LinkedIn closed Thursday at $76.39, down 15 cents. But after investors got a look at the report, the stock climbed up, and within two hours was trading at $83.25, up 9 percent.

The company reported fourth quarter revenue of $167.7 million, more than double its fourth quarter last year. Analysts, who had been expecting the company to finish strong, predicted revenues of $159.7 million. They also expected a 7 cent per share profit. LinkedIn reported earning an adjusted 12 cents per share.

Calling 2011 “A landmark year for LinkedIn,” CEO Jeff Weiner said the company would continue to grow this year, putting an emphasis on expanded mobile capabilities, the international market, and plans to “refresh a number of our pillar products.” Many of those are recruiting related.

Before today’s financial report and an after-market conference call, analysts projected LinkedIn would earn 57 cents a share on revenue of $828.2 million. Now, the company says it expects revenue in a range of $840-$860 million. For 2011, LinkedIn’s revenue totaled $522.1 million.

Recruitment provided half the revenue for 2011 and just over half in the last quarter of the year. The relative percentages that LinkedIn’s three product lines — recruitment, marketing, and subscriptions — contribute to the total revenue haven’t changed much since the company went public last May.

During the question and answer with analysts, Steve Sardello, LinkedIn’s CFO, said there won’t be “a lot of change” in recruitment pricing this year. Instead, the company will focus on expanding its client base and improving the penetration of the service. He said the renewal rate and add-ons grew by 171 percent, and said most customers now hold between three and four recruiter seats.

LinkedIn has been focusing increasing attention on the international market, and growth there has been slowly edging up. By the end of 2011 it accounted for a third of LinkedIn’s quarterly revenue. During the quarter the company opened offices in Brazil, India, and Japan, and translated the service into five additional languages.

LinkedIn’s optimistic outlook for this year is in marked contrast to at least two of its competitors. In the last two weeks both Monster and Dice Holdings offered financial guidance that was more conservative than what Wall Street wanted to hear. As a result, the stock of both companies saw a sharp decline.

CareerBuilder, privately held by three media companies and Microsoft, said it had North American revenue of $157 million in the fourth quarter, bringing the total to $627 million. The company publicly releases only revenue for North America. It does not release international earnings or expenses or profit.

However, Gannett’s CEO Gracia Martore told investors and analysts that CareerBuilder accounted for 82 percent of the company’s digital revenues. That revenue, the company said, was $181.5 million in the 4th quarter. She also said international revenue was up 40 percent for the job board.

If the four owners of CareerBuilder share its income in proportion to their ownership percentage of its stock, then CareerBuilder contributed $148.8 million to Gannett. (The company owns 50.8 percent of CareerBuilder.) From that figure, it’s possible to conjecture CareerBuilder had a $293 million quarter, putting it ahead of Monster. Company officials declined to comment on the figures.

For being so out of fashion, so yesterday, job boards manage to come out on top or top-adjacent on nearly every source of hire study. In a Bersin & Associates survey this fall job boards tied for first with internal transfers as the leading source of all hires. CareerXroads says job boards produced 24.9 percent of all external hires in 2010, second only to employee referrals (27.5 percent).

The latest survey comes from tech vendor Talent Technology, which reports that job boards are the leading source of candidates, according to the 1,100 North American HR professionals who participated. Job boards account for 17 percent of the candidates, followed by employee referrals, which provide 15.8 percent.

What’s remarkable about the evidence is how few accept it. Even after reporting that “job boards remain popular and are used to fill 19 percent of open positions – making job boards the No. 1 source for candidates,” Bersin titled that section of the report “Job Boards: Not Dead, but Dying.”

Even more remarkable is how little the job board industry has done to promote itself. The major boards have their own, proprietary data, guarded more carefully than the U.S. does its diplomatic messages. Second tier and certainly mom-and-pop operations have little data beyond gross traffic counts. So for all practical purposes employers do their own market surveillance.

Now, finally, seven years after it’s founding by Peter Weddle, the International Association of Employment Web Sites has bestirred itself to do some serious research about the industry.

Financed by Jobg8, the job board industry’s candidate marketplace, 100 sites participated last summer in the first benchmarking survey of commercial employment sites. Before you get too hopeful about the prospects, know that none of the biggest job boards participated, the survey was designed for the benefit of the industry, and most of the results aren’t being shared publicly. Those that are may be helpful to some buyers; they’re certainly interesting. More important is that it gives individual sites a yardstick against which to measure their own results.

“It was,” confessed Matt Hoffner, president of Jobg8′s Americas operation (the company is HQd in the UK), “a lot harder than we thought … Just getting all the terms right was quite a challenge.”

Still, after struggling through some 65 questions and their accompanying 22 footnotes, the industry found:

• Three-quarters of a job board’s visitors are “window shoppers” who neither apply for a job nor register. That suggests there’s a high degree of self-selection that occurs, as the next point demonstrates.
• Job postings that direct to a company’s ATS get five applicants on average. Those with only an email address get 3.3 applications. Niche sites and those in business more than three years have slightly higher apply rates.
• Job aggregators (the Indeeds and SimplyHireds) provide about 22.8 percent of a U.S. site’s traffic and only 11.6 percent in Canada. Depending on the region, sizable percentages also came from the job board’s own search optimization efforts and their pay-per-click campaigns.
• The average site has 3.5 employees; 22 percent have one or less; 9 percent have 30 or more.
• Individual marketing expenses varied widely, ranging from 1 to 14 percent. The average is 6.7 percent of revenues spent marketing the site.

Hoffner observed that the industry is increasingly aware it needs to do a better job telling its story. From the survey discussions that took place at meetings in Ft. Lauderdale, during the IAEWS Congress in September, and in London, Hoffner said there was a “clear understanding that we can’t sit still.” The public part of the report says, “Job board owners are looking for new sales and marketing models and resources but expect that promotion and sales efforts will increase in 2012 and beyond.”

One powerful motivator for putting more effort into promotion, besides simply to stand out from the huge number of job boards in the world, is that organic traffic produces better results than that from aggregators. Says the published report: “Many participants stated that aggregator traffic was expensive and may not yield the same rate of applications or registered users as traffic from other sources.”

