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A cryptic post on the Chad suggests DirectEmployers Association may be ending or at least limiting the use of its job listings by other job boards.

Calling the mass distribution of job postings “problematic,” Chad Sowash, VP of business development, says DirectEmployers will be changing its terms of service in a way he expects will not be popular. “Will the answer to this problem be a popular remedy?,” Sowash asks. “Magic 8 Ball says “Outlook, not so good.”

Sowash could not be reached to clarify his blog post. The implication, however, seems to be that DirectEmployers intends to impose some restrictions on the use of its job listings by aggregators.

That could pose an interesting challenge since DirectEmployers lists a number of job boards as partners, including the two biggest aggregators online — Indeed and SimplyHired. Neither of their CEOs could be reached, so we can’t say what they might know about this development or if it will even affect their sites. keep reading…

Dice has bought its way into the health care job market, acquiring AllHealthcarejobs.com for cash and stock worth about $3.76 million.

Announced today, the purchase is the first for the company since 2006 when it acquired eFinancialCareers and JobsintheMoney. Those acquisitions, earlier ones of the security job site ClearanceJobs.com, and Targeted Job Fairs, and now AllHealthcarejobs, are part of Dice Holdings’ long-term diversification strategy.

“Through this acquisition, we continue to execute our strategic plan which includes pursuing growth opportunities in new verticals,” says Scot Melland, chairman, president, and CEO of Dice Holdings, Inc. “Today, Dice gains a successful career site in healthcare, an important industry sector facing long-term shortages of experienced professionals in critical areas.”

Healthcare has been the only sector to see consistent, if slow, growth during the recession that began last year. Adding a niche site with broad reach will help Dice Holdings offset revenue losses in its two biggest job boards, tech site Dice.com, and eFinancialCareers.com. Its powerhouse site, Dice.com, accounts for three-quarters of the company’s revenue and is its biggest traffic driver. eFinancialCareers produces 19 percent of the company’s revenue. keep reading…

Talk about win-win. There’s a job networking event tonight in San Francisco where everyone comes away with at least a new pair of designer jeans.

!IT Jeans is giving away jeans that retail for around $65-$70 a pair to everyone who shows up with proof they’re unemployed and proof they tweeted or posted to Facebook about the event at Lime, a retro-60s restaurant and bar in San Francisco’s hip Castro district.

With the jeans carrying names like “Hottie,” “Industry,” “Dream Diva,” and “Studio,” don’t expect to see any resume-carrying, tie-wearing, business-suited, job-seeking mid-managers at this event. But it also doesn’t look to be just a group of 20- and 30-year-olds surprised to be out of work. Judging by the profiles on the MeetUp site that the Bay Area Job Seekers & Professionals Looking to Network group calls home, there’s a curious mix of talent coming to make contacts and learn how to get into consulting, which is the theme of the evnt.

According to the description, “This event will also focus around the theme of ‘Creating your Consulting Career,’ which simply put, means how to focus your job search efforts on consulting positions instead of permanent positions.”

One of the sponsors of the networking event, the MeetUp group is organized by Mark Thomas, CEO of the equally curious job site, WorkYourCareer. It’s a sort of job board that incorporates classic job postings with an interview auction. Participants apply for a job in the usual way, with one exception: neither application nor resume may carry contact information. If an employer shows interest, the job seeker is invited to bid for an interview. The top bid gets the pick of interview time, with other bidders winning slots until they’re filled.

And yes, the job seeker must pay; most credit cards are accepted.

Thomas, whom we couldn’t reach, also has MoneyBackJobs.com. Pointing back to WorkYourCareer, it seems to have faded with the recession. Its business concept, though, is similar to the many bounty programs that have been tried over the years. Job seekers who accept a job with an employer participating in the MoneyBackJobs program get paid between 4 and 10 percent after 30 days on the job. There are some hoops they have to go through, but the concept is fundamentally bounty.

Tonight’s event, however, is free and open to all job seeking members of the MeetUp group or co-sponsors Pinkslipmixers.com and Slipsquad.com, both of them national networking groups for the laid-off and unemployed. Recruiters from IKON, LOLApps, Jobspring Partners, and Magley & Associates are expected, says Slipsquad.

Just because, Eric Shannon is launching JustJobs today.

