revenue, instead including it with the company’s overall numbers. CareerBuilder, owned by newspaper publishers and Microsoft, is not required to report publicly, but it does voluntarily provide its quarterly North American revenue. For the first quarter, CareerBuilder said it brought in $141 million. That was off 27 percent from the same quarter the year before.

Both HotJobs and CareerBuilder are beset by the same problems as Monster, though HotJobs may be even worse off. Its staff has always been smaller than either Monster’s or CareerBuilder’s and, because of its alliance with hundreds of U.S. newspapers, which are in the throes of the worst advertising depression in their history, we think its revenue has been hit even harder. CareerBuilder long ago built an independent outside and telemarketing sales force. So even though it, too, is partnered with Gannett, Tribune, and McClatchy media properties, it is far less dependent on their sales staffs.

The SEC accused the company this morning of filing false statements about the granting of millions of stock options and failing to properly account for their issuance. In the complaint filed in the District Court for Southern District of New York, the SEC alleges “Monster filed false and materially misleading statements concerning the true grant date and exercise price of stock options in its annual, quarterly and current reports, proxy statements and registration statements.”

The complaint was accompanied by a notice of the proposed settlement, which, in addition to the penalty, says Monster must also “consent to the entry of an order permanently enjoining it from violating the antifraud, reporting, recordkeeping and internal controls provisions of the federal securities laws.”

The SEC and the U.S. Attorney’s Office have been investigating Monster and its backdating of stock options granted to senior executives and others in order to make them more valuable. Last week, former Monster COO James Treacy was convicted by a federal jury in New York City of one count of securities fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, file false statements with the SEC, make false statements to auditors, and falsify books and records. He faces up to 25 years on the conviction.

In settling the case Monster is neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing. However, in the press release issued by the SEC, New York Acting Regional Director unambiguously said, “Monster misled investors by failing to report hundreds of millions of dollars of expenses. Backdating stock options made the company look like it had more money than it really did.”

The SEC said it took into account that Monster cooperated with investigators and that the company’s management has changed since the investigation began in 2006.

Four of Monster’s former executives were accused in connection with the backdating investigation. They are the late CEO Andrew McKelvey, General Counsel Myron Olesnyckyj, Controller Anthony Bonica, and Treacy. McKelvey, terminally ill with cancer at the time the charges were filed, was allowed a special deal in which he admitted his guilty, but not prosecuted. Olesnyskyj became a government witness in the case and pleaded guilty to a single charge. The SEC case against Bonica has not been resolved.

Monster’s brief statement on the settlement includes a comment from CEO Sal Iannuzzi who says: “This is an important step in closing an unfortunate chapter in the company’s history and putting the issue firmly behind us. Our current executive team has spent the last two years refocusing Monster on its customers and shareholders, retooling the day-to-day management, and overhauling governance in an effort to adhere to the highest standards.”

A New York City jury took less than four hours to convict the 51-year-old Treacy of one count of securities fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, file false statements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), make false statements to auditors, and falsify books and records. The verdict came in late Tuesday.

Federal prosecutors charged that Treacy and other senior executives systematically backdated options granted between 1997 and 2003, issuing them the closing price of the stock on the day of issue, but making it appear the options had been granted on a day when the stock actually did close at the option price. While a company can legally issue a grant at below market price, federal securities and accounting rules require the company to take the difference as an expense to current earnings and report the actions.

Not only didn’t the company take the charge, prosecutors maintained that Treacy and other executives, including the late Andrew McKelvey, Monster’s founder, former chairman, and CEO, had conspired to hide the backdating. McKelvey resigned from the company in late 2006 rather than cooperate with investigators who were then onto the backdating scheme.

The amount of the backdating was staggering. When Monster finally went back to adjust its financial reports, the charges came to $272 million. In 2001 alone, the adjustments changed Monster’s earnings from $69 million to $3.4 million. Treacy himself was alleged to have profited by more than $24 million from selling stock accrued from backdated options and resulting stock splits and spin-off.

For his defense, Treacy blamed McKelvey and other senior executives for the backdating. His attorneys told jurors Treacy relied on them and on former General Counsel Myron Olesnyckyj to select the dates for valuing the options and to properly account for them.

