According to Venture Beat, GE is among the early partners.

Treehouse has step-by-step videos on topics like designing websites. Its mission is to “bring affordable technology education to people everywhere, in order to help them achieve their dreams and change the world.”

The job board right now is charging $99. Treehouse has about 35,000 students.

No, not eHarmony — that’s another story altogether. I’m talking about beautifulpeople.com, which now has a link on the upper right of its home page to “recruit beautiful employees.”

This BeautifulPeople site is not for everyone. (more…)

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Remember George Costanza from the old Seinfeld show? He had problems with jobs and women, which makes sense to anyone who believes job seeking is like dating, which is pretty much most everyone who has done both.

For you doubters and naysayers, proof is on the way from none other than eHarmony. Late next year, the company, which insists it takes a “scientific approach to matching,” will launch a career site employing the same principles as its dating site.

A company executive told The Washington Post, “We have 29 dimensions that we match on for marriage. It would not surprise me if we have even more for a worker relationship.” Relationship-seekers answer about 200 questions before eHarmony computes a profile and does its magic. Not coincidentally, among the questions are a number related to work and career.

With eHarmony jumping into the job matchmaking business, it just goes to show you what intimate lifestyle site Lelo said about a healthy sex life making for a healthy career. (more…)

Toby

We pause now, before beginning our workday, before we plunge into this post about Mars and Monster, to pay homage to television’s most real unreality comedy show, The Office.

The show’s finale aired last night, ending nine years of episodes that anyone who has ever worked in an office, especially a sales office, would instantly recognize as real life snippets slightly disguised. At one point or another, we’ve all had a boss or known of a boss as quirkly lovable as Michael Scott.

And what The Office  did for — or is that to? — HR, but cast it as the stereotype of itself. Toby, the mild-mannered, accidental HR representative of corporate in the Scranton branch office, will forever be who every viewer of working age will picture when HR comes a’calling. (Unless they think of Catbert, who inhabits the opposite end of the HR spectrum.) (more…)

The main question is not whether job boards are relevant, but whether their search results are relevant for their users. Do job seekers find the job they want, and do employers find the candidates they need? It is a simple equation of attention and relevance, and currently the competition happens to play a better card on both aspects.

The typical job board offers this primary search interface to job seekers:

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Both companies reported their first-quarter financial performance today.

Reporting before the market opened, Monster said it earned 8 cents a share on revenue of $212 million. It was the first time in seven quarters the company beat Wall Street’s revenue expectation, which was $210.5 million. That surprise, and the company’s announcement it may buy back up to $200 million of its stock, drove the price up almost 9 percent.

LinkedIn reported earning 45 cents per share on revenue of $325 million. That was 15 cents higher than Wall Street’s estimates average of 31 cents per share earnings and well above its $317.1 million revenue estimate. What hurt the company was its Q2 forecast of revenue of $342 million to $347 million. Analyst estimates averaged out to $359.2 million. The stock lost 10 percent of its value in after hours trading. (more…)

However, that was down a penny per share from the same quarter last year, and the analyst estimates were lowered after Dice issued a forecast below what Wall Street was looking for. The other indicator of a general job board slowdown is that most of the $4.3 million increase in revenue comes from the company’s acquisition of Slashdot last year. Taking that out of the equation, Dice Holdings grew organically by $300,000, and the tech and security sector saw a 2 percent increase. (more…)

This one comes from the “Great Place to Work” firm, maker of the Best-Companies-to-Work-for list that gets a lot of press at the beginning of the year.

This new search engine is called “Great Rated.” It gives you information on a company, and pulls in from Facebook and LinkedIn who I might know at my desired employer (as you see, I tried Whole Foods).

The site also includes a job search, through a relationship with Simply Hired.

Check it out here.

New Recruiter Homepage

Sporting a new look and with some new features — including a recommendation engine that ‘learns’ the kind of people a recruiter most want — LinkedIn Recruiter is getting an official relaunch this morning.