Board operators are also looking at a changing pricing model. Most sites still charge a fee to post a job; a few charge employers for each click. Hoffner says a “pay per applicant model came in for discussion. It’s an evolving pricing model that has the operator share risk with the customer. That’s a direction they seem to be heading toward.”

Dogs and babies came out on top. They were the stars of four of the top five favorite ads in the USA Today Super Bowl Admeter. The M&M commercial ranked 4th.

However, it was a such a mediocre crop of ads this year that more than a few newspapers used the word “Yawn” in their headline of the coverage. The Associated Press report said: “The Super Bowl may have been a nail biter, but the ads were a snooze.”

“What’s notable about this year versus others is that advertisers played it safe. As a result, we saw fewer standouts, but we also didn’t see as many costly mistakes,” said Tim Calkins. He’s clinical professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University who each year leads the school’s Super Bowl Advertising Review.

The panel’s top pick was the M&M ad. CareerBuilder, which ignored criticism over its use of chimpanzees, got a “B” grade from the panel. The USA Today audience ranked it in the middle of the pack.

The company was blasted last year by animal rights activists who complained about the use of chimps, who, they said, are taken young from their mothers and are mistreated or abused as they’re trained for commercial work.

CareerBuilder, knowing it would face another round of negative publicity, opted to go ahead anyway.

“The chimpanzees were brought back by popular demand.  It’s been a very successful campaign that job seekers identify with and act upon,” said Jennifer Grasz, a spokesperson for CareerBuilder.

Last year, the chimp ad ranked sixth in the USA Today poll. This year’s version, in which a human is sent on a business trip with a team of prank-pulling chimps, ranks 26th.

And just in case you were wondering, The New York Giants beat the New England Patriots 21-17. The game was a repeat matchup of 2008 when the Giants also beat the Patriots.

Hours after the company reported it nearly doubled its fourth-quarter profit over the same quarter in 2010, meeting Wall Street’s expectations, its stock price took a 16 percent beating. In afternoon trading in New York, Dice Holdings was selling for $8.40 a share, down $1.59 on the day.

Last week Monster’s stock took a 20 percent hit after it missed analyst profit expectations and announced layoffs. The company earned 11 cents a share, rather than the 12 cents Wall Street expected. Yet, the company grew revenue for the year by about 14 percent and turned 2010′s loss into a 37 cents a share profit.

Dice, however, not only met the Street’s per share earnings prediction, but its $47.36 million in revenue was slightly ahead of what analysts expected. For the year, Dice reported revenue of $179.1 million versus $129 million in 2010. Profit for the full year was 49 cents a share. In 2010 it was 28 cents.

Those results did little to cushion the company’s 2012 prediction that revenues and earnings will come in below analyst expectations. For the current quarter, Dice says it expects revenue of $46 million and net income of $7.1 million. Analysts are looking for  $46.83 million in revenue and per share earnings of 13 cents.

For the year, Dice is looking at revenue of $197 million. Wall Street wants $201.1 million.

In the announcement of the company’s financial results, Chairman, President, and CEO Scot Melland called 2011 “a terrific year for the company.” Calling 2012 “a more uncertain recruiting environment,” Melland said he expects the company to grow.

“Our strategic priorities are unchanged: expand the number of customers using our services, capitalize on the global opportunity in our energy vertical and serve more markets around the world.”

Among the players already in the ring are BranchOut, the first to build a business networking presence on Facebook, Monster’s BeKnown, and LinkedIn, the reining leader. (Facebook had its own big news Wednesday, filing for its much anticipated IPO.)

Like BranchOut and BeKnown, Glassdoor leverages a user’s Facebook data to find connections at companies in which they have an interest. These can then help provide a direct line to the recruiter or hiring manager. It works simply by using your Facebook login.

Setting Glassdoor apart is the wealth of information it has collected about tens of thousands of companies that’s hard or even impossible to find anywhere else. From its beginning as a place where workers could review their company (or former company) with sometimes no-holds-barred bluntness, Glassdoor has broadened its scope, providing just the kind of information job seekers want: job listings, salaries, interview questions, company background, those unvarnished opinions — both pro and con — and now, who among a person’s Facebook connections has an in.

Branded “Inside Connections,” the new service adds networking to the Glassdoor features, making the site, as Tim Besse, co-founder and vice president of product and marketing, said, “The most complete listing of information about jobs.”

It’s that completeness, Besse argues, that gives Glassdoor the advantage over all other careers networking sites, including, he insists, LinkedIn. “The two most trusted ways to find out about a company,” says Besse, “People you know and, two, people who worked there.”

LinkedIn has both, but if you aren’t connected to one of them, that won’t be much help. At Glassdoor you could always see what people had to say about an employer. Now, you can also see who among your connections works there.

“We have all the tools,” Besse adds.

LinkedIn’s advantage is the completeness of its user profiles. Because it is oriented toward careers and business networking, LinkedIn users tend to be thorough in posting their professional information and prompt in keeping it current.

Facebook users tend to provide only limited employment information. While data is hard to come by, Glassdoor says a survey it commissioned shows 65-70 percent of Facebook users have entered at least some employment data. However, Besse points out that Facebook’s Timeline will prompt ever larger numbers of people to complete their profiles and provide more details.

(Timeline was announced at Facebook’s f8 conference in the fall. Its rollout has been slow, but its anticipated impacts are large and have been discussed in detail by marketers, researchers, and others.)

A post on the Harvard Business Review site about the impact of Timeline on careers notes, “If you were holding onto the idea that Facebook could be your personal haven while you build your professional profile on LinkedIn, it’s time to let that fantasy go. The Timeline offers an opportunity for you to tell the story of your career in a uniquely compelling way, so you need to consciously tackle the challenge of building a propersonal profile that will position you appropriately in the eyes of employers, clients, or colleagues.”

If Facebook users do as the writer suggests, then sites like Glassdoor stand to benefit and it won’t matter that LinkedIn has locked out BeKnown, BranchOut, and others, refusing to share its data.