It’s a jobs search engine in the vein of an Indeed and SimplyHired, though Shannon will insist, with some justification, that it’s not just another clone. Instead, if you notice similarities to Craigslist, that would please him.

“I’ve been a fan for many years,” says the founder and president of LatPro. “It’s simple.” keep reading…

New logo

Kenexa

Here’s a math teaser for you: i X e = s. Solve for “s.” The answer is success, which is what Kenexa promises from its solutions that multiply the individual by the environment.

Like math or not, you’ll be seeing that formula wherever you see Kenexa since it’s a key ingredient of the HR software company’s rebranding.

In a press release today, the company says, “The formula will be rolled out in the company’s website, collateral, and other materials. Kenexa has also unveiled a modern corporate logo that reinforces its new look and feel, and emphasizes the “X” in the formula. The new logo is reinforced by the tag line: ‘HR Success Multiplied.’”

The old and new Kenexa logos are shown here. And if you want even more, check out the company’s new print ads. You can ignore the pop-up box unless you want to provide your info.

TweetMyJobs

Barely five months old, this Twitter-based job service is hitting on all cylinders. Besides thousands of job channels that tweet and retweet jobs fitting an industry and an geography, TweetMyJobs actually has a modest business model charging as little as 99 cents to send a job posting to specific job channel followers. Recruiters can also get resume tweets if they choose, and anyone can follow the general message group.

Now comes TweetMark, a cool service that lets an employer incorporate a brand with their tweet. For $99 a year — free until the end of June — a company gets a custom Twitter page that incorporates its logo or whatever branding message it chooses. When a job is tweeted to the appropriate job channel, the branding element gets incorporated with the 140-character text and appears on the recipient’s device.

Thought you couldn’t get images with Twitter? So did we. But TweetMyJobs founder Gary Zukowski is clever enough to have figured out a work-around. Here’s his explanation: “The logo is not in the tweet, but since it’ll be tweeted on the custom Job Channel, it will be associated to the tweet by default.”

OneWire

Startups, especially job board and candidate matching startups, don’t usually launch ad campaigns that involve TV and radio. A little SEO, some keyword buys, and maybe a press release or two. But OneWire is making a bigger splash with a commercial that’s supposed to be launching today in New York City and a few other major, east coast financial centers.

OneWire, you may recall from our earlier post, is a job matching service for the finance sector. It works on brute force, getting as granular in its data collection as asking for GPA scores, and details about the specific size and reach of the deals an experienced financier handled or an analyst covered.

OneWire is the product of F.S. von Stade & Associates and its founder and president F. Skiddy von Stade. FSvS is one of the leading search firms for the finance industry.

HighFlyer

Speaking of job boards, this one’s a bona fide job board and the latest of the ever-expanding number of ever-so-hopeful challengers to the Monster and CareerBuilders of the world. Now a new job board launch is hardly big news. In fact, it barely qualifies as news at all. But with a seven-day Bermuda vacation as a come-on to job seekers to register, what’s to lose? Especially since the site practically swears that registration will take under a minute. (The press release announcing the launch actually says it will take less than 30 seconds.)

The bad news for job seekers is that we only found nine jobs on the site.

Buy a Domain

That may be a clue as to the decision behind the UK’s Employ Holdings Ltd. to abandon its plan for a network of U.S. job boards under the “Employ” banner. How do we know the UK job board operator has given up its U.S. hopes? Because it wants us to help it auction off its stock of employ-related domain names. These are such exciting names as EmployCaterers.com, Employlabor.com, and EmployConstruction.com. (Don’t bother clicking into them, they’re all parked addresses.)

Scott Taylor, director of Employ Holdings, emailed us saying, “My company was planning to tackle the USA online Digital Recruitment Marketplace in 2010 to capitalize on the economic recovery and establish ourselves throughout the USA, however as we have various projects underway it has been decided that we are best served concentrating on the UK and European markets at this point in time.”

You can contact him if you’re interested in buying the package — which is the way they’d rather dispose of the 40-odd domain group. If you bid, keep in mind that dot-com addresses for job boards may not be worth a whole lot. Especially once Employ Media starts selling dot-jobs addresses.

Monster’s stock price took a hit this morning after Wachovia Capital Markets downgraded the job board’s securities to an “underperform.”

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.

keep reading…

A new survey says students choose nursing because they want to help people. But the money doesn’t hurt.