The redesign itself is an update of the classic LinkedIn Recruiter look to make it more consistent with the LinkedIn homepage redesign that was introduced last fall.

Parker Barril, Linkedin’s Talent Solutions head of product, unveiled the fresh, new LinkedIn Recruiter at a live and webcast user event — ConnectIn — in San Francisco. As he put it, “the consumerization of the enterprise,” the trend toward making products and services easier to use, “is influencing a new generation of products.” (more…)

The beginning of this year’s report spells out the demise of more simplistic views about source of hire tracking: that data is easy to get, that it is reliable across the board, and that it is clean (one source = one hire). If you’ve been in recruiting for more than a decade, you probably know that things weren’t much better before the Internet drove so much hiring activity. I remember laughably tracking sources of hire via a questionnaire we asked applicants (online and on paper) and trying to create data based on employee’s recollections of how they came to apply for their job 5-10 years ago.

So no data is perfect but this data is very imperfect. Still, it is the best set of data and analysis we have on sources of hire. With that monster-sized disclaimer out of the way, here are some of the results.

Referrals, Career Sites and Job Boards Top List Again

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Brought by an Arkansas woman representing perhaps as many as a million customers of the job board, the suit says:

From its inception until September, 2011, TheLadders scammed its customers into paying for its job board service by misrepresenting itself to be ‘a premium job site for only $100k+ jobs, and only $100k+ talent.’ In fact, TheLadders sold access to purported ‘$100k+’ job listings that (1) did not exist, (2) did not pay $100k+, and/or (3) were not authorized to be posted on TheLadders by the employers.

According to the suit, many of the jobs offered on TheLadders were scraped from other sites with no attempt at verifying how much they paid or even if they were current.

The suit, filed yesterday by the New York class action firm of Bursor & Fisher, was reported by recruiting consultant and blogger Nick Corcodilos. He’s posted a copy of the lawsuit here.

TheLadders issued this statement in response to news of the suite:

We just learned about this yesterday afternoon, and have put it in the hands of our counsel to resolve. We remain steadfast in our commitment to providing the best job-matching service, while serving as the fastest-growing source for professional jobs. In fact, we’re focused on migrating our members to our new online experience, featuring Scout, by April 1, as well as launching our free native iOS app. We continue to be a free resource for recruiters and employers to help them find the right person for the right job.

Five specific counts are alleged in the class action suit: (more…)

Last month, says comScore, the web traffic measurement company, 17.3 million different visitors from the U.S. clicked into Indeed to look for a job. That translates into a 29% increase over December’s job search count.

Overall, January saw a 24% increase in the job search category, ranking comScore’s broader Career Services category among the fastest growing of all website groupings.

Jeff Hackett, executive vice president of comScore, noted that in addition to big jumps in tax and travel sites, “We also saw a very seasonal spike in the Career Services category, including Job Search, Training and Education, and Career Resource sites, as Americans looked for ways to grow their careers and expand their skill sets in 2013.” (more…)

Surveying 3,991 employed, full-time workers, CareerBuilder found 75% of those who applied for a job never heard from the company. So common is that silence that only 82% of the candidates actually expect to hear something, even just a perfunctory, “Got your application.”

Contrast that with the experience of the thousands of candidates surveyed as part of the CandE awards research. Almost 78% reported getting an acknowledgement after submitting an application. And more than half of the applicants to the 90 companies taking part in the evaluation said they got a note describing the next steps in the process.

While even among the 37 winning companies the process wasn’t without its issues, overall 53% of the candidates would apply again. A majority are willing to tell their friends about their experience; some are willing to post about it on Facebook, Twitter, a blog, or elsewhere. (more…)

Referrals and the company career site are the two leading sources for new workers hired by the 1,054 companies participating in SilkRoad’s just released study of recruitment marketing effectiveness.

Between them, they produced 40% of the more than 150,000 hires the companies made in 2012.

This is the second year the HR software provider has compiled ATS data from its customers to report on their source of hire. This year, the company included interviews as a measure of effectiveness.

