The announcement will be made this morning at the ERE Expo underway in San Diego.

Now, subscribers to any of The Ladders’ various job boards can opt to follow specific recruiters and receive their job posts. What makes this different, if not better, than following a recruiter on Twitter is that these job posts are not blasted out publicly. As anyone who has used Twitter knows, tweets are public.

On the recruiter side, MyPipeline can be a pre-screening tool. Sure there are six-figure poseurs on The Ladders, but coughing up a monthly fee tends to limit their number. So unless a recruiter is tweeting all the same jobs to their Twitter followers, MyPipeline provides some assurance that the applicants aren’t going to be resume mass mailers.

Marc Cenedella, founder and CEO of The Ladders, was a bundle of enthusiasm when he and I spoke last week about MyPipeline. “This is really wicked cool,” he said. “People will enjoy this product immediately.”

“This is the first time this has been done in the job board industry,” he boasted.

OK. OK. It’s a neat feature. (I’m thinking so based on Marc’s description. I didn’t actually get to test it out or even to see it.)  Now it’s not sliced bread, but certainly handy for that group of middle-age $100k job seekers for whom Twitter is something they’ve only read about. The job posts are delivered via email, which, Cenedella says, is the preferred method of The Ladders’ demographic.

Think about it for a moment before you shrug it off. Every job board worth the time allows job seekers to set agents to email them job posts meeting certain criteria. However, I can’t think of any time I’ve seen “recruiter” as a search parameter.

So you have to give The Ladders credit for offering this as a feature. Maybe anybody could have done, but The Ladders did it.

Cenedella’s team also thought through the potential wrinkles. Recruiters can opt-out either entirely or they can reject certain individuals. Job seekers can go search for specific recruiters or opt-in to one or more based on who posted the jobs to which they applied previously.

DirectEmployers took down its job boards a few weeks ago, while it makes changes to the platform.

Bill Warren, executive director of DirectEmployers Association, blogged about the changes his team is making to the platform listing four specific areas — social media integration, accessibility, job posting — tagged for improvement. These are in response to feedback DirectEmployers has received since the first sites launched last October.  A fifth reason he cited was “Building out tens of thousands of additional domains.”

In a conversation this morning (Pacific time), Warren told me the original expectation that January would be the official debut was a little too ambitious. As late as meetings January 28 and 29, Warren was still predicting the imminent launch of 25,000 .jobs domains.

But refinements arising out of discussions at those two meetings, attended by a handful of recruiting leaders, including Peter Weddle and Gerry Crispin, postponed the launch.

“It’s quite a project, as you can imagine, ” Warren told me.

Over the weekend the Associated Press wrote a story about the project, which it described as a competitive challenge to traditional job boards such as Monster and CareerBuilder.

The story says the first of what may be 30,000 regional job boards will appear this month. Later in the year, occupation-specific job sites will launch.

Some of these were part of the initial beta launch and have been taken down. They’ll be back online “once we have everything the way we want it,” Warren told me.

Typically, beta sites aren’t taken offline. Enhancements and new features are developed and pushed out to the live site when ready. Taking down a beta site after it begins to attract attention is generally bad for traffic.

However, Warren told me that with the search engines beginning to direct job seekers to the sites, DirectEmployers feared they would not “feel the full power” of what the sites are expected to be. So taking them offline was preferable.

The Associated Press story, incidentally, quotes a Monster spokesman saying the company’s investments in new search technology and its acquisition of HotJobs makes it “one of the most cost-effective sources of hiring for recruiters today.”

The story also quotes Josh Akers, VP of sales for RecruitingBlogs.com, declaring the .jobs project, “the most significant play that I’ve seen … since the invention of the online job board.”

I should note that Akers worked for Warren for almost five years as a regional vice president of DirectEmployers. That relationship helps put in perspective the glowing — and, in my opinion, overheated — description.

If you’ve been following the saga of the .jobs top level domain, you know that it was originally described as a way for companies to help job seekers find postings on the corporate site.Though it has became much easier in the last several years to find the jobs of a specific company, that wasn’t always the case.

Early supporters of the creation of the TLD (which is what the better known .com, .net, .edu, .org, and so on are technically called) also saw the domain as a way to reduce job fraud, spam, and misdirection. The Society for Human Resource Management signed on early to the application by Employ Media (which is partnering with DirectEmployers) to create the domain and became the policy overseer. Before a company could be awarded a .jobs address, it had to promise to support SHRM’s code of ethics.

