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UPDATE FROM 9:28 A.M. EASTERN ON MONDAY…USA Today has the results of its Ad Panel up online. Monster’s fiddling beaver ad ranked #10. CareerBuilder’s casual Fridays commercial was 51 out of 63 ranked ads. The first place winner was the Snickers ad featuring Betty White.

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Peyton Manning? Who dat? Who DAT! The Who Dat Nation has spoken. The Saints won the Super Bowl. Decisively, without a doubt, without a question, and in a game that was one of the rare ones that got better and better after every play.

But you didn’t come to ERE to read about the game. You already know the Saints whipped the Colts 31 to 17.

Now comes the other important scores: Whose commercials made it into the top best. For the details on each of the commercials that ran, go to USA Today and its widely watched Ad Meter. All the commercials are available there.

But in the contest between CareerBuilder and Monster for the best job board ad, the highly populist, if less-well-known ERE poll has Monster in the lead by a touchdown. The fiddling beaver commercial had 40 percent of the vote to 30 percent for CareerBuilder’s casual Friday ad. keep reading…

CareerBuilder released its North American revenue numbers today, which show that while it has been hurt by the recession, it’s still ahead of its closest competitor.

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

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

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

Monster is getting beat up on Wall Street today. The stock opened down and went lower, and is off 16 percent right now, a clear signal that the markets don’t like what the company announced yesterday.

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

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

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

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

The statement’s four points are: keep reading…

Monster’s acquisition of HotJobs is a major coup for the recruitment firm, catapulting it into the lead in traffic, and boosting its global growth prospects, while also helping it to gain greater entree to the small employers that to this day still turn to newspapers for recruitment.

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

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

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

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

Monster is buying HotJobs. The news of the $225 million acquisition from Yahoo! was announced just moments ago in New York.

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

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

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

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

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

US.Jobs site with social elements displayed

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

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

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

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

Monster ad from Wired

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

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

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

A group of recruitment and HR leaders and professionals has been invited to a meeting in Indianapolis to discuss the Direct Employers plan to build tens of thousands, maybe even a million, of new job boards using the .jobs domain.

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

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

Bill Warren

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

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

Job posting distributor eQuest says CareerBuilder and Monster are still the most requested sites for advertising openings, though Craisglist and the free job boards were among the fastest-growing posting destinations.

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

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

Santa came a day early for Jobfox. The job matching service got a $2 million   infusion the day before Christmas. It’s debt funding, which means what it sounds like: it’s a loan.

keep reading…

As we count down the final hours of 2009 — an “Amen” seems in order here — there are a few fun, and even one or two useful pieces of recruitalia that have turned up to help us close out the year.

The first reminds me of that expression about drinking your own Kool-Aid. It’s a video starring Human Factor International’s Managing Director Jeffrey Jones. Human Factor International is an executive coaching and transcultural leadership training firm. The company says its process “is designed to help executives close the gap between where they are and where they want to be in their personal and professional lives.”

Now watch the video and you’ll see why I extracted that phrase from the company website, though I don’t believe HFI meant to imply the process accelerates at 32 ft/sec squared. keep reading…

Ronald J. Kramer, an almost 10-year member of Monster’s board of directors, resigned Sunday.

The only mention of his departure came in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The 8-K report (a reference to the SEC provision requiring publicly held companies to report unscheduled material events and changes) says Kramer’s resignation was effective immediately and “did not involved any disagreement on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies or practices.”

Kramer is CEO and board vice chairman of Griffon Corp., a $1.2 billion building products and advanced telephonics manufacturing company. Before taking that job in 2008, Kramer had been president and a director of casino owner and operator Wynn Resorts.

According to Forbes.com, Kramer earned $301,701 in cash and stock from Monster in 2008.

Neither Kramer nor a Monster spokesman could be reached.

The technology insider website TechCrunch says Yahoo has launched a curious recruitment advertising program that involves buying keywords against the names of former employees.

Just before Christmas, TechCrunch reported that Delicious founder and former Yahoo executive Joshua Schachter discovered that searching on his name on Google brought up a recruitment ad for Yahoo. He announced in a tweet saying “yahoo’s running recruiting ads against my name. classy.”

Schachter joined Yahoo when it bought Delicious in 2005. He left three years later, part of a mass exodus of top talent that left the company reeling .

Turns out that Schachter isn’t the only ex-Yahooer to find ads popping up on their Google search results pages.  TechCrunch said PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf is among the keyworded. keep reading…

Today brings news of the U.S. Army’s $38 million recruiting video games, a recruiting marketing video that is surprisingly fresh and entertaining and should be required watching for anyone considering an HR career as a recruiter, and a change at Vault.

America’s Army

When you’re recruiting for an organization where the expression “taking potshots” is no mere idiom, you have to be innovative in your approach, not to mention cutting edge to reach the 17-25 year olds who are your (pardon the expression) target. keep reading…

Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi, who was in a breakout session at the recent White House jobs summit, is telling the Administration that employers should get help to mitigate the expense of bringing on a new employee.

