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Financially battered Workstream has changed leadership again, bringing back its co-founder and board chairman Michael Mullarkey as chief executive officer. He replaces Steve Purello, whose resignation was announced this morning. keep reading…

Aided by a $32 million income tax adjustment, Monster Worldwide reported it earned $33 million or 27 cents a share. Without the tax benefit Monster earned 1 cent a share, beating the Street’s guess the company would just break even.

Revenue, however, was $215 million, $8 million below what analysts expected. Sales in North America continued their recession-fueled decline, dropping 39 percent from the same quarter a year ago, and down from the $102 million in Q2 of this year. International sales were off 41 percent from the prior year, but off only 4.4 percent from the $89 million posted in Q2. An unfavorable exchange rate took a $7.4 million bite. keep reading…

In a joint venture with the manager of the .jobs domain, DirectEmployers has launched the first of what might become tens of thousands of new geographically and occupationally focused job boards all sharing a .jobs extension.

The new sites, identical in design and structure, made their appearance earlier this month. Among them are Atlanta.jobs, Boston.jobs, Mexico.jobs, and India.jobs.

“We just started pushing them out,” says Chad Sowash, VP of business development for DirectEmployers, a non-profit HR consortium, that has recruiting as its focus. Among its services is the Job Central job board, to which members can post jobs without additional fee.

“It’s a new playing field,” Sowash adds. “What this is going to do is allow thousands more, perhaps tens of thousands more” sites where job seekers can look for jobs. keep reading…

The British newspaper whose job board was hacked over the weekend is advising the half-million users whose information may have been accessed to buy identity insurance and notify credit reporting agencies.

An indignant Twitter post by one of those whose account with The Guardian jobs site was compromised says she received an email from the newspaper advising her of the illegal access and suggesting she subscribe to an identity protection service.

“got the guardian hack email – they suggest I buy identity fraud protection services. Hang on, who let people steal my information?” reads the tweet by Joelle Nebbe-Mornod, a technology consultant and former CTO now in the U.K.

The site itself gives no hint of the hack, until you scroll almost to the bottom of the home page where, under a heading of Workplace News, there is a short item headlined: Guardian jobs site – Security Breach. It links to a page of more detailed information. keep reading…

Two new tools have debuted recently. One will help with your sourcing research and the other promotes the passive candidate who may be overlooked by tech recruiters seeking fresh candidates.

Dice.com, the IT job board, introduced a new search result report that allows recruiters to toggle between the results that meet their criteria and other candidates who also match the criteria, but who haven’t been active on the site for a year.

Tom Silver, senior VP North America of parent company Dice Holdings, said the thought of offering additional results came about because more than half the searches on Dice are for candidates who have been active in the last 90 days. In their quest for fresh job seekers, recruiters were missing candidates with equally good skills.

“So,” says Silver, “We wanted to make it easier to see older candidates. We’re just trying to prompt recruiters to look at the entire database.”

keep reading…

Shares of Dice Holdings, owner of IT job board Dice.com, closed up almost 5 percent today, following news this morning that the company had a better quarter than Wall Street expected. keep reading…

RiseSmart, a self-described disruptor of the “the $3 billion-plus corporate outplacement market,” announced this morning that it got a $4.6 million infusion of venture capital.

Norwest Venture Partners, a $3 million participant in an earlier round of financing, put in $1.8 million. The balance of $2.8 million came from new investor Storm Ventures.

Originally based in Dallas and now in Silicon Valley, RiseSmart cleverly developed a technology approach to classic outplacement, focusing on providing job leads, resume editing, and networking suggestions. Its Job Search Concierge uses offshore researchers to scour online sources for job leads matching candidate interests. Instead of searching, candidates spend their time contacting companies and networking.

The Job Search Concierge is a consumer-focused service which individuals in the $100k salary category can subscribe to for $43.95 a month. The service has been likened to The Ladders, with the searching and filtering done by others rather than the job seeker. keep reading…

Monster’s stock price is settling down today after a big bounce Thursday that came on news the company had been upgraded by an analyst for J.P. Morgan.