However, the .jobs address never really caught; only about 15,000 addresses with that domain have been issued since approval was granted in 2005 to being using the domain. For more details, here’s a list of ERE stories on the subject.

The whitepaper’s top-line findings show that, on average, 41 of the nation’s larger companies filled just over half their vacancies in 2009 by internal transfers and promotions. This is the largest percentage since CareerXroads first reported the data in 2002.

For 2010, however, 48 percent of the participating companies expect to hire and hire robustly. The prediction is for 29 percent growth in hiring. Only 10.8 percent of the surveyed participants expect to higher fewer workers this year. Compare those percentages to the Source of Hire report issued last year at this time. Then, 100 percent of the companies predicted they would hire fewer workers.

“The spike in internal movement is a strong artifact of the recession and suppressed many other sources of hire,” says the report, authored by Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, founders and principals in the recruitment-oriented CareerXroads consultancy. “Expect internal movement to fall to more normal levels in 2010.”

Another key finding — and one recruiting managers and HR executives should take to heart (a subtle way of saying, “Fix it”) — is that 30 percent of the respondents were clueless about the size of their contingent workforce.

Technically speaking, the survey choice selected by the 30 percent was “do not know and cannot even guess” the size of the contingent workforce. Of those who did report a size, the average was 13.6 percent of the workforce was contingent.

However, the large number of respondents who couldn’t even guess is troubling. Crispin and Mehler warn that “staffing leaders not in touch with this contingent (workforce) are likely to fall behind. If predictions that contingent workers could become 25-35 (percent) of a company’s workforce in the next few years are correct, then the business plans and staffing functions have a ‘disconnect’ that must be addressed.”

The bulk of the report deals with the source of hire of full-time workers.

As Crispin and Mehler have reported for the last eight years, referrals are the largest source of external hires. Not only were 26.7 percent of the external hires made from referrals from employees (who account for the biggest share), vendors, alumni, customers, and others, but referrals are an efficient candidate source.

“The yield for referrals is one hire for every 15 referrals, making this category the most efficient source by far,” say Crispin and Mehler. “The growth of social media could change the dynamic of referral, and firms need to re-examine their efforts to stay ahead of the curve.”

Next to referrals, corporate career sites, at 22.3 percent of the total external hires, produce the most hires.

This is a category that has caused Crispin and Mehler to hold their nose even as they list it as a source of hire. In every one of their reports on the subject, they counsel that corporate sites should be considered a “destination” and not a source.

Their reasoning is that candidates get to the company site from somewhere else; perhaps from a search engine or a job post link or an email from a friend. As the authors write, “So when more than one in every five external hires is attributed to the firm’s career website you can only imagine how many other sources were also involved.”

Personally, as I have seen more and more effort being put into corporate career sites (Microsoft, for instance), I’ve begun to think it may be time to reconsider them as true sources. So it was interesting to see Crispin and Mehler wave the white flag on this.

“Ok, we’re over it,” they write. “We’ve accepted the notion from our colleague  Elaine Orler, Talent Function Group, that ’source’ should be viewed as a channel. We like the nautical feel of this imagery and that it evokes a desire to map the entire course — the waters, shore, shoals, and narrows as an aid to navigation.”

A few more details from the report:

• Job boards accounted for 12.3 percent of external hires, which translates into 6.3 percent of all hires.

Say the authors, “Every respondent reported success in hiring employees from job boards. We wanted more and designed one question to tease out the number of hires attributed to each job board. Unfortunately only 61% of the respondents can track back to specific sites.”

Don’t count out job boards, they add.

• Direct sourcing accounted for 6.9 percent of the external hires. This year, direct sourcing includes social media, SEM and SEO, the corporate ATS, and mining external databases for leads.

Write the authors: “We asked respondents to enter the number of hires they could attribute to social networks and related SEM strategies such LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Entice Labs, Jobs2Web, and “other.” The total reported, fewer than 500 hires, represents less than 1% of external sources.”

An added observation: LinkedIn accounts for 60 percent of all hires attributed to social media.

There’s much more great information in the whitepaper than I can hope to include here. It’s so detailed and so full of suggestions and recommendations that Crispin presented the report in a one-hour webinar today. If you missed it, the webinar will be archived and made available here.