The student nurses who frequent CampusRN by a margin of 4 to 1 say  they chose a nursing career for altruistic reasons. Even after a year or two of chemistry, biology, anatomy, and other challenging classes, 98 percent said they would still choose a healthcare career.

At the same time, 54 percent of the students taking the survey said salary is their No. 1 consideration in picking an employer. Close behind are hours and schedule, benefits, and the quality of management and staff, each with 45 percent.

CampusRN, which, as its name suggests is a niche career site for nursing students, conducted the survey in conjunction with Bernard Hodes. As do most of these online surveys, the report cautions not to draw far-reaching conclusions since the 661 respondents came exclusively from the CampusRN site and chose to participate, coaxed by a contest and $5. keep reading…

Just days after its former Chief Operating Officer was convicted of stock fraud, Monster Worldwide has agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle charges brought against the company by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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.”

One of the largest job posting distribution services in the world is now pushing jobs out to Twitter followers.

eQuest has partnered with TweetMyJOBS to use the service to send targeted job postings directly to Twitter followers. eQuest posts something like 200 million jobs a year to more than 20,000 job boards. Now, it will send job notices directly to jobseekers who have opted in to the TweetMyJOBS service.

“eQuest is very impressed with the feature enhancements TweetMyJOBS has provided Twitter users,” said Larry Butti, Job Board Communications Manager at eQuest. keep reading…

Even with all of the buzz, many of us are still trying to figure out how to best use Twitter and all of its potential. One of the companies paving the way for us is JobShouts. keep reading…

Amanda Picton doesn’t like disillusioning nursing students about their first job out of school, “but I want to be honest with them.”

So when she tells the students who call her for career advice to look in Texas and expect $50,000 a year, rather than in Missouri for $100,000, she’s not surprised that some of them tell her she’s wrong. “In nursing school they are mislead to believe they are going to be making $50 an hour and are in demand everywhere,” says Picton. “We do this (recruit and place nurses) everyday. We know what the market is like.”

Now, Picton and her recruiting colleages at InHouse Assist are sharing their knowledge of healthcare careers with anyone for free. keep reading…

Not a lot of surprises in the latest career trends report from Beyond.com. Healthcare and medical jobs are the largest segment represented on the 15,000 site Beyond network. They represent almost a quarter of the jobs posted to the network during the first quarter of the year. Beyond says it’s a top spot the industry sector has held for the last three quarters.

IT jobs accounted for the next largest group, but their 11 percent of the total showed the continued weakness in the sector. The job count was off on a year-over-year basis, decreasing almost 3 points from the 14 percent of jobs in the first quarter of 2008. Even so, they were up slightly from the last quarter.

By far, the largest number of jobs on the Beyond network are essentially entry-level. The report says 59.5 percent of the jobs during the quarter specified less than one year of experience. Another 22.5 percent sought 3-5 years of experience.

That’s bad news for the 68% of network candidates whose resumes show five or more years of experience. The largest increase in candidates was the 2.1 percent jump in older candidates — those with 21 or more years experience. The biggest drop was among candidates with less than a year of experience (1.62 percent).

While the percentages suggest that companies, when they hire, are looking for cheap labor, which typically means entry-level or close to it, the survey results are specific to the Beyond.com network. Big though it is (traffic is among the top 25 employment sites), Beyond.com itself is the only all-purpose site; most of the company’s job boards are regional or industry.

Despite a first quarter loss, Monster executives told analysts Thursday the company is in good shape considering the sour global economy and that it is growing in brand strength and market share.

“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. keep reading…

SimplyHired is cracking down on sites, especially job boards, it believes are gaming the system by posting phony listings, repackaging listings from other sites as their own, or which use so-called black hat tricks to improve the organic positioning of their jobs and thus increase their clickthrough traffic.

“We are trying to make sure the jobs in our index are as high quality as possible,” explains Gautam Godhwani, co-founder and CEO of SimplyHired, a search engine for job listings. “People are actively gaming the system,” he says, telling us that those who refuse to change are being removed from the search engine’s index.

That means that a job which previously would have been found by searching SimplyHired will now no longer appear there. For a small job board which depends on the visibility provided by the search engines, being excluded may not be quite a death sentence, but it can mean a huge drop in traffic, which can translate into an equally big drop in revenue.