“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.) keep reading…

While you were at HR Tech, or spending your day sourcing a needle in the haystack or sifting through the 265 resumes that came in for that junior accountant opening, news was happening elsewhere in the recruitment world.

The headlines: The Human Capital Institute loses its long-time director; Yahoo cuts a deal with CareerBuilder in the UK and Ireland, and; another startup stumbles.

Now, the details: keep reading…

Remember Jobster? Of course you do. How could any recruiter forget the soap opera story of this company founded by a former White House staffer who, as CEO, burned through $46 million before he departed at the end of 2007?

Besides spending like it was 1999, Jobster changed, enhanced, modified, enlarged, annexed — choose your favorite adjective — business models often enough that the enterprise resembled Mrs. Winchester’s house. All of this playing out quite publicly via leaks, corporate PR, and the CEO’s own (defunct) blog.

In fairness to the now departed Jason Goldberg, he was a visionary. When Jobster launched in 2004 it tapped into the then-unnamed and not even  recognized phenom we now all know as social recruiting. To briefly, and only inadequately, explain it, Jobster was a corporate recruiter’s tool to tap the connections of the company’s employees; a digital employee referral program.

Over the next three-plus years Goldberg made well-timed investments, buying a job search engine called WorkZoo, a job tagging service called Jobby, and the blog Recruiting.com. Jobster would eventually relaunch as a career networking site, loosely tying in the referral program of its youth and bits and pieces of the acquisitions. Much of the best parts, however, languished, suggesting the visionary lacked a vision. keep reading…

There’s Monster news today with the  international job board lauded in a Barron’s report for its aggressive cost-cutting and wise investments. The report, followed by an upgrade by UBS, helped boost shares of the publicly traded company to a year high of $18.57.

The closing price is a bit more than triple the $5.95 low for the year Monster hit on March 10.

The bullish article, “Turning Into A Monster Of A Competitor,” talks about Monster’s international reach, noting it accounts for 45 percent of the company’s revenue. The article approvingly cites the acquisition of China.HR and Trovix as well as the makeover of its website, with its new emphasis on tools for the passive job seeker.

These steps, plus a reorganization of its sales force and the improving global economy, says Barron’s, makes Monster “a good long-term bet.”

As if to second that recommendation, UBS Investment Research upgraded Monster Monday to “Buy” from “Neutral” while raising the price target to $27 from $15. It’s the second “Buy” recommendation in a month for Monster. The first was from Oscar Gruss & Son.

Meanwhile, Monster has launched a new round of humorous commercials for the career tools it introduced earlier this year. keep reading…

There’s been an explosion of ‘free’ out there — free social media, free long distance, and yes, free job boards. What is a free job board? For most recruiters and employers, it’s a place where you can post jobs (and sometimes search resumes) without paying a dime. Ever.

How can a free job board survive? Some make money from advertising (think Google AdWords). Some charge the job seekers for access. And many boards, I suspect, simply don’t make money.

So what gives?

keep reading…

How much would you pay for HotJobs? How does $1,396,709,461 sound?

That’s a princely sum for the site considering competitor Monster.com is worth a paltry $7,188,176 while CareerBuilder.com, the No. 1 U.S. job board by traffic and revenue is valued at $10,090,838.

This bit of silliness comes from Valuate My Site, which purports to estimate the value of a website based on traffic, links, and some sort of secret sauce. Here’s how the site says it does its work: keep reading…

Former Monster president and COO James Treacy was sentenced Wednesday to two years in federal prison on his conviction in May of stock options fraud.

In addition, Treacy was ordered to pay $6.3 million in fines and another $6.3 million in restitution.

Treacy is the only former Monster executive to receive prison time in connection with a stock options backdating scheme that netted the recipients – including Treacy – millions. Andrew McKelvey, who founded TMP Worldwide, which owned Monster, and was the company’s CEO and chairman, was accused of stock fraud, but because of his terminal pancreatic cancer, was allowed to defer his prosecution after he admitted his guilt in court. McKelvey died in November 2008. keep reading…

In no particular order, here are some bits and bytes of recruiting news that made it to our inbox this week.