While such help could vary, Iannuzzi gives the example of a job candidate currently getting $15,000 annually in unemployment benefits. If the government instead contributed that $15,000 to an employer who could provide, say, a $50,000-a-year job, it would, he says, reduce the cost and risk for employers. “Onboarding is very expensive, and employees come with heavy costs,” he says. “No one wants to hire and let people go. That’s one of the worst things a company can do from an economic and from a morale standpoint. Grants or tax credits, in some way, shape, or form, mitigage risks to companies for training or onboarding people — government picking up part of the tab of that training.”

The White House divided summit-goers into breakout sessions. Iannuzzi’s track (a bit over an hour, which, ideally, he said, would have been much longer) was mainly about training, education, community colleges, and other hands-on hiring issues. Toward the end of the session, to take one example, the subject of the lack of nursing educators came up.

In addition to Iannuzzi’s suggestion for some sort of onboarding assistance, he also believes that some TARP money should be used to get banks to loan more money, especially to small businesses, with the U.S. government guaranteeing the loans. “An extremely critical thing is to free up credit markets to get them to invest and hire,” he says. “Getting credit out there which has been very hard to come by is very, very critical.”

Iannuzzi is collecting additional economic ideas from Monster employees and will be submitting them to the Administration. keep reading…

Matt Ferguson doesn’t see pay for performance replacing the pay to post model for job boards anytime soon, if ever. Nor have the job aggregators had much of an impact on the business.

Rather, says CareerBuilder’s CEO, it’s social media in all its forms that poses the biggest threat to the job board industry. The “biggest threat and the biggest opportunity,” he said in a conference call Wednesday with a group of analysts and others. keep reading…

I don’t personally know Carmen Hudson. But I’d like to.

I heard her speak at a conference a few years ago and last month caught her presentation at the Social Recruiting Summit. Both times I came away with two thoughts: How am I ever going to remember everything she shared, and what’s the secret to her energy and enthusiasm?

She’s a stylish dresser, says Dave Mendoza, with a special love of shoes and a dream of entering the World Series of Poker. She’s on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and too many more to list. Her blog, PeopleShark, is aptly named for a recruiter who is a  recruiter’s recruiter.

A quick Google search — Sorry. In deference to her that should read “A quick Yahoo search” — and you find page after page of listings for her conference appearances, her interviews, her recruiting advice, and, now, her new gig as founder and CEO of Tweetajob. keep reading…

I ran ads using CareerBuilder.com (June & July 2009) and LinkedIn (October 2009) to see which one produced the most resumes and the resumes with the closest match to the job requirements. The positions I posted on LinkedIn were for a production supervisor and a production control and planning supervisor for Amico’s Bourbonnais, Illinois, plant and a plant manager position in Lafayette, Louisiana. The positions posted on CareerBuilder were for an inside sales rep, sales estimator, and a purchasing manager for Amico’s Bourbonnais, Illinois, plant and for an outside sales rep for the Southeast.

I defined a qualified resume as an individual who met the education and experience requirements of the posting. If a candidate did not have the education or experience required, their resume was not considered qualified. An example might be a resume where the candidate did not have a degree or did not have the minimum experience required in the job posting. As for the cost, to run one ad on LinkedIn cost $195 and the cost of a CareerBuilder ad was $360. Both sites give volume discounts, but for purposes of analysis I used the cost to run just one ad on each site. After screening each resume I determined the number of resumes that were qualified and those that were not and calculated the cost per good resume. keep reading…

There’s a new, free, ATS in town. Launched today, Zoho Recruit is a nicely featured candidate management system that’s suitable for smaller employers and staffing agencies.

It’s built by the same people who launched Zoho People, a low-cost talent management system we wrote about a while back. keep reading…

When Monster bought Trovix in the summer of 2008, the blogosphere popped with wonder at how the job board would make use of Trovix’ job matching technology.

Forrester Research analyst Zach Thomas suggested that, “By making this acquisition, Monster is putting a real emphasis on search and they believe it will help them leap-frog the competition.” Others were less generous.

The answer has been coming ever since Monster began beta testing Power Resume Search several months ago. A few weeks ago, confident that its $100 million investment was the homerun it expected, Monster turned Power Search live, premiering it during an analyst meeting that was also webcast over a marathon five hours or so.

Tuesday, the company demoed the new search for a group of recruitment consultants and bloggers. And the result was no mere home run; think grand slam.

In a word, Monster’s new Power Resume Search is stunning. Stunning in its simplicity. Stunning in its speed. Stunning in its ability to intuit skills from a title, and to rank and rerank the resulting candidates depending on what skills and other qualities you decide important. Stunning in its potential for changing the job board business. keep reading…