The site’s FAQs do spell out the requirements, among them: “Provide unique and relevant content that adds value to the job seeker experience.” Black hat tricks are specifically prohibited: “Do not provide job content loaded with extraneous or artificially modified content (i.e. keyword stuffing, etc).” And the jobseeker who clicks through on a job ad can’t be required to register to see the full ad.

The crackdown on alleged bad practices (which can also include uncorrected, though innocent, technical flaws such as broken links), has gotten mixed up with a new, and surprising business practice requiring new advertisers to commit to a minimum $500 monthly spend. keep reading…

This post has been updated.

Job board insiders are scoffing at rumors that Yahoo is planning on selling HotJobs, saying it is unlikely the company could find a buyer in this market.

“It’s the worst possible moment in history to sell a job board,” says one insider who asked not to be named. “There may be a desire to divest (HotJobs), but who’s got the money to buy?”

The most likely candidates to buy a job board are other job boards. However neither of the two biggest boards — Monster and CareerBuilder — appear in a position to make an acquisition. keep reading…

Workstream made it official last night, filing a third quarter report that showed it earned the first profit since it went public in 1999.

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.) keep reading…

Of the three major job boards, none has embraced Twitter so thoroughly as CareerBuilder. It’s using the short messaging service for everything from responding to customer inquiries to alerting followers to trends and CareerBuilder surveys.

Its latest Twitter product is customized job alerts, which allow Twitter users to get links and short messages to jobs meeting their search specifications. The newly launched beta version at TwitterJobAlerts is more customizable than the city- and industry-specific Twitter feeds CareerBuilder introduced last summer. Those deliver every job in an industry category. The Twitter Job Alerts deliver only the matching jobs.

“It’s our next step,” says communications manager Allison Nawoj. “This is something (jobseekers) can receive on the go.”

If it wasn’t for the peculiar limitation on when messages are delivered (choices are once a day or once a week) Twitter Job Alerts would have it all over the usual emailed job alerts . But once a day? That is so not Twittering. keep reading…

Today we have news of new launches, a new ATS, and a couple of gossipy items that crossed our desk.

PERSONAVITA

Whoever first said job seeking was a full-time job probably had no idea just how much overtime 21st-century job seekers would have to put in. You have to brush up your resume — once you decide what kind of resume it is you want, and how many different ones you need.

Then, no sooner does the conscientious job seeker post it to Monster, CareerBuilder, and wherever else they think is right and just, they get told how no one ever gets hired that way. Instead, you have to network. So off goes conscientious job seeker to LinkedIn, Spoke, and to their personal contact list to announce they are in transition, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Meanwhile, they discover that networking is good, but you need to build a personal brand, too. And that means a Facebook page, a personal profile to supplement the resume, maybe their own web page, and, of course, the now-de-rigueur blog to market themselves.

No wonder the number of discouraged workers climbs every month.

Now comes PersonaVita, if not to solve the problem, at least to salve it. Launched today, the site is pitched as a way to “capture your experiences, validate your contributions, and draw from your social, professional, and academic achievements to create a personal brand online.” keep reading…

Talk to Steven Toole about ResumePal for even just a few minutes and you get the feeling this is how sliced bread came about. ResumePal is a simple, elegant, and free solution to an annoying jobseeker and recruiter problem.

It’s an easy-to-use method to apply for jobs through corporate websites without having to reenter the data for each different employer. Jobseekers create a profile once, then by logging in to ResumePal from any participating employer’s site, they just click to apply. When they change their profile, by updating their contact information for instance, ResumePal automatically updates the database of every participating employer to which they’ve applied.

“It’s very similar to PayPal,” says Toole, vice president, employer marketing at Jobfox, which developed the service. “It’s convenient for jobseekers, but there are significant benefits for employers too.”

keep reading…

Monster has managed a coup over rival CareerBuilder, partnering with Microsoft to power the software company’s new consumer career center.

Where jobseekers browse MS Office templates for resumes, Monster’s name now appears prominently as the power behind the career information. A how-to job search video on the site includes both companies. In a section titled “Four steps to your next job” step one informs jobseekers:

“Monster.com and Office Online are teaming up to make the whole job search process faster and easier.

“Office Online provides templates for your resume and your cover letter, and Monster.com provides the Search and Submit features, so you can find the job you want and apply for it — quickly!”

keep reading…