Besse, in that case, could realize his goal: “I am out there to build the world’s largest and most trusted” career site.

That’s a remarkable number, which, even if is skewed by respondents with very in-demand skills, would still go a long way to explaining why you’re not getting calls back. In fact, the survey shows that IT professionals are picky about whose call they will return.

The best thing a recruiter can do when leaving a message or speaking with a potential candidate is to be as detailed about the job as possible. Hearing details about the specific job, the team, the nature of the work, and the company culture is the kind of information that would lead 88 percent of the survey respondents to return the call.

Less important, but still high on the list for the IT professionals surveyed, is the professionalism of the recruiter and the reputation of the company.

“The best recruiters take the time to get to know the client and the candidate in detail. He or she with the most intelligence wins the matchmaking process,” says TEKsystems Director, Rachel Russell.

The findings come from the company’s quarterly IT Professional Perspectives Survey, which surveyed 2,424 IT workers last quarter about how they look for jobs. First, when a tech worker begins to consider a new job, they take stock of their skills, goals, and interests. Then, 96 percent say they hit the job boards.

“Job boards are the quickest way for IT professionals to feel like they’re getting out there and searching for a job,” says Russell. “But given that so many people are on the job boards, it’s a hard place to stand out.”

Perhaps knowing that, once a tech job seeker finds interesting opportunities, the next step for 72 percent of them is to network with other professionals. At some point, many will work with a recruiter. According to the survey, 59 percent say a recruiter is the main resource; 54 percent say colleagues; 53 percent say friends; and, 46 percent rely on their networks.

Recruiters who help job seekers, even if they don’t end up placing them, may still reap rewards. With 45 percent of the survey respondents saying they have 10 or more top professionals in their network, recruiters who remain accessible, helpful, and professional may be able to get a referral. The survey found 65 percent of IT professionals willing to share names if they had a positive experience with the recruiter.

In this year’s 30-second commercial airing during the fourth quarter on Feb 5, the chimps wreak havoc with their human co-worker during a business trip, ordering 46 banana daiquiris, while brainstorming a poison ivy shampoo.

The chimps have proven to be an audience pleaser since making their debut in CareerBuilder’s first Super Bowl ad in 2005. The company’s three ads all made it into the top 10 in most of the popularity polls. The company reprised the monkey concept the following year, then tried a variety of other concepts, including viewer-conceived ads.

Last year, the chimps returned in an ad called “Parking Lot.” It ranked sixth in the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter poll, but prompted a complaint from PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, over the use of chimpanzees. The organization, once monitored by FBI counterterrorism investigators, released a letter from Angelica Huston calling on CareerBuilder not to air the commercial and to never again use chimps.

CareerBuilder explained that it’s again using chimps, despite the complaints of PETA and other animal-rights groups, for the simple reason people like them. “The chimpanzees were brought back by popular demand. It’s been a very successful campaign that job seekers identify with and act upon,” CareerBuilder VP of Communications Jennifer Grasz told Forbes.

Monster, whose 1999 “When I Grow Up” commercial is considered one of the best Super Bowl commercials of all time, has yet to appear on any list of this year’s advertisers. The company last ran a Super Bowl commercial in 2010.

At a per ad cost approaching $3.5 million, the Super Bowl is the most expensive TV buy in the world. CareerBuilder says it’s worth it and sent along these data points:

• Revenue – Over the last seven years, on average, CareerBuilder’s invoicing increased 36% year-over-year in the month following the Super Bowl.  This consistently outpaced year-over-year growth in other months.
• Applications – Over the last seven years, on average, CareerBuilder saw a 24% year-over-year increase in applications to our employers’ jobs in the month of the Super Bowl.
• Traffic - CareerBuilder’s traffic grew 43% year-over-year during the month of the Super Bowl when we first debuted as a Super Bowl advertiser. CareerBuilder has seen continued gains and, in 2011, the company had an 18% year-over-year increase in traffic in the month of the Super Bowl.
• Brand Awareness – Per a Millward Brown awareness tracking study, from 2004 to 2011, CareerBuilder’s unaided awareness grew 29%. Total awareness of CareerBuilder’s TV ads doubled in the week following our first appearance at the Super Bowl.

A quick look at some of the goings-on in recent days from the recruiting/human resources world:

• If you’re looking for a gift for the busy New York professional who has everything, you can now get them a “PA for a day.” The new temp firm, founded by a PR/events director for a New York ad agency, offers personal assistants for a day — actually for as little as two hours, at a rate of $20 an hour. The company says that “personal assistants cannot and will not assist with any tasks that are illegal, illicit, or questionable.” In addition, “PA For A Day currently does not offer babysitting/childcare services.” We’re not sure if they’re referring to the boss’s kids, or the boss himself.
• Hey LinkedIn, better sound general quarters. You’re under attack by a Norwegian startup. JobCruiter sent out an announcement about its launch with the in-your-face headline “JobCruiter.com Challenges LinkedIn.” The site, says the announcement, has “ambitions of being the best global career network.” Now, here’s the fightin’ words: “Many see today’s career networks just as boring overviews of their contacts where nothing is ‘happening.’“

• So many job boards launch in a week that we’re tempted to erect our own population clock. Atlanta, which has no shortage of job sites already, has one more as Twitter jobs broadcaster TweetMyJobs gets into the job board business. The city is partnered up with TMJ, which puts Mayor Kasim Reed right on the front page. The site itself does what all job boards do, provides a search box, a dashboard to manage searches and submit resumes, and a way for job seekers to see who of their Facebook friends works at a hiring company.

• Speaking of new sites, CareerBuilder took the occasion of a survey about relocation to announce its new CareerRelocate site. It’s a cool site with a graphical skills demand indicator, which told us that cowboy country is where there are jobs in the “other” industry category. But will the jobs move us? The survey says about a third of employers will. Forty-four percent of workers say they’re willing to go, but when they do 41 percent leave the family behind.

• Bad news on those relocation prospects for recruiters, though. Wanted says job ads for recruiters increased only 4 percent between December 2010 and December 2011. That’s about 50 percent better than what it was back in 2008 and 2009. But that CareerBuilder jobs demand map says most of the country doesn’t have much need for recruiters.