Terminally ill when he was charged, McKelvey made a deal with prosecutors that required him to admit his guilt. McKelvey died last year. Olesnyckyj also made a deal, pleading guilty to fraud and cooperating in the investigation.

Monster reacted to the jury verdict with a statement saying, “This verdict brings us closer to the end of an unfortunate chapter in the company’s history and putting the issue firmly behind us.”

Treacy will be sentenced Aug. 25th. In addition to prison, he could be fined and required to turn over gains made from the sale of the backdated options.

The company reported revenues of $38.8 million and non-GAAP earnings per share of 14 cents. The per share earnings were in line with analyst estimates, though the Street had been expecting revenue of $39.05 million.

However, Kenexa took a big hit, booking $33.3 million as a reduction to goodwill. That one-time expense (included in GAAP reports but not in non-GAAP as it is not an actual cash expense. Confused? See this definition) drove profits into the minus column. That gave Kenexa a loss on the quarter of $34.3 million versus last year’s $4.8 million profit.

Without that charge and a few other charges that are not considered operating expenses under non-GAPP rules, Kenexa earned $3.9 million from operations versus last year’s $9.1 million.

The company explained it this way in its financial release: “As a result of a substantial decrease in the company’s stock price, reflecting the very difficult market conditions of recent months and the impact on its operations, the company evaluated its goodwill for potential impairment as of March 31, 2009 in accordance with accounting requirements. Based on the results of this evaluation, the company reported a non-cash goodwill impairment charge of $33.3 million, on a pretax tax basis. While the impairment charge reduced reported operating results under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), it is non-cash in nature and does not affect Kenexa’s liquidity or cash flow from operations.”

GAAP or not, the revenue side shows a wide gap between last year’s performance and this. Not unusual for an industry beset by the recession. But a hit nonetheless.

Rudy Karsan, Kenexa’s CEO, said in the financial release, “While the business environment is challenging and we expect it to remain so for the remainder of the year, there are a number of positive developments related to Kenexa and the talent management market. During the first quarter, sales and renewals of Kenexa’s talent acquisition solutions remained solid, which was a primary contributor to the solid growth of our deferred revenue.”

The company said it expected the current quarter to have revenues in the $36 million to $39 million range and non-GAAP operating income to be $3.6 million to $4.6 million. Thet would give between 14 and 16 cents a share in earnings, which, at the high end, is what analysts are expecting.

The company’s stock closed at $7.85 a share, down 40 cents from the previous close.

“We are gaining market share,” declared CEO Sal Iannuzzi. “We are declining less than the competition.” Instead of splitting a million dollars among Monster and one or two other job boards, Iannuzzi said employers are spending less but giving it all to Monster.

“Competition is stiff,” he said. Price discounting so steep he called it “stunning,” is common. And though he said Monster won’t “give away the product,” his marching orders to the sales force are “take market share.”

He didn’t mention any other company, but it was unmistakable that he was talking about CareerBuilder and, to a less extent, HotJobs. Neither company reports its financials completely. CareerBuilder is a private company owned by a group of newspaper companies and Microsoft and voluntarily shares its North American revenue. (Those figures weren’t available.) Hotjobs is a division of Yahoo, which does not separately identify the revenue.

In pursuit of share Monster spent $27 million during the first quarter on marketing its redesigned site and its new features. After a five year absence Monster returned as a Super Bowl advertiser this year, and also partnered with the NFL in a fan promotion to hire a “Director of Fandemonium.”

CFO Tim Yates said the $27 million was specifically for the launch of the new Monster site and won’t be repeated again this year. Without that expense and an additional $15 million in such one time expenses as $4.6 million in severance payments and legal expenses of $3 million connected with the stock option backdating affair, Monster would have been in the black for the quarter.

Even so the loss, amounting to $10.3 million or 9 cents a share, beat Wall Street’s estimates of an 11 cent per share loss. It came on revenue of $254 million, Monster’s smallest since the end of 2005.

Monster’s expense cutting over the last several months has been significant, Iannuzzi and Yates reported. Salaries, administrative costs, and office expenses totaled $184.5 million for the quarter compared to the same quarter last year when those expenses amounted to $214.3 million. A big part of that comes from a 400 employee decline in staff.