First, the headlines:

• A publicist for business law firm Proskauer Rose LLP reminds us that Sept. 8th is the deadline for federal contractors to sign up and use E-Verify, if they want to continue being federal contractors;
• CareerBuilder lit a match to BrightFuse, the business community site it launched 18 months ago, issuing a press release officially announcing it. At the same time, CareerBuilder released a survey saying 45 percent of employers have used social networking sites to research job candidates.
• Australia’s leading high-salary job board — www.sixfigures.com.au — introduces a new look and expanded career content today for its dues paying, high earning members. It’s also putting more news and content on the outside of the login wall. keep reading…

There are a raft of new find-a-job and career sites that have come to our attention in the last few weeks. There are the “me toos”: retooled versions of existing sites that may have a nice touch here or there, but overall do little except to add to the online recruitment clutter.

Then there are sites like UpMo.com that actually try to help a job seeker understand that a job is not a career. The subscription-based service launched earlier this year, but just this week added a job search engine that promises to filter the duff for its members. ResumeFit.com, meanwhile, serves the recruiter by incorporating a candidate assessment right into the resume. As a company partner told us, “this is great for triaging candidates on the front end.” keep reading…

If there was any doubt, the announcement today by Simply Hired that it has attracted an additional $4.6 million in venture capital during one of the leanest economies in decades is testament to the potency of the job search engines. keep reading…

A Los Angeles radio station is offering free air time to job seekers who get 30 seconds for their elevator pitch and a link to their resume online.

Each of five different “radio resumes,” as they’re called, airs on KHHT-FM, a Clear Channel property that is among the top stations in LA. The resumes rotate through the 63 weekly spots covering all day parts, including the pricey and desirable drive times in the morning and evening.

Clear Channel came up with the idea of offering air time to help job seekers. So far, only a few of the company’s 850 stations stations are trying it. The LA station began the promotion in early July. keep reading…

Monster lost money in the 2nd quarter of the year, but by so small an amount it was mostly ignored by after hours traders, who bid up shares by 2 cents following a guardedly optimistic conference call with analysts.

Reporting Monster lost $1.4 million loss on $223 million in revenue, CEO Sal Iannuzzi said he was nonetheless “cautiously optimistic” about the job market. While he discounted any notion of a quick recovery, he told analysts on the financial call, “We are seeing encouraging signs of stabilization.”

Speaking of the company’s customers, he said they seem to be turning away from further job cuts and there’s even some signs of increased recruiting activity. keep reading…

It could be an uncomfortable 60 minutes tomorrow for Monster’s CEO when he presents the company’s 2nd quarter numbers during a conference call with Wall Street analysts.

Yahoo Finance says analysts are expecting Monster to earn a penny a share on revenues of about $225 million. Last year for the same quarter, the company had sales of $354.3 million. In the first quarter of this year, Monster had a loss.

I have no particular insight on what the revenue and expense numbers will be. Instead, I’m looking at traffic numbers released by comScore the other day that show Monster’s job audience grew 6 percent in the 12 months since June 2008. Meanwhile, the number of Americans visiting all career services and development sites grew 10 percent.

That means Monster captured only 60 percent of the category’s growth. CareerBuilder, the leading job board by traffic and North American revenue, saw its traffic decline by 1 percent. Among the big three general job boards in the U.S., only Yahoo’s HotJobs bested the category growth, growing at a brisk 23 percent.

However, the clear winner among the top 10 most trafficked sites is Indeed.com, which grew at a blistering 59 percent. The job search engine now ranks fourth among the most trafficked job sites, according to comScore.

At the other end, and surprisingly still among the top 10 sites, is Brassring.com. Traffic there dropped 11 percent over the year, a not-surprising turn considering the site became a job board for Kenexa since its acquisition by the HR software firm at the end of 2006. What is surprising is that the site still gets 2 million unique visitors a month.

Monster’s traffic growth is particularly troubling for the company, which relaunched the site in January with a big marketing push, including, in February, its first Super Bowl commercials since 2004. Much of Monster’s first quarter loss — some $27 million — was attributed to the big marketing push.

CEO Sal Iannuzzi told analysts when the 1st quarter numbers were released that the millions spent on marketing were already showing results. “We are gaining market share,” Iannuzzi declared. “We are declining less than the competition.” keep reading…