ERE.net

As we mentioned, Monster moved to the New York Stock Exchange today. A couple of videos from today feature Monster’s CEO Salvatore Iannuzzi. In one video, on CNBC, he says, “When everyone says things are bad, it must mean it’s pretty much the time when things will start to turn around. So I’m more optimistic than negative.”

Similarly, in a Bloomberg video, embedded below, he notes that “the slowdown has been going on for nine months or longer … and I’d like to think we’re somewhere in the middle” of it, headed toward the end.

keep reading…

Third quarter financial reports are coming in for the publicly held recruiting industry vendors and the results show that the world economic condition is beginning to have an effect.

HR technology providers Taleo (profile; site), Kenexa (profile; site) and SuccessFactors (profile; site), all of whom reported this week, mostly beat or matched Wall Street’s expectations for the quarter. Only Kenexa took a hit when it reported earnings that were lower than the same quarter in 2007.

Both Kenexa and Taleo said they expected the fourth quarter to be tougher and issued financial projections showing a reduction in earnings per share from the third quarter, which ended Sept. 30.

Taleo lost $8.2 million for the third quarter, compared to net income of $2.2 million for the same period last year. The company said this was “primarily from restructuring charges and amortization expense related to the acquisition of Vurv.” Kenexa meanwhile earned $5.4 million and expects to earn between $6.3 million and $7 million for the fourth quarter. That doesn’t take into account a hit of $2 million to $2.5 million. That’s what the company expects it will cost to reduce its workforce by a planned 12 percent.

Those numbers are below what Wall Street was expecting, sinking Kenexa’s stock price to a 52-week low.

SuccessFactors, which has been losing ever-increasing amounts since 2004, was the only one of the three companies to say it expected improvement in the fourth quarter. The company expects revenue for the quarter to be in the $31.0 million to $31.5 million range. For the year, it raised its earlier projection and now says the company will bring in between $109.9 million to $110.4 million. Even with the improving numbers SuccessFactors will show a loss for the year op $1.32 to $1.34 per share.

keep reading…

1.10.09. You couldn’t walk the floor of the Expo without seeing someone wearing the rectangular Monster button showing that date. They were part of the buzz the company is creating in advance of the launch of what it’s telling people is a new improved user experience.

Taking to heart the message CEO Sal Iannuzzi has been touting that users are as important as recruiters, the company is set to roll out a new look and new features on January 10th. Monster was previewing some of what’s coming at its well-trafficked booth, and what we saw suggested the kind of career and succession planning tools found in higher-end talent management systems.

“It’s a seeker-centric appoach,” Monster’s VP of Client Adoption, Eric Winegardner, told us during a tour of the features.  There were no live demos because Monster’s development teams are still making tweaks.

But the slides showed tools that should appeal to passive candidates, as well as the traditional active seeker.

keep reading…

Next week, four company founders will take the platform at ERE’s second Startup Forum to tell the world about their better mousetrap. They’ll follow in the footsteps of four other startups that introduced themselves at the Spring Expo in San Diego, and who, today, are just emerging from beta or, in one case, not yet there, or about to launch a new version, but in every case still still here and hopeful.

At ERE’s Fall Expo in Hollywood Beach, Florida, recruiters will meet the newest businesses to launch. Two of the founders will talk about how their respective companies are harnessing the power of video to help recruiters make better hiring choices and save the environment while also saving the hiring company a few dollars.

keep reading…

Recruitment stocks were no exception to the hammering stocks took today as investors worldwide drove down markets, sending a message to finance leaders that they were unimpressed with Friday’s U.S. bank bailout.

A spotcheck of several publicly traded HR vendors showed most of them were off by at least as much as the overall markets, all of which closed down. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 370 points, a 3.58 percent drop that was actually considerably improved from the 800 points the Dow was down at one point Monday. The NASDAQ was off 84 points for a 4.34 percent drop.

In the last 90 minutes of trading the New York Stock Exchange saw a sharp upturn that recouped some 400 points. The rising tide lifted most boats, including the shares of publicly traded HR recruitment, staffing, and tech stocks. Even so, among the companies we checked, only Monster (profile; site) was up on the day, closing at $14.81, up 6 percent. Dice Holdings (profile; site), like Monster a job board, was down 7 percent to close at $6.05 a share. Workstream (profile; site), which owns 6FigureJobs.com, closed at 7 cents a share, a 12.51 percent plunge for the troubled company.

Among the HR tech vendors, Taleo (profile; site) was down 9.77 percent to $16.07, while competitor Kenexa (profile; site) closed at $12.94 for a 5.75 percent drop.

Some of the staffing companies performed better, a relative term considering the size of the market drop. Manpower, for instance, was down $1 to close at $36.92, a drop of 2.64 percent. Kelly was off 3.38 percent, down 60 cents to $17.13 a share.