To further reduce expenses, Yates said the company has eliminated cash bonuses, paying them in stock options, and has halted contributions to employee 401(k) accounts.

During the financial call, the marketing expense and the product launch came in for close questioning, as analysts asked about the effectiveness of the new site features with users and customers.

Darko Dejanovic, Chief Information Officer and Head of Product, said the results have been striking. On every metric the company uses — unique visitors, searches, total visitors, etc. — “those numbers significantly increased,” he said, and on an order of “20, 30, 40, 50 percent.”

Iannuzzi said that even accounting for the increase in job seekers created by the economic situation, the numbers are impressive. In the U.S. for instance, job searches rose 71 percent after the launch on Jan. 10., he said. In Germany, unique visitors rose 29 percent.

More launches are coming. On May 16th Monster will roll out its Trovix-enhanced search to a select group of 150 customers. They’ll use the new system for several weeks providing feedback and suggestions before the new search backend becomes standard toward the end of the year. A seeker side rollout is planned for late summer. Monster acquired Trovix last year.

By then we should see if Iannuzzi’s sense of optimism was well placed. Though he repeatedly cautioned that it could be nothing but a mirage, Iannuzzi said sales reps are reporting a greater willingness by customers to commit to long term contracts. “Don’t read too much into it,” Iannuzzi warned. But, he said there seems to be “a general sense of increasing optimism” and “not the doom and gloom we were hearing in Q4.”

Other Companies

SuccessFactors also issued its earnings report Thursday. It lost $5.7 million on revenues of $35.2 million. That’s a world of improvement over the same quarter in 2008 when it lost $19.1 million on revenue of $23.5 million.

“Q1 was a challenging quarter for SuccessFactors, as businesses of all sizes and industries slowed their decision-making and reduced spending on software products and services,” said CEO Lars Dalgaard. “We view this economic environment as an appropriate time to increase our focus on expense management and profitability, while continuing to invest in the highest levels of product quality, support, and total value for our customers.”

In the 2nd quarter, the company expects revenue to be in the range of approximately $35.5 million to $35.75 million. For the year, the company says it expects revenue of $145 million to $146 million, which would give it about a 30 percent annual growth.

Taleo, which had delayed filing its financial reports for 2008, finally did Thursday. Taleo reported revenue of $168.4 million and a loss of $8.2 million or 30 cents a share for the year. In 2007, the company earned $3.8 million on revenue of $128.1 million. It won’t report its first quarter numbers until next week.

Kenexa, another leading HCM vendor, won’t report its results until May 11th. Analysts expect it to report earning about 14 cents a share on revenue of $30 million.

The $570,000 net profit wasn’t quite as good as the $780,000 it projected in preliminary numbers last month, but it clearly shows how far the company has come since the bleak months of 2008.

For the same quarter last fiscal year, Workstream reported a loss of $19.7 million. You read that right and we’re reporting the numbers correctly: For the quarter ending Feb. 28, 2008 Workstream lost $19.7 million primarily because of interest liabilities. Even so, its EBITDA, considered by analysts a better comparison of company performance across an industry, was $4.5 million in the red. For the third quarter of 2009, its EBITDA was a positive $1.3 million. (Workstream has an odd fiscal year. It begins June 1 and ends May 31.)

The financial report, released after the market closed Tuesday, didn’t have much of an effect on the market, which factored in the numbers when the preliminary report was issued last month. Workstream’s stock was trading down 2 cents at 28 cents a share just minutes before the market closed today. The stock has seen a big runup since the end of 2008, when it was trading at 2 cents a share.

Traders may also be looking at the company’s balance sheet, which is carrying a $19 million note and current liabilities of $7.8 million. However, where analysts and investors focus most — operating income — Workstream’s sale of its SaaS provisioned compensation, performance, and talent management services showed a surprising stability. For the quarter, software sales were actually up slightly over the same quarter of 2008. Workstream reported income of $2.1 million vs. $2.0 million. The category is down about $1 million for the nine months ended Feb. 28th, coming in at $5.7 million.

When he released the preliminary numbers last month, Workstream CEO Steve Purello told us the company has been focused on internal cost-cutting while sales “sought opportunities to assist our F2000 base of customers in managing their rapidly changing workforces. “

Besides the HCM software unit, Workstream also owns 6FigureJobs, and personal career consultant Allen and Associates, While the job board, like others, has taken a big revenue hit from the recession (down about $800,000 in the third quarter alone over the prior year), Purello said resume search revenue is buffering the job board as companies that have laid off workers selectively (and quietly) hire others for mission critical positions.