• Jobvite says it’s making it easier for veterans to find jobs. Jobvite customers can flag job opportunities specifically for veterans. Among other features of the application, jobs specifically of interest to veterans can be tagged, after which they automatically get added to the Veterans Job Bank.

Recruitment MarComm Firm Sold

NAS Recruitment Communications has been bought from Interpublic Group by a private equity firm in partnership with senior management. The new owner, Stone-Goff Partners, called the acquisition an “excellent match” with its “strategy of investing in strong niche businesses with established track records and experienced management teams.”

Key members of the management team, including CEO James Miller, will stay with NAS. In the announcement of the deal, Miller said, “Interpublic has been a great owner and partner over the last decade; however, under this new structure, NAS will be more nimble and better able to adapt to a constantly evolving set of dynamics in our space.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Unrabble Your Candidate Search

Unrabble is the latest “no resume” candidate analysis and job posting service to hit the market. The startup from KMC Software is aimed at the SMB market. Busy hiring managers or recruiters just fill out an online job description form, edit the resulting job posting, and it gets posted to StartUpHire, Indeed, and SimplyHired. It can also be distributed to the leading social networks.

Candidates apply by filling in forms that, among other things, have them list and rank their skills. Unrabble ranks candidates based on how their skills and self-scoring stacks up against what the hiring manager specs out. The service even allows a hiring manager to research a specific company listed in a candidate’s work history. The site is heavy on visualization and graphic representation of work timelines and the like.

Coalition Says No More Addresses For .jobs Operator

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers began selling new domains this week to almost anyone who can pony up the $185,000. For that, you get the right to append a .pepsi or .toys or even a .smith to an Internet address.

While the whole idea has been mired in controversy, the coalition fighting over how the .jobs domain is being used says the one group that shouldn’t be allowed to get one of the new gTLDs is Employ Media or any of its principals. In a letter to ICANN, the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition says the organization has been lax in its oversight of how the .jobs domain was used and mismanaged the contractual dispute.

“ICANN can still re-gain a measure of regulatory authority by publicly excluding Employ Media, as well as DirectEmployers Association, its alliance partner in this egregious breach, from participating in the new gTLD program,” says the Coalition in a letter.

You can find the history of the dispute here.

Your Staff Is Job Hunting

If you think the headline is wrong, you may be in for a surprise. Right Management (a Manpower division) says 84 percent workers are looking or will be looking for a new job next year. That’s the same percentage as last year, according to the firm, which surveyed almost 1,100 workers for this year’s survey via an online poll.

So now you’re thinking, “Some poll. More than 84 percent of the staff is still here.” But the survey doesn’t mean everyone is headed out the door. The findings are a barometer of worker distrust in management as well as job commitment.

Says Right Management Executive Vice President Bram Lowsky, “It’s a workplace equivalent to whether or not ‘the country is moving in the right direction.’ Sometimes called ‘flight cognition’ by behavioral psychologists, intent to leave is far from an unusual phenomenon, but when it applies to four-out-of-five employees for two years running it has to be of top concern to senior management.”

Creative Forecasting

The first-quarter 2012 outlook for marketing and advertising professionals is pretty decent, according to a new survey.

Here — at right — is what marketing and advertising executives said when asked, “In which of the following areas do you expect to hire in the first quarter of 2012?” (with multiple responses allowed).

Military Recruiting, Swedish Style

The Pentagon recruits American youth with a high-tech appeal that makes military life look like more fun than the best video game. If you’ve seen that space command commercial from the Air Force, then you know what that means. The Swedish military takes, ahem, a somewhat more down-to-earth approach.

Get Paid to Tear Things Down

Who wouldn’t want a job in demolition? Some of us would even do the work for free, especially if it involved stuff blowing up. (Yes, this might just be a guy thing.)

If this interests you, click on over to the National Demolition Association’s new job board, which it calls Demolition Career Connection. It’s a JobTarget site that backfills with construction jobs from construction job boards. Alas, it turns out even laborers have to have certain skills and training to work in demolition.

Applicant Tracking and Referral Systems Partnering

Taleo, a system for managing job candidates, has a little partnership going with SelectMinds. SelectMinds (written up here) has a tool to manage employee referrals, allowing employees or alumni to match open jobs with their contacts, and recruiters to keep track of referral activities, applications received, and so on. This referral product will now be integrated (though not free) for users of Taleo’s applicant tracking system.

Speaking of Taleo partners: TALX also is integrating with Taleo, offering larger employers WOTC help.

Home Health Report

A new report’s out on the home health and personal care industry. The 121-page PDF includes sections on training, wages, hours worked, and labor shortages in the field.

Deloitte Tops Vault’s Tech Consulting List

1,500 consultants ranked Deloitte’s IT consulting group as a best place to work, moving it from third last year to first for 2012. Vault compiled the rankings based on weighting a number of qualities including prestige, firm culture, pay, and work/life balance. Deloitte Consulting LLP earned a weighted average of 7.964. Just behind it was last year’s first place winner, Booz Allen Hamilton with a 7.866 score.

Besides the rankings and scores, Vault also compiles an abstract of what the survey respondents had to say — good and otherwise — about each of the top 25 companies on the list. See it all here.

Manufacturing Optimism

Many manufacturing execs envision certain operations coming back to the U.S. Why? Higher wages in China and elsewhere; a smaller supply of skilled people overseas; and patriotism.

Rumors have periodically made the rounds of a potential or even pending sale — 20 of them since 2006, according to Bloomberg. All have proven false. But now, says the financial news service, financial analysts and some of Monster’s largest shareholders say the time and price may be right for a takeover.

“The valuation is absurdly cheap,” Eric Green, a Philadelphia-based fund manager at Penn Capital, told Bloomberg. With 3.2 million shares of Monster stock, Penn Capital is one of the company’s largest shareholders.

“The stock has been a clear disappointment,” Green is quoted as saying. He suggested a takeover price of $15 a share. That’s a 92 percent premium over Thursday’s closing price of $7.83. “I would love to see someone buy it,” he said.