The free whitepaper will be posted to the CareerXroads site shortly, if it’s not already there now.

One caveat, which is especially important if all you do is read this summary and glance at the chart: source of hire reporting is not entirely reliable and, as they say in the commercials, your results may vary.

Or, to quote Crispin and Mehler, “There are dozens of reasons why source-of-hire data is replete with errors. Dr. John Sullivan pointed out as much in his excellent September, 2009 ERE article. He argued that source of hire was the first step in developing functional excellence. In his usual understated style he noted, ‘It’s (SOH) almost always wrong’. We agree.”

Not going to happen, I agree.

But in the United Kingdom, that’s just what has been happening since 2002. Coming together as the National Online Recruitment Audience Survey, dozens of the job boards there participate in an annual survey that profiles their users, segmenting them by industry, occupation, age, income, job-hunting behavior, and more; 40 categories in all. The data is combined with traffic information from each of the participating job boards.

This month NORAS will report the results of its October-December 2009 survey which collected data from the users and owners of 70 of the UK’s job boards, double the participation from the previous survey.  These include such major UK job boards as Fish4Jobs, GuardianJobs, and eFinancialCareers, the Dice-owned site.

The results allow recruiters and employers or, for that matter, anyone, including the competitors, to see, for instance, that executivesontheweb.com and exec-Appointments.com have the largest percentage of users who are CEOs or company owners at 12 percent and 11 percent respectively.

Because of the sample size you can do cross-tabs. Those are the nifty refinements that make it possible to see which sites have, say, the largest number of CEO/owners between 25 and 34. (Which turns out to be eFinanciaCareers, though it happens this is a category where the sample size is too small to be statistically certain.)

The value of having data like this is readily apparent. As the NORAS site itself explains, “Using NORAS you can target the right online audience, increasing applications from relevant best-fit candidates, while reducing irrelevant and time-wasting applications. NORAS is the route to maximizing return on investment and making online recruitment as efficient and effective as possible.”

In the U.S., you have to sleuth out such information for yourself. Big customers can get data directly from the major job boards. Most of the bigger job boards have some demographics information available publicly. However, it’s nowhere near as detailed as the NORAS numbers, nor do you have the added assurance that someone other than the board itself has vetted the data.

You can buy traffic data and some demographics from one of the analytics companies such as Nielsen, Hitwise, or Comscore. If you want free data, your alternative is to use a site like Compete.com or Alexa or Quantcast, all of which have significant limitations.

Otherwise there is no counterpart in North America to NORAS.

–

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

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

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

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

I’m reporting these results at 11:05 p.m. ET Sunday night, a little more than an hour after the game ended and four-and-a-half hours after our poll went live. The results may have changed by the time you check (just go to the poll and check the results), but since halftime, the percentages have held fairly steady.

If you missed the ads or want to see them again, just click here and you can check them out and still vote in the poll, which we, in a completely shameless attempt to kick up the hype, will leave open until no one cares.

You’ve also probably noticed (unless your Super Bowl party was a lot more fluid than mine) that the poll numbers above only add up to 70 percent. The other 30 percent of the voters said both ads were about the same. (I told you we were into populism.) You can read that to mean anything you like.

While you’re reading into things, here are a couple of coincidences I noticed that you might as well read something into as well.

Wildlife of one sort or another figured in several of the commercials. Like Monster, CarMax had a commercial featuring a beaver. Vizio did, too, though their beaver had a minor role. There was a squirrel in another ad and Bridgestone had a whale.

The CareerBuilder ad, featuring a nearly naked casual Friday office, was followed by a pantsless Dockers ad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The statement’s four points are:

• CareerBuilder is the clear leader in North American revenue and will continue to be even if the deal goes through.
• CareerBuilder has been the U.S. traffic leader since 2004 and will continue to be in the future.
• History could repeat itself and Monster will have a difficult time securing regulatory approval.
• Yahoo traffic does not monetize effectively.

In detail, here’s what CareerBuilder had to say:

“CareerBuilder is the clear leader in North American revenue and will continue to be even if the deal goes through.In 2009, CareerBuilder’s North American network revenue totaled $542 million compared to Monster’s $407 million. Estimates of HotJobs’ 2009 revenue were $80-$100 million. CareerBuilder’s positive revenue trend and associated increasing market share have been steadily increasing since 2006 when we became the undisputed market leader. As of today, even if the acquisition is approved and it is completely accretive to Monster, CareerBuilder’s $542 million revenue remains greater than the combined Monster/HotJobs at approximately $487-$507 million.