“In today’s environment we’ve found company HR departments with a focused discipline on cost-cutting, measuring and differentiating performers vs. non-performers, reviewing compensation structures, and even some strategic hiring of high-performers previously unavailable,” Purello told us.

As for his own company, Purello wore us last month that “Workstream is continuing its own discipline of seeking revenue opportunities while watching expenses so we may bolster our balance sheet. We realize that prospects and customers are making commitments for our software and services for many years and want to partner with a company they can count on to serve them well in the future.”

The stock of most publicly held HR firms was helped by the 497 point surge in the Dow and equally significant jumps in the other indices. Whether technology provider, staffing firm, or job board, the effect was felt equally. Monster, for instance, saw its stock jump 15.1 percent, besting by more than twice the Dow’s 6.8 percent rise. Closing at $8.45 a share, it’s still off its 52 week high of $29.

Staffing firm Manpower, which hit a high of $70.71 last year, closed up 10.7 percent to close at $31 a share.

Kenexa, Lawson, SuccessFactors, Taleo and Workstream — all HR technology vendors — were up ranging from 17.5 percent for Kenexa and Workstream’s 16 percent to Taleo’s 10.2 percent rise. The up-market’s coattails may have been muted in Taleo’s case by its announcement today that the accounting review begun last year would result in the restatement of some $18 million in consulting revenue.

The company has been issuing periodic updates about the review, so its conclusion wasn’t unexpected. In addition to restating (essentially making accounting adjustments), the end of the review will allow the company to file its tardy financial reports and resolve its threatened delisting by the NASDAQ, where the stock is traded.

Monday, after the market closed its frenetic day, Taleo officials said the revenue recognition review had concluded and the company will restate revenue going back as far as 2003. It will also be filing its delayed reports by the end of April.

What it means is that about $18 million of revenue reported between 2003 and 2007 will be reassigned, resulting in relatively minor reductions in revenue reported during each of those years. Less than 4 percent of that $18 million wil be spread over the company’s financial quarters beginning from July 1, 2008, onward.

The company explained the adjustments in a press release saying: “Historically, when application services and consulting services were sold together, the company recognized consulting services revenue as the services were delivered. Now, in similar arrangements, the company’s consulting services revenue will be recognized ratably over the term of the application services agreement, typically three years.”

To put the dollars in perspective, Taleo said that over the period involved “a total of approximately $85 million in consulting revenue and $378 million of application revenue was recognized.”

In a statement today, Workstream says it earned $780,000 on revenues of about $5.6 million for the 3rd quarter ending Feb. 28. Its EBITDA of $1.5 million for the quarter is three times what it was for the 4th quarter of 2008. EBITDA, often used to compare the performance of companies in the same industry, is debated as a metric of genuine profitability. But there’s no debating a bottom line operating profit of three-quarters of a million dollars, a stunning reversal considering Workstream’s historic financial performance.

For the same quarter a year ago, Workstream reported losing $5.9 million. For the last quarter ending Nov. 30 (Workstream is on a June 1 to May 31 fiscal year) the company had an operating loss of $1.1 million. Even a quick look at the numbers, however, shows that Workstream has been improving its performance over the last few quarters. (The hit it took for the huge loss reported for the quarter ending May 31 was primarily a writedown of goodwill.)

Last week, company CEO Steve Purello told us the company has been putting its house order since pretty much hitting bottom last spring. That’s when an acquisition deal fell apart, the company faced a delisting notice from NASDAQ, where it trades, and there was an unbroken string of losses.“We’ve done all the things we said we were going to do,” Purello said, giving us his best guesses as to why Workstream’s stock was on a tear since January. In less than two months it went from a price of 2 cents a share to 20 cents. As we write this, the stock is around 22 cents a share.

Today’s financial release hits only the top line results. Specifics on the company’s financials won’t be released until the middle of April, when it files its detailed report with the SEC. While today’s numbers are subject to revision, if it occurs it shouldn’t significantly change the picture.