There may yet be more bad news. In after hours trading prices began declining again.

This year in the recruiting industry there has been a lot of talk about how companies are tapping into Web 2.0 technologies to enhance their recruiting. But how is the candidate community also using these technologies for their own purposes, and what impact is it having on our recruiting strategies?

keep reading…

Yahoo asks itself four questions when sourcing candidates of different generations.

• Where are they?
• How do they want to receive information?
• What makes them respond and engage?
• What’s the same and what’s different about the generations?

Carol Mahoney, Yahoo’s VP of talent acquisition, talked about the questions today at an HCI event. For Gen-Xers, Yahoo is focusing more on career sites as well as recruiting events. For younger applicants, the emphasis is on social networking (Twitter is big among Yahoo hiring managers) and a long courting process. “They do not want to just drop in and get their info and go,” she says, of millennials. They want to be courted. It’s more than information. It’s a relationship.”

This courting includes friends and family. In India, Yahoo laid off what Mahoney says was a very small number of people, and many were placed in other roles. But it was “such a huge deal” in India that Yahoo had to explain the layoff to families of wary job candidates.

With generational differences in mind, Yahoo has redone its career site. On the upper left, for example, the quick job search is aimed at Gen X-ers who don’t want to beat around the social-networking bush. In contrast with most career sites, which could put a wild boar to sleep — Yahoo has done it right, actually using the career home page to excite people about working at the company. (Its older versions, Mahoney, who arrived at Yahoo five years ago says, were “appalling.”) You leave the site with the impression that a Yahoo job involves doing something important, something that has an effect on people.

There’s more on generational recruiting from this webinar:

Little more than a year after introducing video resumes, CareerBuilder has discontinued the service. It was quietly taken offline in June.

The company won’t say how many jobseekers posted videos, but it seems the participation rate wasn’t high enough to warrant CareerBuilder’s effort. Job board spokesperson Jennifer Grasz told us, “We’re always testing the market with new tools and services to enhance the user experience. If the response rates are not there, we’ll reevaluate whether the market is ready and focus energies on other areas to aid in the job search and recruitment process.”

CareerBuilder’s main resume pages are still online, though no longer linked from the site. However, Grasz said the jobseeker videos have been removed. Jobseekers can always post their video to a service like You Tube and include a link in the resume or cover letter they have on CareerBuilder. When an employer downloads the resume, the link becomes hot.

keep reading…

You’ve done your homework and sold the boss on getting a company video made. In fact, you did such a good job the CEO is hinting around about having a starring role, and since it was your idea, you’re in charge of the project.

Now what do you do?

keep reading…

Even the military is not immune from the consolidation of job boards. Today, RecruitMilitary, LLC announced it bought competitor Landmark Destiny Group for an undisclosed amount.

A subsidiary of Virginian-Pilot Media Companies, a Norfolk, Virginia newspaper company, Landmark Destiny operates a job board for U.S. military personnel transitioning to the private sector and recently separated veterans. It will be merged into RecruitMilitary.com, a similar military-focused site.

Both LDG and RecruitMilitary also publish employment newspapers, distributing them on U.S. bases around the world. RecruitMilitary and LDG send their magazines to military bases for free distribution to transitioning personnel. RecruitMilitary publishes Incoming!, a six-page quarterly, and ships more than 50,000 copies to over 230 bases. LDG publishes Search & Employ, a 28-page bimonthly, and ships some15,000 copies to more than 75 bases.

Together the two sites have over 500,000 registered users. It’s not clear how many overlap or what percentage have completed resumes. Still, RecruitMilitary president Drew Myers said in the press release announcing the deal that the acquisition of LDG “greatly strengthens our company. We jump to first place in military-to-civilian job boards, matching our ranking in military-to-civilian career fairs. And the purchase gives us a highly competitive position in publishing.”

We couldn’t tell what ranking he meant. Even ignoring overlap, both sites together don’t come close to the traffic of Monster’s Military.com. Traffic metrics sites Compete.com and Alexa.com show Military.com far ahead in rank and visitors.

RecruitMilitary however, has been aggressively promoting its military career fairs. So far this year it has held 64 compared to 13 in all of 2006, its first year producing the fairs. The company produces career fairs in cooperation with HireVetsFirst, a part of the United States Department of Labor; The American Legion; and the Military Spouse Corporate Career Network.

RecruitMilitary also provides search services to companies looking for workers with military backgrounds.

If you’re into brown, blue and green you ought to go be a doctor or a forest ranger. See how easy picking a career is when you know your colors?

Like white? Then interior decorating is for you. (Too easy. Everyone knows white goes with everything.)