“CareerBuilder has been the U.S. traffic leader since 2004 and will continue to be in the future. Monster will most likely run the business as two separate companies with separate products and separate revenue streams. In that situation, CareerBuilder’s industry-leading 21 million unique visitors per month will remain the leader over Monster’s average of 11 million unique visitors per month. In line with CareerBuilder’s current portal traffic deals and Monster’s previous portal traffic deals, Monster should expect an additional average five million unique visitors per month from Yahoo, leaving CareerBuilder the undisputed leader in traffic in the U.S.

“History could repeat itself and Monster will have a difficult time securing regulatory approval. Monster attempted to buy HotJobs in 2001. After an initial review that spanned several months, the federal government announced it would conduct a second round of reviews. The HotJobs board ultimately chose to sell the company to Yahoo instead. This transaction will require an intense U.S. Department of Justice review. This deal could take an extended period of time to close. During that time both Monster and HotJobs will continue to lose market share to CareerBuilder.”

(Here’s some background on the previous bid by Monster for HotJobs. The deal in 2001 had gone so far that Monster even issued a press release saying it was buying the company, only to find Yahoo had outbid it. Marc Cenedella, now CEO of The Ladders, was on the negotiating team back in 2001 and posted the press release on his blog.)

“Yahoo traffic does not monetize effectively. Yahoo purchased HotJobs in 2001 for $436 million. They are planning to sell HotJobs to Monster for $225 million today, a decline in the value of HotJobs by nearly half. During the same period, CareerBuilder’s revenue has grown 500 percent, while HotJobs revenue has declined over that period of time. It is clear the Yahoo traffic does not lead to revenue growth and market share gains. We don’t expect that to change when Monster takes over that traffic.”

What’s particularly interesting is CareerBuilder’s estimate that HotJobs had 2009 revenue of $80-$100 million.

Besides being in line with the guesstimates of others in the industry, it’s an indication that the chaos at Yahoo has made HotJobs a poor cousin. While all job boards have seen year-over-year declines in revenue, even at the upper end of the estimate, HotJobs would have been losing ground faster than many others, and this would have been occurring while its traffic was surging.

That certainly lends support to CareerBuilder’s fourth point about the value of the traffic. “It is clear the Yahoo! traffic does not lead to revenue growth and market share gains,” CareerBuilder’s statement says. “We don’t expect that to change when Monster takes over that traffic.”

Them’s fighting words, but probably a bit overstated. Yahoo’s internal struggles over what business it wants to be in — and its C-suite shake-up — certainly diverted focus. And, of course, HotJobs has been for sale since at least the summer of 2008. Monster, incidentally, began making a serious run at the company at least as long ago as October 2008 when it signed an NDA with Yahoo! No wonder at yesterday’s analyst conference call Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi said, “This was a long and interesting negotiation.”

While CareerBuilder didn’t think much of the purchase, Dice Holdings CEO Scot Melland had a contrary view. He told me the deal “has the potential to be a win-win for both” Monster and Yahoo.

The devil’s in the details, of course, but Melland says Monster will get a big traffic boost and picks up some 600 media partners that have strong local sales teams. Even accounting for the overlap in customers, Monster will see revenue growth.

For its part, says Melland, Yahoo manages to shed an asset it no longer considers core to its business, while getting a brand-name player for its career channel. And it gets paid for the traffic.

Melland wouldn’t discuss whether Dice had taken a run at the HotJobs deal, though more than one industry source told me it had. However, he said the HotJobs acquisition would have little impact on Dice, which operates a few niche job boards, including the technology focused Dice.com and one for the financial industry.

For the broader industry, Melland said he thought the impact would become clearer over time. It does make Monster a much stronger player, he said.

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

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

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

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

The company also did not respond to an email request for comment on the HotJobs acquisition.

In terms of pure traffic counts, the HotJobs acquisition plus the agreement that keeps HotJobs on the Yahoo! homepages in the U.S. and Canada for three years, pushes Monster ahead of CareerBuilder, which has held the lead for several years. No other career site in the world comes close.

The most recent U.S. traffic numbers I’ve seen put Monster and HotJobs at a combined 32.3 million to CareerBuilder’s 21.7 million. Even though Monster won’t hold onto all that traffic — there is overlap among the job boards — it will be ahead when the sale closes and the dust of systems integration settles.