Monster’s stock price has declined steadily since hitting a 10-year high of $59.28 in May, 2006. In the last 12 months, the stock has been as high as $25.90, reaching there in January, when the economy seemed ready for a hiring surge. Since August, it has been under $10 a share.

The market value of the company is now about $1 billion, $5 billion less than it was worth in 2006. Its 66 percent decline since the start of this year is the largest of any company included in the S&P 500. As a result, Monster is being moved by Standard & Poors to its MidCap 400 after the market closes today.

Part of the reason for the lackluster stock performance is the weak hiring outlook and the global economic climate of the last few years. Another part is the rise of alternative recruiting channels, especially social media, and especially the launch of LinkedIn as a public company. It bears noting that as hot a launch as LinkedIn had, rising almost immediately upon the start of trading to a high of $122.70, it has been under $75 a share since November. Dice Holdings, the other pure play job board, is also off its 12-month high of $18.75, closing Thursday at $8.75. LinkedIn closed at $66.38. CareerBuilder is privately held by a group of newspaper companies with Gannett owning the majority.

“When the employment market recovers, we’re going to see Monster’s revenue recover,” Avondale analyst Jim Janesky told Bloomberg. “If Monster doesn’t earn the value it deserves in the stock market, then there are various other avenues of recognizing value, and one is certainly a merger or an M&A opportunity.”

Monster declined to comment to Bloomberg and didn’t respond to our email asking for comment.

“As the arbitration idles in its dormant state, Employ Media and its alliance partner DirectEmployers Association have aggressively expanded the reach of non-compliant Dot Jobs Universe, which was the very basis for the issuance of the breach notice,” charges The .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition.

In the letter it sent to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — and distributed publicly — the Coalition says “ICANN’s reluctance to enforce contractual compliance is of grave concern” giving “the impression to the Internet community that ICANN is unable or unwilling to enforce its rules…”

Early in May, after months of negotiation over the creation of thousands of job boards with a .jobs Internet address, Employ Media sought to arbitrate ICANN’s charge it had breached its contract with the organization. ICANN said that by awarding DirectEmployers Association thousands of occupational and geographic names on the .jobs domain, Employ Media and its partner the Society For Human Resource Management “intend to use the .JOBS TLD (top level domain) primarily to compete with other internet job boards.”

(SHRM sponsored the creation of the .jobs domain and provides policy oversight. For a complete history of the .jobs issue, go here.)

ICANN’s response to the arbitration request was filed July 22. The next step is for an arbitrator to be selected to chair the three-person panel. (Each side gets to name one arbitrator, which they have done.) There is no sign that has been done, leading the Coalition to note, “ICANN’s failure to keep the ICANN Community apprised of the status of the arbitration is a regrettable standard practice.”

Besides the arbitration pace, the Coalition’s letter raises two additional issues:

• It complains that ICANN kept from the public correspondence dating back to 2009, when Employ Media first allowed Direct Employers to use address names on a reserved list. Among that correspondence is a January 20, 2010 email telling Employ Media using those names was a violation of the contract.

• Why ICANN allowed Employ Media to make, as the Coalition termed it, a “fundamental change” to the database description of the purpose of .jobs. The original wording said the .jobs extension was “reserved for human resource managers.” ICANN approved changing it to “reserved to serve needs of the international human resource community.”

The wording change might seem innocuous, but one of the claims made by ICANN in its notice of breach of contract is that Employ Media is permitting persons other than human resource professionals to obtain .jobs addresses. When the Coalition requested the rationale for approving the change, ICANN sent documents with so much of the text deleted that it was impossible to understand.

Emails were sent to ICANN and Employ Media requesting comment and a status update on the arbitration. No response has been received.

Built on the Facebook platform, BeKnown is a jobs-oriented network that allows users to build career profiles and connections separate from those on Facebook itself. By adding jobs to corporate sites and including colleges, Monster is encouraging users to conduct their job hunting within BeKnown.

For employers and schools that already have a Facebook career presence — and thousands do — the BeKnown sites are largely duplicative. But for those brand sites where jobs aren’t the main focus, a BeKnown site can become the gathering place for career discussions.

That’s the point Tom Chevalier, Monster’s BeKnown product manager, was making during a demo call today. A BeKnown site is a “secondary or duplicate offering,” he said, if a company or campus career center already has a recruitment presence on Facebook.

For everyone else (and that would include all those companies who simply stream their openings onto their Facebook site) a BeKnown site is where employees, alumni, students, job seekers, and potential candidates can engage in career conversations. Chevalier observed that a company isn’t very social if  it’s not carrying on active discussions with its fans and visitors.

In that regard, colleges will have it easier than employers. Alumni are vocal supporters of their school, and they are the very ones to talk about how their degree and their college years have paid off. And to post jobs.

Employers, whether direct or agency, need to invest time to make social media work. This isn’t unique to BeKnown or any other social site. Simply streaming jobs onto your site is not a social media strategy.

Engaging with candidates requires real interaction. Chevalier says BeKnown facilitates that because of its orientation. The way the site is designed, a BeKnown user can quickly see who they may know. If the employer adds the job feature — free and easily added — current listings appear on the main page. Right now, only jobs posted to Monster automatically show up. Soon, Chevalier said, XML and RSS feeds will be added to automate the process.

Colleges have it even easier. Monster has created pages for some 3,500 colleges in the U.S., populating them with content that includes a bit of history, costs, financial aid, and alums registered with BeKnown. A school need but claim its page.

While Monster was announcing its latest enhancements, Facebook was already the center of attention over its rumored plans for a $10 billion IPO next year. In a story repeated in hundreds of posts, the Wall Street Journal said the company was expected to file papers for its initial public offering possibly even before the end of the year. Based on the shares already outstanding, a $10 billion offering would value Facebook at $100 billion, ranking it among the most valuable companies in the world.

First up, is the story of Staffingbook and one man’s quest to alter the course of recruiting:

Steve Harari has ambitious hopes for the recruiting industry. Not content to simply help recruiters place candidates and employers find talent, Harari wants to convince recruiters to mentor their talent over the long term.