How about if your favorite colors happen to be black and red and orange? Maybe you just really like Halloween. Otherwise, you are “The Evaluator,” says a press release from CareerBuilder (profile; site), which just added a color wheel (parked on the old CareerPath.com website) to help jobseekers better assess their personality.

Before we get scolded for making light of a serious assessment tool let us note that the Color Career Counselor has been scientifically vetted with the results published in the North American Journal of Psychology. You can read the paper here, but fair warning: it’s full of the kind of statistical analysis we avoided in college.

keep reading…

Back in 2006 I wrote an article discussing the integration of assessments into job boards. It was an example of the continued movement toward the inclusion of assessments into the mainstream of recruiting and hiring products and systems.

In this article, I praised the progress being made in understanding the value of quality assessment products in the modern hiring process.

I strongly believe that the words I wrote in 2006 are as relevant today as they ever were; in fact, they are more relevant now than ever. The days of the big job boards and their keyword matching strategies are numbered.

keep reading…

From the online-recruiting grapevine:

–(You heard it here first): NewmediaHire is going live with a redesign of its site today. If it looks familiar, it’s because it’s based on a platform called “Ning,” popular for building websites. The video-blog-discussion-heavy site is aimed at creating a sense of community — more than just job-hunting — and is aimed at an international audience (the site has a corresponding LinkedIn group and perhaps half of that group is based in the UK, Australia, Canada, Africa, South America, and elsewhere outside of the U.S.) An Indian company helped NewmediaHire build the new site.

–A new site, moneybackjobs.com, is offering employees a “5% to 7.5% bonus for accepting a new job that’s posted on our website.” Employers pay $50 to post, and 10-12% for each candidate they hire. There are incentives for employees to be exclusive, and to take their resumes off of other sites (”trust us, we have ways of finding out,” the company says) as well as big incentives for employers to only post on moneybackjobs. Smart.

–From ThinkPanmure’s Nate Swanson: “We are hearing that several large BrassRing customers are unlikely to renew their contracts when they expire late this year or early next year, but have yet to make a decision as to whether to use their existing ERP vendor or that of a best-of-breed vendor.”

Quality of Hire Measurement
Reporting and metrics is always a hot topic for recruiting, but so few companies do it right. In my research over the years, most companies measure time-to-hire and cost-per-hire but ignore quality-of-hire. Lisa Shapiro Mendell is an exception. She is interested in adding this key performance indicator to her recruitment metric dashboard and wants to know what other companies have done the same.

Ravi Subramanian recommends hiring manager surveys and assessments. Michael Chernesky asks a very relevant question…who is accountable? Bonita Martin says recruiters and Steven Yeong says hiring managers. Joshua Letourneau offered some great insight based on his experiences. While many of his clients do measure quality of hire, their process often fails because of one of three problems. They don’t measure quality of hire beyond the first day; the hiring manager survey turns into a game since “recruiters are incentivized to make the survey look good”; or feuds spark between HR and the hiring manager. Josh’s solution to overcome these challenges lies in performance assessments that measure expected versus actual performance. Anyone out there having great success measuring QOH? Share your story; we would love to hear it.

Wednesday’s Question of the Day
Anna Patterson’s latest Internet search engine, Cuil, is backed by $33 million in venture capital and expected to outshine Google. I read negative reviews of Cuil and wanted to know if anyone is using it and seeing results. Glenn Gutmacher, Sourcer extraordinaire, is not a fan…it is slow and produces poor quality results. Without launching an alpha or beta version, Glenn believes they “set high expectations and they ‘way’ underdelivered.” T Tallis agrees. Amanda Blazo is more optimistic. She acknowledges Cuil’s shortcomings but encourages us to give it time.

Phone Screening Candidates
Diane Propsner wonders: before a third-party recruiter sends a resume to a corporate recruiter, How much time should he or she spend on phone screening and what questions should be asked? She gave us an overview of her process and the questions included. Andrew Stone agrees with Diane that 10-15 minutes is not enough time for building a relationship with a candidate. Tania Murray recommends “tailoring your cover sheet to your client to focus on just what they (candidate) told you is important to them.” According to Tania, it is critical to know the candidates goals and motivations. Joy Naui offers a different approach by suggesting that third-party recruiters first contact the hiring manager. The phone screening should include key points based on that conversation. Questions should include more than technical skill questions. If a candidate recognizes that you are genuine about finding them the right job, they will agree to answer more questions.

Thursday’s Question of the Week
After hearing Dr. Wendell Williams’ Selection and Assessment webinar on July 23, an attendee wanted to know if behavioral or situational screening questions are better and why. I thought I would ask you. Joe Payne is in favor of behavioral questions since they are a good indicator of past actions and can allow interviewers to dig deeper. Matt Cooper brings up an interesting point that most candidates are too prepared for behavioral questions with the amount of information available on the Internet including examples and preparation tools. Interviewers need to be creative and get more specific. KT Connor agrees with Matt and also cautions against self-reporting assessments instead recommending objective decision tools.