Monster will pay Yahoo! for the traffic it sends to the career channel, which is a fairly typical arrangement. How much Monster will pay wasn’t disclosed, but without Yahoo providing traffic, HotJobs wouldn’t have been worth much.

The “traffic deal,” Iannuzzi said, “will establish a No. 1 traffic position for Monster in the U.S.”

The newspaper network that comes with the sale probably helps more with the traffic than with sales. However, even today, newspapers still have a sizable (if diminishing) piece of the recruitment pie, especially with smaller and regional businesses and local staffing firms. These are the employers who call into the newspaper to place an ad or go online at the newspaper’s career site to do the same.

Reaching the smallest advertiser directly is not cost effective, yet with a White House focus on boosting hiring by small businesses and so many of them in the U.S. that they are the long tail of employment, Monster’s new newspaper partners will certainly help it there. CareerBuilder, owned mostly by three newspaper companies, has only a fraction of the more than 1,000 dailies and weeklies that are now in Monster’s orbit.

Globally, there are important benefits, too. Monster gets the exclusive right to negotiate with Yahoo’s overseas properties to power their career sites and buy traffic. The U.S. and Canada traffic deals becoming a “template,” Monster’s CFO said.

There’s no doubt Monster will pursue those deals. Iannuzzi made it very clear he has been shifting resources to strengthen the international business and that he sees opportunities in South America and Eastern Europe.

While the HotJobs news grabbed the headlines, Iannuzzi focused much of his attention during the analyst call on Monster’s new products and site reengineering. This week, Monster officially launched 6Sense search technology, which it built out of the Trovix architecture it got when it bought that job-matching firm 18 months ago.

The brains behind its Power Resume Search and PowerSearch, 6Sense is a hit, Iannuzzi said during the call, with customers as well as seekers. The first major improvements Monster introduced in years came under Iannuzzi’s watch. In January last year, Monster introduced career mapping tools, community groups, and other services to encourage job seekers to stay with Monster even after finding a new job.

A few months later, a pre-beta group of recruiters got to test the new resume search. It was a hit, helping them to find candidate resumes that matched their needs far better than did the standard (and long-time) keyword search. It got rolled out in beta in the fall and I was bowled over by how effective it is.

Since then the job-seeker version was introduced and that, too, is a (big) step up from Monster’s “Standard Search,” as the company calls it now.

Now, three months after becoming generally available and some six weeks into selling the higher-priced Power Resume Search to contract customers, Iannuzzi told the analysts, “What we are seeing is very encouraging … based on six weeks of selling … vast majority of what we are selling is 6Sense technology.”

Curiously, he went on to say 6Sense can be a tool to make recruiters more efficient because it cuts search time, making searches far more precise. But he also said it’s a threat to the industry for that same reason. “The recruitment industry,” Iannuzzi said, will have “to reconsider their business model in light of what we have developed.”

What to make of that very pregnant comment? Iannuzzi didn’t offer any help on that: perhaps because he didn’t want to; perhaps because the conference call ended at that very point.

While we wait to see what others and the market make of that, the financial markets bid up Monster’s stock price slightly in after-hours trading. Evidently, the news of the acquisition and the new product success were positives, despite the cautions from Iannuzzi and CFO Tim Yates.

The first quarter, the one we’re in, is going to be a challenge. They expect, in Iannuzzi’s words, “A rough quarter from a P and L perspective.” The rest of the year, though hardly smooth sailing, should be better.

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

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

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

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

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

US.Jobs site with social elements displayed

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

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

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

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

Those geo-focused sites will be supplemented by occupation-specific jobs and, where there is demand, geo-occupation-specific sites. The number could potentially reach the millions, says the information site for the project, Universe.jobs. Some of these sites launched a few months ago in beta. Here’s one for Atlanta and one for sales jobs. Other sites are detailed here.

Crispin, an early supporter of the creation of the .jobs domain, said he was encouraged by the focus of DirectEmployers in the development of the recruitment sites. “DirectEmployers intends to focus in on how to build it out as to how ICANN intended it,” he said.

(ICANN is the Internet group that decides naming conventions and authorized .jobs, a top-level domain. Details of the request by the Society for Human Resource Management and Employ Media to ICANN to create the domain can be found here.)