“I don’t think it’s too far-fetched that a recruiter might be mentoring a candidate,” says Harari, who has launched his culture-changing effort at Staffingbook.

Were he talking about boutique search firms working at the highest levels, it wouldn’t be far-fetched at all.  Even less-lofty placements involve some amount of coaching and mentoring to at least prepare a candidate for an interview.

But Harari’s quarry is the independent recruiter who lives for their next placement. His plan is to convince these recruiters to nurture their candidates for 5, 10, even 20 years.

It’s “a significant behavioral departure for recruiters,” Harari admits. His trump card is that a long-term relationship can lead to multiple fees. “Over 10 to 20 years I might place the candidate four or five times.”

Staffingbook, branded as “The Marketplace for Passive Talent,” is the platform to make it happen. Recruiters post their candidates here. Employers peruse the inventory to find those they want, then, facilitated by the Staffingbook platform,  notify the recruiter who decide whether to present the candidate.

If it sounds a little like some mashup of BountyJobs, TopEchelon, and LinkedIn, you would be sort of right. Except at Staffingbook, everybody pays a fee and splits aren’t in the picture.

Setting it all apart is that mentoring issue. Staffingbook will encourage its recruiters to stay in touch with their candidates and have a conversation at least quarterly.

Kenexa Buys Restaurant Talent Consultancy

Kenexa acquired Batrus Hollweg, a hospitality industry talent management consultancy and tech vendor. The announcement was made this week. Kenexa said the addition of Batrus Hollweg will enhance its existing research and content portfolio.

Headquartered in Plano, Texas, BHI is especially strong in the restaurant industry, where it focuses on helping companies select and develop hourly and management workers. It also offers an ATS branded as Click and Hire.

“BHI’s wealth of research and content regarding talent best practice, as well as their assessment solutions, are recognized as some of the top-notch content and solutions in our industry today,” said Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan. “The combination of Kenexa and BHI will provide the most researched and proven talent solutions content, particularly in the hospitality industry.”

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Earlier this month, Kenexa reported an especially strong 3rd quarter. Its 23 cents per share earnings on $77.2 million in revenue, handily beat Wall Street’s consensus estimate of 20 cents a share. The company predicted its 4th quarter would be equally strong, with revenue in the range of $76 million to $78 million and per share earnings of 25 to 26 cents per share.

CareerFruits Job Site

Proving that every variation of the word “career” has not yet been used in the job-site field, in January 2012 we will have CareerFruits. While the site is being built, a blog and LinkedIn post briefly describe what the company is up to: candidates will “search a job or shortlist many jobs and apply to all of them using LinkedIn/Visualize.me/Video Profiles. You can even add comments to a job and vote if you like a job. You can even ask questions and refer friends in single click to earn reputation and rewards.” Recruiters “can post jobs for free and track responses online, rate/comment on a candidate profile so that others can get benefitted with your feedback, and set up your own team and share profiles that you feel your teammates can utilize.”

The managing partner, from Singapore, tells us that “the seamless tracking of candidate responses and automated workflow to schedule and track overall interview loops are one of the most sought-after features we are working on.” The site is mainly funded through family and friends; a few investment proposals last month were rejected.

Tech/marketing Jobs Site 

Out of the UK comes JobPage, in beta, for technology jobs and marketing jobs. The JobPage team also was behind Page/Do, an award-winning site for making landing pages. JobPage is a sort of a one-stop-shop for posting a job. You use the site to post a job; broadcast it to various job boards like Indeed and share it through your social media sites; get analytics on who’s viewed the job; and manage the whole process, such as make a note that you need to do reference checks. This pricing chart (in British money) gives you a sense of what you can do with JobPage.

Jobs Sent by Text 

And out of Idaho we have InstantJobFair.com launching this week. You pay $100 to send jobs to a category of people who’ve signed up to receive text messages; for example, southern California salon-health/fitness-beauty job candidates. Job seekers who get your text message are directed to a basic web page with info on where to email their resume.

The survey was released this morning by Monster Worldwide, which, in addition to its flagship job board, also operates Military.com, the largest career and information site for veterans, transitioning military and their families. The survey introduced Monster’s new Veteran Talent Index. Separate indices score veterans’ confidence in their career opportunities, their job search activity level, and an employer measure of how they perceive the veterans they’ve hired measure up to other workers.

On the latter score, employers are much more gung-ho about hiring veterans than are the vets themselves. Almost every employer who has hired a vet (99 percent) would hire another. That’s due in large measure to their performance. Sixty nine percent of employers say the veterans they’ve hired do their job “much better” than their non-vet workers.

Speaking during an online news conference this morning,  Jesse Harriott, Monster’s chief knowledge officer, said the survey makes clear that employers are more optimistic than the vets themselves are about their career transition.

Where the Employer Veteran Hiring Index came in at 70 out of 100, the  Veteran Career Confidence scored only a 50. It’s “not as high as we would like it,” Harriott said.

Veterans may lack confidence in their ability to translate their military skills and experience for the civilian workplace. Nearly half (47%) of the surveyed vets feel challenged getting employers to understand what they did in the military. 45 percent say applying those military skills in a civilian environment is also affecting their confidence.

That’s an area where employers and veterans share the same concern. Seventy percent of the nearly 500 employers in the survey agree “Veterans or those with prior military experience are prepared for a career transition out of the military.” However, by the same percent, employers say vets need to do a better job explaining how their military experience applies to the job they’re after.

Communication appears to be the biggest problem, according to the survey. Three of the four issues deal with providing prospective employers more information about their military experience and helping them understand its relevance in the civilian world.

In his introductory comments this morning, Harriott noted that there is a broad difference between veterans who served prior to Iraq and Afghanistan, and those who have served since 9/11 and the subsequent invasions. This latter group is officially referred to as Gulf War-era II veterans.