Are Job Boards Becoming Obsolete?
This is a hot topic of debate, check it out!

Big news from Monster (profile; site) today. It bought jobmatcher Trovix (profile; site) for $72.5 million; settled that class action shareholder lawsuit over the stock options backdating for $25 million, and managed to beat Wall Street’s expectations for its 2nd quarter financial performance, earning 40 cents a share excluding one-time expenses. The Street consensus was the company would earn 37 cents a share.

Total revenue grew 9% to $354 million, from $324 million in the comparable quarter of 2007, boosted by a favorable exchange rate. Even without the benefit of the exchange rate Monster grew revenue by 4 percent. Wall Street analysts had estimated revenues would come in at $361 million.

International sales fueled the company’s growth during the quarter, as it has for the past year. While revenue from North American operations fell by $10 million during the quarter to $164 million. But sales elsewhere in the world jumped 34 percent (23 percent when you exclude the effect of currency exchange rates). International sales now account for 44 percent of company revenue.

keep reading…

With the Carl Icahn proxy fight averted and the Microsoft buyout dead (today, but check back tomorrow), Yahoo! can resume the reorganization it announced last month. It should be easier than most of the previous reorganizations the company went through as this time several top corporate positions are vacant.

(Watch out, though, for the fireworks expected at Friday’s shareholder meeting when almost anything may happen.)

For the past several months, senior managers and top-level executives have been leaving the company in numbers large enough to attract attention from bloggers and tech writers. In June TechCrunch published a list of 114 director and VP level personnel who left Yahoo!, many in 2008. Not long after the site published another story saying Yahoo! could see another 100 senior people leave in three weeks, after options vest worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

keep reading…

There’s a new recruitment site where a candidate doesn’t need a resume, doesn’t need to say who they are, doesn’t even have to go looking for the job.

Some companies have made hires that way for years. It’s just that those “special” candidates are the boss’s relatives. For the rest of the world, the new site is an experiment in anonymous sourcing. It’s called Scopings and it sort of reminds us of those old computer dating programs. Candidates put in a little bit of information about themselves; employers put in a little more information.

The computer compares the candidates to the job description and suggests possible matches. Then the courting begins.

Only when both of you show enough signs of interest is the cloak of anonymity dropped. keep reading…

Below:

• Monday’s Question of the Day
• Building an ATS From Scratch
• Search Engine Marketing
• Sendouts vs. PCRecruiter
• Candidates Going Out of Their State for an Interview

keep reading…

From a report today by Nate Swanson, who analyzes HR/recruiting stocks for ThinkPanmure:

“We believe that companies are beginning to realize that the value proposition of the large, generic job boards (Monster/CareerBuilder/HotJobs) is waning, at best, as they increasingly provide a large volume of low-quality candidates. With recruiter in-boxes being filled with the equivalent of “resume-spam,” these large job boards are becoming less effective and eliminate many of the efficiencies of the online model. We believe that growth in these generic job boards is slowing, with online postings moving to niche job boards that are geographically or vertically focused (StepStone and Dice), or to sites that offer a pay-for-performance or “all-you-can-eat” pricing model (SnagAJob).

Second, we see the recruiting process becoming more complex and believe that recruiters will be spending an increasing amount of time on “employer-branding” initiatives, which target passive candidates and employee referrals. Here, companies will look to leverage their existing employees or alumni groups as a valuable source of new candidates. In fact, studies show employee referrals to be one of the largest and most cost-effective sources of new hires. Popular social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook bring the power of an extended network to the recruiting process, although it’s still very early and a highly manual process. We think that social networking sites are becoming more and more like job boards. In fact, one HR manager to whom we recently spoke views the content on these sites as more valuable than those in a resume, as the content is public and therefore verifiable, and more current than the profiles listed on a job board, which could be more than a year old.”

If video resumes are the future of recruiting, then FutureResume.com is a peek at what’s to come. The brand new site showcases candidate videos that are linked to digital resumes, cover letters and references packaged together with a rudimentary skills and background profile to make candidates searchable.

The slickly designed site launched a few weeks ago with a handful of employers. More are to be added when the site officially opens up to employers, who, like the jobseekers, can also post videos to supplement traditional job postings.

There’s nothing especially remarkable about FutureResume. CareerBuilder has been offering video resumes for more than a year. FutureResume takes it a further step, making the video the main attraction, rather than an additional element. Even though jobseekers can post a “paper” resume and skip the video, they’ll be discouraged by the $14.95 monthly fee FutureResume will begin to charge next year.

keep reading…