Crispin explained that the job listings on the DirectEmployers sites will all be real jobs from real companies, which was one of the goals in creating the .jobs domain. Another was to make it easy for job seekers to find corporate career sites. But in all cases, in order for a .jobs address to be awarded, the company had to agree to abide by an ethical code.

While what DirectEmployers is building looks and sounds like job boards, Crispin said it’s not. “At the end of the day, it’s not job boards … It’s something more.”

He was boarding a plane out of Indianapolis (where the meetings were held) so he didn’t have  much of a chance to explain. But looking at the .jobs sites, it’s clear they have evolved from their first iteration back in October. There’s a social element to them and a connection into social networks. Click into the FOLLOW tab in a job post and you can get a listing of employees on LinkedIn.

The project may well continue to evolve. Crispin said its future is “not set in stone.”

Monster ad from Wired

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

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

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

Over the last year+ Monster has been introducing new career-focused tools and features, like its career-mapping service and social communities organized around professional careers.  Over the summer, it tested its semantic resume search with a number of recruiter clients, then began offering it and the seeker search as options in the fall.

After a demo of the search tools in November, I wrote “Power Resume Search is stunning.” On the seeker side, I’ve found Precision Search (Or is it PrecisionSearch. Monster references it both ways.) to be an equally big improvement over “Standard Search.”

Now, Monster is making a full-court press (or should that be a blitz) to promote 6Sense and the other features. Monster will air a second commercial, this one featuring a beaver, during the Super Bowl, and will also announce its choice of a new Director of Fandemonium during the game. Print ads in tech and business magazines like HR Executive, Wired, and Fast Company have already started running.

“This isn’t just the launch of an advertising campaign. It represents a commitment to help people make clear progress in finding the right job,” says Ted Gilvar, executive vice president and global chief marketing officer at Monster. “We know that people want help — whether it’s a more efficient way to search for jobs or helping them connect with others through specialized career networks.”

CareerBuilder will make its sixth Super Bowl appearance with an ad selected from among those submitted in a contest. Three commercials were eventually picked out of some 1,000 entries and were each awarded grand prizes of $100,000.

The idea was that the public could then vote for their favorite, which might be selected as the one CareerBuilder airs as its second quarter commercial. However,  one of the three — Worst Seat — has been nixed by the network. The commercial is pretty gross, showing a cubicle worker entertaining (some) of his colleagues by passing gas. So, of course, that’s the video embedded here.

“CareerBuilder has had a very successful track record with advertising in the big game and we are confident that all three concepts selected would play well with the big game audience,” said Richard Castellini, the job board’s chief marketing officer. “We made a strategic decision to change our advertising approach and leverage the creative minds of consumers across the country. Our decision paid off when we were flooded with a large number of very high caliber ideas, which played a major role in our decision to pick not one, but three.”

A company spokesman told me, “We have not announced any plans for our marketing past the big game.”

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

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

Bill Warren

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

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

ERE: What’s the purpose of the meeting? What will you be showing?

Bill Warren: The purpose of the meeting is to answer any and all questions a group of industry experts might have about the .jobs build-out. We are not so vain that we think anyone really cares about what we are doing. However, we have had many phone calls with questions about what we are doing and how we are building out the domains. We will be showing not only how the domains are being built out, but also the analytics platform and how we are integrating with social media. Two long-time, well-respected industry experts suggested that we do this.

ERE: Since your .jobs buildout is well under way and ads have been appearing on the sites for months, why do this now?

Current Boston .jobs job board

Warren: The .jobs build-out is far from being well under way. It was suggested that we invite a group of industry experts to Indianapolis to demonstrate the .jobs platform after we had a working model to show them. We should have a working model with a significant number of domains built out by January 28th. The ads have been on the sites about 30 days. Why do this now? Again, it was suggested that we do it after we had a significant number of domains up and running.

Initial version of Boston .jobs job board.

In a follow-up asking for clarification Warren wrote back, “When I said, ‘The .jobs build-out is far from being well under way’, I meant we had only built-out 200 geo-specific domains thus far. The .jobs platform is still in ‘Beta’ and ads were put on the ‘Beta’ URLs in November for testing purposes.”

ERE: The personal expense to the invitees to attend includes hotel and airfare. What’s the value to them to attend this meeting? Why is it necessary to do this in person?