While the unemployment rate for all veterans is below the national average, for Gulf War II vets, it’s 12.1 percent (not seasonally adjusted). For the youngest veterans, those 18-24, the unemployment rate was 20.9 percent in 2010, according to the latest release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Older veterans, especially those with college degrees, fare significantly better. For those Gulf War-II vets older than 24 with a college degree, the unemployment rate in 2010 was 3.9 percent. Those who only had a high school degree had an unemployment rate of 12.7 percent.

That suggests that despite their military training, young vets without a college degree are struggling. Monster’s survey found that some 60 percent of the job postings on its site called for a bachelor’s degree or better. However, its study of Gulf War II veteran resumes found only 26 percent listed a college degree.

“It is apparent that veterans need additional training and education in order to be strong candidates for available roles,” the survey report notes.

Monster will issue its new Veteran Talent Index twice annually. The next one, Harriott said, will be out near Memorial Day.

I’ve listed a few responses below and included some dialogue regarding pros and cons of each. Hopefully this discussion will help recruiters and recruiting leaders focus their energies on those tools that actually bring value to their organizations.

This list is presented in no particular order.

Employee Referrals: Traditional employee referral programs tend to fail because they don’t excite employees. Too often referrals are advertised on the intranet, posters in the break room, or distributed via internal mass emails, so this communication just becomes background noise. These programs don’t engage the vast majority of your employee base.

If recruiters, however, only had a referral program as their sole launching pad for filling positions, they could have solid success. Instead of advertising the program, recruiters would pick up the phone and proactively ask for referrals from employees on a regular basis. From that starting point, recruiters could have rich and thorough conversations with referrals from their current employees who may be the right fit for a position or point them to the right candidate. This high-touch methodology would certainly turn up passive candidates that none of your competitors are actively pursuing. The sheer size of your employees’ first and second level connections could fill a talent pipeline for a long while.

Existing ATS: In general, most companies underuse their current database of candidates. Compounding this reality is the fact they’ve paid a lot of money to attract candidates to their application process in the first place. For large, well-established organizations, an ATS could mean access to millions of candidates. The biggest challenge then becomes effectively mining the database, but left with only one recruiting approach, relying on an ATS could very well be the best option. If used wisely, by creating talent communities and folders, an ATS can be a great stand-alone recruiting tool. Positions not filled directly by candidates housed in the database, could lead to referrals and hires down the road.

LinkedIn: Having a dedicated recruiter for LinkedIn searches, introductions, and resulting conversations can result in attractive talent. Since LinkedIn allows recruiters to quickly locate candidates who appear to be a close match to their needs, this tool has a great advantage over several options listed here. However, recruiters tend to start these conversations cold, and this barrier can create resistance to success. For an organization with a low volume of high-niche positions, LinkedIn could be the best go-to tool.

Search Engine Sourcing: Starting a search with the empty box of a search engine can be a daunting first step, but top-notch sourcers can unearth contact information and initiate conversations with talent that no one else is engaging. The weakness of this approach is the energy and time it takes to find candidates. Although much of the search engine process can be automated across several sites, the process still has flaws since connectivity to these candidates is usually pretty weak (as opposed to a referral) so you may have to turn over a lot of rocks to find an interested candidate.

The Phone: Not to be overly simplistic, the old-school recruiters might think it’s best to just start making cold calls to competitors as their starting point. Since fewer recruiters are pounding the phone these days this could be a fairly effective, if not time-consuming, activity. For companies with a high volume of openings this might not be the most practical approach.

Job Boards: This is an obvious choice to discount as a main/only source to find talent. Not only does post and pray not produce the best candidate pool, it also is the only expensive option listed here. However, I would say it has one advantage over all the others above: ease of use. For small companies without robust ATS’s that are mainly filling low-level positions, this may actually be the best option, especially if they don’t have dedicated recruiting support. Most companies are much more complex and require more assertive tactics to fill their positions.

I would love to hear other recruiters’ thoughts on what tools/methods they would use if they were left with only one way to fill positions. Additionally, the common thread in most of these techniques is the ability to engage a candidate and then ask for referrals — this is the relationship nature of recruiting. Those recruiters that are strong on the relational side of the business will always find ways to be successful, regardless of the tools or techniques they are using.

The company told investors and analysts during a conference call after the markets closed this afternoon that it would add some 500 to 600 more employees by the end of the year. CEO Jeff Weiner said the rapid expansion would give LinkedIn a jump on 2012.

Because of SEC rules and legal cautiousness, company officials didn’t discuss the planned stock sale during the call. But Weiner and CFO Steve Sordello said they would be bringing in more tech people to speed up the launch of new products and scale its operation to accommodate the rapid growth. Sales people would also be added now so they’ll be in place to begin selling with the new year.

Sordello said the company was on pace to bring in between $154 and $158 million in the current quarter. That would give it between $508 and $512 million for the year.

The company has been on such a tear, that one analyst questioned whether its revenue and earnings projections might be too conservative.

For the third quarter, the company reported a per share loss of 2 cents. The analyst consensus was for a 4-cent loss. Adjusting for one-time and non-operational expenses, LinkedIn earned 6 cents a share. The consensus for that calculation was that the company would break even.

Showing that it’s not just growing money, Weiner and Sordello noted the company’s global expansion and reported that 59 percent of its 135 million members are international. The fastest growing group is college students and recent grads. Weiner said helping them find their first job is a company priority.

Its traffic has also grown rapidly. The site now averages about 87.6 million unique visitors monthly, a figure the company said is low since it doesn’t include mobile users who, by company metrics, now account for something “north of 10 percent” of page views.

“Mobile is far and away our fastest growing product and service,” said Weiner adding, “we’re thinking through how to monetize mobile and we’re hoping to begin that next year.”

The company’s shares got no lift from the overall market even though earnings are up, because the employment picture in the months ahead is murky. Murky enough that in releasing its third-quarter financials this morning, company officials estimated earnings for the current fourth quarter would be less than what analysts are expecting.

Monster’s share price opened at $9.25, then dropped sharply as the market digested the news that bookings (contracts for searching and job posting) weren’t likely to increase much in this last quarter and revenue for the year would be significantly less than the company projected in July.