The data set came from companies as small as 100 employees and some larger than 10,000; 60% had under 2,000 employees, 30% fall between 2,000 and 10,000, and the remaining 10% are larger. A company spokesman said the employers represent “the entire scale. We have lots of technology, healthcare, higher education, and several other strong verticals.”

As it did last year, SilkRoad found that job boards collectively yielded more interviews and hires than did all other external sourcing efforts. (For the report, SilkRoad classified corporate career sites and inside recruiter efforts as internal, explaining “they are company resources.” Company sites were included because they are “internally controlled element of job advertising.”)

Among the job boards, Indeed yielded more interviews and hires than any other single site. CareerBuilder was second. (more…)

The company earned 35 cents per share on revenue of $303.6 million. That was $24 million more than the average of analysts’ estimates and more than $11 million above the most optimistic projection. The average of their earnings estimates was 19 cents a share.

The numbers released this afternoon show LinkedIn brought in more total revenue for the year than did Monster and its fourth-quarter recruitment revenue alone was 90% above the same quarter in 2011. (more…)

It’s fourth-quarter revenues, also reported this morning, of $211.2 was nearly on target with analysts’ average estimate of $212 million, while earnings per share, after adjusting for expenses associated with the company’s restructuring and sales, were 8 cents, in line with estimates.

For the year, Monster earned .38 cents a share, after adjustments. Without the adjustments, Monster lost 66 cents for the quarter, and $2.27 for the year.

By comparison, Dice Holdings Inc., owner of several niche job boards and technology networking sites, reported last week it earned 15 cents a share, a penny better than analysts expected. But profit was down 14% over the fourth quarter in 2011. Revenue, however, grew 11% to $52.7 million on the strength of acquisitions the company has been making. (more…)

If you answer is along the lines of “I don’t know,” CareerBuilder has a solution for you. Any employer with a job posting can now see how well their ad performs against every other similar ad in the CareerBuilder network. Free.

That alone is pretty cool, since knowing your ads for customer service reps draw fewer applications than your competitors get is important business intelligence. But as the cliche goes, “Wait, there’s more!” Besides the raw counts, CareerBuilder’s new Recruitment Performance Portal tells you at a glance how experienced they are, how educated, as well as ethnicity, gender, and a fairly broad range of other details. (more…)

Similar to TalentBin, Dice’s new service pulls together bits and bytes of information about candidates,  summarizing the individual’s experience, skills, and interests in an easily scanned profile. Open Web searches the accessible parts of some 50 social and professional networks — including such tech hangouts as GitHub and Stack Overflow — and the open Web, indexing a candidate’s contributions and postings to build the profile. A series of icons tells searchers where the information was found; a mouse click takes you to the source.

The goal of Open Web, explained Chairman, President, and CEO Scot Melland, is to give Dice recruiters “as complete as possible a picture of the candidate in the geography they are searching.”

Provided for now to Dice recruiting customers at no charge, Open Web is searchable in multiple ways. Besides a typical Google-type search, you can put together a profile by name. That’s particularly useful if you have a candidate in mind who may not have an updated resume.

Melland will officially announce Open Web Wednesday morning, during the quarterly financial call with investors and analysts. Dice Holdings, Inc., which owns Dice.com, eFinancialCareers, is expected by analyst consensus to report earning 14 cents a share on revenue of $51.4 million for the fourth quarter of 2012. (more…)

Without a doubt, Beriker is one of the valley’s own. After leaving Yahoo, which he joined in 2010 when it acquired his previous company, Dapper, Beriker was Entrepreneur in Residence at VC Matrix Partners for barely four months before being named CEO at Simply Hired.

Gautam Godwhani, who co-founded and led Simply Hired as president and CEO for eight years, became chairman of the privately held company’s board. Simply Hired launched in 2005, just months after Indeed. The two career sites initially aggregated job listings from the commercial job boards, scrapping them at first, and then, as traffic built, accepting direct feeds. (more…)