Warren: Each invitee would of course have to make their own decision as to whether or not their attendance is worthwhile. I’m sure some will not attend because they do not consider it worthwhile and I certainly respect their decision. Because of all the questions we have received, we wanted to offer these individuals the opportunity to see the same presentation, to ask questions, and to hear questions from others. It could have probably been done as a webinar; however, I thought a webinar would be too impersonal for the level of this group.

ERE: What are you expecting in the way of outcomes?

Warren: Nothing more than industry experts having an opportunity to see a demonstration, ask questions, hear questions asked by their peers and, most importantly, get answers to any questions they might have. Again, the meeting is in response to the suggestion of two individuals who have a long-term investment in this industry and for whom I have tremendous respect.

ERE: How will whatever feedback you get affect your rollout and plans?

Warren: We are always interested in being good stewards of the .jobs platform and would carefully consider any and all recommendations we receive. These individuals are experts with a tremendous understanding of, and respect for, our industry. We value their feedback and will try to work with them in any way possible in the future.

ERE: How was the list of invitees decided?

Warren: It was based solely on the recommendations of the two individuals who suggested we have the meeting. If anyone was left off the list that should have been included, I’m sure it was nothing more than an oversight.

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

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

Craigslist was the fastest-growing destination for eQuest customer job postings, tripling the volume of 2008. The most popular city destinations were the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando, and Phoenix. All but Orlando charge to post jobs.

CareerBuilder and Monster, however, still hold the lead by a mile over other posting sites, says eQuest. A majority of clients want their jobs posted at one or even both sites. And no wonder. eQuest says “in a sampling of 400,000 unique jobs posted to each board between June 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009, both Monster and CareerBuilder garnered staggering traffic numbers, totaling almost 200 million viewers in just six months — well above the traffic stats of any other online job source.”

ERE community member Michaela Prebbleton was the first to notice and posted a comment to an article about the first loan the company got last summer. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jobfox got $3 million in debt financing just six months before this latest round.

There’s an indication in the financing that warrants or options or both may have been part of the deal. More important, though, is what the borrowing is all about.

Could be the Jobfox founders don’t want to give up any more shares in the company, or the economy has made investors especially cautious.

Jobfox has already gone through three rounds of VC funding, getting a total of $40 million for the service founded by former CareerBuilder founder and CEO Robert McGovern. So between the VC investments and the borrowing, the company’s total of $45 million rivals the $55 million that was poured into Jobster.

I emailed Jobfox’ VP of Marketing Steven Toole this morning asking about the financing and what plans the company had for it. Haven’t heard yet, but Steven may very well post some details yet.

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

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

Besides Jones, Asia Pacific Director of Business Development Phil Guo, and Media Director Thomas Irre took the 61-story jump off the Macau Tower. The press release the company sent says, “The three made the leap in keeping with an HFI principle that breakthroughs frequently occur when you’re outside of your comfort zone.”

While we’re watching videos, here’s the Fan Favorite from among those submitted in response to CareerBuilder’s call for user-created commercials.

CareeerBuilder launched a contest last spring offering a $100,000 prize for the best user video, which it would then professionally produce for use during Super Bowl 2010.

Hundreds of entries were submitted, which are here on YouTube. CB decided that three of them were so good it awarded each a grand prize check. The three winners, the fan’s choice, and the contest rules and other details are available here.

At least one of the videos will be shown during the game on February 7th, as CareerBuilder makes its sixth consecutive Super Bowl appearance. You may recall its debut for Super Bowl XXXIX when CareerBuilder hit the ratings and critics jackpot with two monkey ads. The company — actually, its ad agency, Cramer-Krasselt — dovetailed it with an online viral email campaign called Monk-E-Mail, so successful it’s still active on the CB site.

Cramer-Krasselt and CareerBuilder later had an acrimonious divorce when a subsequent Super Bowl “Survivor” takeoff ad campaign failed to produce similar results.

Monster is reported to have bought one commercial, which AdAge implies will focus on its “Director of Fandemonium” contest. AdAge says CareerBuilder’s one commercial buy will air during the second quarter. The 2010 Super Bowl ads, which are nearly sold out, reportedly cost between $2.4 million and $3 million for 30 seconds.

CareerBuilder, BTW, was rated 26th on Glassdoor’s list of the 50 best places in the U.S. to work. When you figure that Glassdoor is a place where the disgruntled can rant freely (and often do), that’s quite an achievement.  Matt Ferguson, CB CEO, got a 78 percent approval rating.