The stock recovered some, closing at $8.83, behind Wednesday’s $8.91 close.

For the third quarter, Monster had revenue of $259 million, an increase of 20 percent over the same quarter in 2010. (The percentage is based on adjusted 2010 numbers, which were reduced to account for advertising business Monster voluntarily gave up. On an unadjusted basis, revenue grew by 13.2 percent). The company earned 13 cents a share (adjusted), or 1 cent more than Wall Street was expecting. Last year, after adjustments, Monster reported earning 2 cents a share.

(Public companies report their revenue and expenses two ways. The GAAP method includes expenses and income that for analysis purposes are one-time costs or are accounting issues that can distort a company’s actual operating performance. The non-GAAP report omits those items. Monster’s “official” or GAAP method report shows it earned 26 cents a share in the 3rd quarter and lost 5 cents a year ago.)

However, revenue for the quarter was less than what analysts estimated by about $5 million.

Monster’s Chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi blamed the “macro uncertainties” of the global economy for finally prompting employers to begin pulling back last month. The company first felt the effects in the e-commerce placement of job postings and resume purchasing, and then late in September started seeing customers cut back on their contracts.

Now, says Iannuzzi, the hiring pullback seems to be a trend, or at least enough of a concern that it is prudent to lower the estimates for both bookings and revenue growth. Earlier Monster estimates were based on national and global opinion of strong economic growth. That’s no longer the case.

“Right now,” said Iannuzzi, “there is increasing uncertainty and fear that we may experience another recession.” For that reason Monster cut back on its revenue and bookings estimates. “We believe it is prudent to manage our business on the assumption” that economic conditions will not improve, he said.

However, Iannuzzi said the situation is different from what it was three years ago. Instead of layoffs and other draconian measures, companies are slowing up on hiring.

CareerBuilder, which is not a public company and volunteers only some financial information, said its North American revenue grew 13 percent in the 3rd quarter to $161 million. Monster’s North American revenue was $123,2 million, a 15 percent improvement over 2010.

Although it doesn’t provide its international numbers, Gannett CFO Paul Saleh said CareerBuilder’s international business grew “in the low 40 percent.” Gannett, the largest newspaper company in the U.S., is the majority owner of CareerBuilder. Some of CareerBuilder’s performance is covered during Gannett’s quarterly financial report.

During the company’s conference call with financial analysts, CareerBuilder’s international opportunities were cited by Gannett CEO Gracia Martore, who said, “We’ve improved the results as we’ve been in many of the markets that we are in internationally year-over-year. And so we … see that as a great opportunity to continue to expand upon our international offerings there. And as Paul mentioned, we saw a terrific revenue growth overseas, albeit from a small base, but that’s a real area of opportunity for us going forward.”

The other two leading public careers advertising sites will report next week. Dice Holdings reports November 2, LinkedIn reports November 3.

Facebook has launched a page, facebook.com/socialjobs, which features resources and information for job seekers from the coalition’s other partners: The National Association of Colleges and Employers, the DirectEmployers Association, and the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, along with the Labor Department. Facebook plans to create public service announcements to promote its services in the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, which, according to CNN Money, are Michigan, Rhode Island, California, South Carolina, Oregon, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Alaska, and Florida. Included in Facebook’s list of initiatives is this intriguing item:

After a Tuesday night party worthy of a last century Silicon Valley event, a bleary-eyed audience was brought to its feet by former basketball great and now-successful businessman Magic Johnson. Roaming the cavernous convention hall, he mixed photo ops with motivational lessons from his life, which took him from high school standout to Laker star and now to business success as the CEO of multi-million dollar development companies that work largely in inner city neighborhoods.

He offered up such chestnuts as  ”It’s not enough to deliver … you have to overdeliver”; “losers lose and winners win”; and others as he told his life story. It was an entertaining almost 90 minutes that went into overtime as Johnson took questions, hustling over to each person to make sure they could get a picture of themselves with the NBA legend.

A more serious and sober panel followed, talking about, of all things, data. Johnson’s razzle-dazzle was a tough act to follow, but what the session offered was a glimpse into the future for HR and, very plainly, for LinkedIn.

The crux of what the panelists had to say is that we are swimming in data, more data than has ever before existed in the history of the world, and companies are just now beginning to learn how to effectively mine it for competitive purposes.

Four very smart people shared the stage — Reid Hoffman, co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn; Tim O’Reilly founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Michael Chui of McKinsey, and Josh Bersin CEO of the HR consulting firm Bersin & Associates. Analyzing all the recruiting and employee data that companies gather has been a powerful trend in HR for years, but from what the panelists said, the information already in company servers and HR hard drives has barely been tapped.

Companies that learn how to use it will be able to make decisions about all sorts of business issues, not the least of which is workforce planning and recruiting. Bersin, the moderator, naturally enough opened the session with a reference to Moneyball, the movie about how the Oakland A’s mined statistical data to put together a winning team on a shoestring (as Major League Baseball goes) budget.

The session, quipped Bersin, should be called “Moneyball comes to HR.”

The sit-up-and-take-notice moment came when LinkedIn demonstrated how the company is mining the 120 million+ profiles and other data it has and making it available for recruiters. Go into LinkedIn Skills and do a search yourself and you’ll discover the rich information that results. The demo search for “android” turned up ranked lists of LinkedIn members who are professionals in the field, as well as lists of additional skills that android experts list in their profiles. Not sure what companies hire mobile experts? The Skills results page tells you. Same for where they are located and more.

A recruiter could use this data in multiple ways, including compiling skills checklists, discovering the companies that have mobile professionals on staff, the groups they join, and, of course the names of professionals whose connections they may be able to leverage.

Skills is in beta, so expect some hiccups. My own search for “editors” included a Wikipedia reference to a British rock band by that name. Still, Skills is a useful resource as it is now, and it hints at the even deeper data LinkedIn has.

As the panelists noted, every company has some of that same kind of information about its workforce. Mined and, as Chui said, integrated with data from outside the company, data such as that available free from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, then, as he maintained, “It really matters on a bottom-line basis.” Big data,” he said, “is a big deal.”