Monster released its financials for 2008 this afternoon and the numbers give mute testimony to the impact of the worldwide recession on the recruitment market.

For the last quarter of 2008 Monster reported revenues of $290.7 million and earnings per share of 24 cents. This is off from last year and below analysts’ expectations, falling at the lower end of Wall Street’s estimates.

The biggest hit came in the company’s North American sales which were off 22.1 percent in the 4th quarter from the same quarter in 2007. For the year, North American sales were off 9.8 percent.

The silver lining, thin as it may be, is that the company managed to eke out a 1.5 percent increase in revenue for the full year, due mostly to a 17.9 percent growth for the year in international sales. However, the recession’s global impact began to be felt in the 4th quarter. International sales were off 14.3 percent, coming in at $122.8 million, just $12.3 million less than the  $135.1  million Monster generated in North America.

However the company’s operating expenses were almost $70 million more in 2008, which made a big dent in the earnings per share for the year. More than of half that – $40 million – is attributed for legal expenses in connection with the lawsuits arising out of the stock options backdating of several years ago.

Monster reported diluted earnings of $1.03 per share in 2008 vs. $1.12 in 2007.

Last year, Monster had $347.8 million in revenue for the 4th quarter and $1.324 billion for all of 2007.

Analysts had been expecting 4th quarter revenue in the range of $279.1 to $331.4 million with the average being $311.6 million. Earnings had been expected in the range of 21 to 33 cents per share with the average being 27 cents.

Monster, like most publicly held companies, reports numbers in a variety of different ways to make it easier for analysts to make comparisons. Numbers used here are from the company’s operations statements.

Monster previously traded on the NASDAQ. It’s stock price closed at $12.01 a share on that exchange Friday. Today, it ran up almost 10 percent in the first hour of trading, before settling back to $12.81 (a 6.66  percent increase over its Friday close) when this item was posted at 11:45 a.m. ET. (Current price here.)

Monster Chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi announced the company’s move to the NYSE during the quarterly financial conference call Oct. 30.

“We believe,” he said, “the New York Stock Exchange is a prestigious platform for Monster, a platform that is committed to integrity in governance, innovation and global growth. These are exciting times for Monster and our move to the New York Stock Exchange is consistent with the goals and strategies and values of the new Monster.”

He also announced during that call, attended by financial analysts, that he would be purchasing $1 million worth of Monster shares and CFO Tim Yates would buy $500,000 worth. Iannuzzi bought 72,000 shares on Nov. 4th at prices ranging from $13.77 to $13.99. Yates bought 36,000 shares that same day at prices ranging from $13.81 to $14.00.

Workstream issued a press release today saying it had appealed the latest delisting order. That gives the company some breathing room while NASDAQ reviews the matter. Workstream could avoid delisting by filing its annual report, Form 10-K, as required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Workstream is required to file 90 days after the end of its fiscal year on May 31.

Why the report has not been filed was not explained in the press release and company CFO Jay Markell could not be reached.

Company officials reported in July that Workstream’s fourth quarter ended in the black, the first time that has happened in the company’s history as a publicly held corporation. It reported an EBITDA of $516,000 for the fourth quarter ended May 3 compared to an EBITDA of ($4.5 million) for the previous quarter and ($1.3 million) for the fourth quarter last year. Only sketchy numbers were released then, however, with the company explaining there was some sort of analysis underway of its accounting for goodwill.

Nevertheless, delisting is almost inevitable for the company. In November 2007 the company was notified that it would be delisted by the NASDAQ exchange because its stock price had fallen below the $1 a share minimum. The company got an automatic extension to Nov. 17th., but with the stock trading around 16 cents a share for the last few months, Workstream will be dropped by NASDAQ. That will make it difficult for its shareholders to sell their stock. When they do, generally through private transactions, fees will be higher than when the shares are traded through an exchange.

Earlier this year, Workstream was courted by payroll processor Empagio, which made a bid to acquire the company. Though unsolicted, Workstream and its board endorsed the merger, which would have created a new company with Workstream shareholders owning 25 percent. The deal eventually fell through.

Besides its software business, concentrated in on-demand compensation, performance and talent management in its TalentCenter 7.0 released last year, Workstream also owns 6FigureJobs.com and Allen and Associates, a candidate focused career management firm.