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

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

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

Neither Kramer nor a Monster spokesman could be reached.

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

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

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

No comment yet from Yahoo.

Speaking of Yahoo, CEO Carol Bartz confirmed what has been an open secret: HotJobs is for sale. peHUB reported last summer that HotJobs was being shopped, but Yahoo wouldn’t confirm the report, though Bartz had indicated the company was weighing its strategic importance.

Now, though, Bartz told an investment conference earlier this month that Yahoo would sell HotJobs “if we got a decent price…”

What might that price be? Bartz didn’t say, but probably not enough to make a significant difference to the $6 billion (in revenue) company.

Last I heard, HotJobs was at least a contributor to Yahoo’s bottom line, netting around $50 million annually. That number is probably a little higher, since that figure is more than a year old.

Selling HotJobs is not going to be easy. Dice took a look. Monster supposedly also has. Don’t know about CareerBuilder, but I would have to assume the company at least kicked the tires. May have even done a bit more, since HotJobs has an extensive newspaper partner network and CareerBuilder is a newspaper-owned holding.

To make sense, any deal would have to include a traffic agreement with Yahoo and the newspaper partner network. HotJobs is the job channel for Yahoo.com, which is the world’s biggest traffic destination. Yahoo funnels traffic to HotJobs from links on the site while the several hundred newspaper partners do likewise.

(Yahoo used to maintain a list of its partner sites, as most job boards do. But the link now returns an error message. That may be part of a general corporate indifference to the site. The press center link to “Press Releases and Info Flashes” hasn’t been updated since 2008.)

America’s Army

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

No wonder, therefore, that the U.S. Army has been using video games as a recruiting tool for years.

Now comes a report from GameSpot, a site for news about the digital games industry, that puts the 10-year-cost cost of developing and managing the Army’s free PC games called America’s Army at $32.8 million. The original cost to develop the first version of the games was budgeted at $7 million.

An entirely new version — America’s Army 3 — was released in June, and almost immediately the Army cut ties with the game’s developer. GameSpot reported earlier the Army will take over future development and game management.That will be handled by an Army unit formed in 2005 specifically to oversee development of the game.

Head2Head

This Canadian RPO and headhunter has a new video out that will make no friends with newspapers or job boards. Who cares, though. It’s a lot of fun and, ironically perhaps, it may be the most honest career video ever made.

“Stop putting in print ads. Stop posting on job boards. You may as well set fire to your money,” says an aggressive, sharply dressed gent who at first look might be an arms dealer or a central casting FBI agent.

That’s the opening scene of “What Can 60 Hours Do For You?” For the next 4 1/2 minutes you’re treated to snapshots of a 60-hour recruiting marathon to fill a req for a client where “failure is not an option.”

The credits claim that Head2Head staff wrote and produced the video. The parts were also played by staff members who should all get Oscars for their acting. (Or was it acting?)

Take the 4 minutes and 53 seconds to watch and enjoy. And then you tell me if it doesn’t nail headhunting. Still want to be a recruiter?

Vault.com

Vault, the venerable career information site that was an early leader in providing job seekers help in researching a company and building a personal network, has been struggling this year.

Erik Sorenson called it “stiff headwinds” driven by the faltering U.S. economy. In a memo earlier this month to the remaining staff at Vault, he described 2009 as a “period of right-sizing the company.”

Sorenson, the former president of MSNBC who became CEO in 2007 when Vault was acquired by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, has now stepped aside. His replacement is Claude Sheer.

In looking toward 2010, Sorenson said in the memo, “We need to beef up our senior management and strengthen our strategic efforts by bringing on someone with different knowledge, skills, and interests whose experience and passion is in growth platforms, strategic partnerships, and Internet deal-making.”

The change was effective on Dec. 7th. Sorenson is now Vault chairman and a consultant.

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

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

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

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

Pro-Stimuli

Yesterday on CNBC, Alcoa CEO-turned-Bush-Treasury-Secretary-turned-Bush-critic Paul O’Neill said that he “never hired a single person because of a government program” and that only demand for a product creates more hiring. “I’m pretty dubious about the government’s ability to actual create more employment,” O’Neill said.

It’s a sentiment that Iannuzzi understands. Sort of. On a spectrum where on one side you have liberal bigger-government Keynesians and on the other side the economic conservatives who miss the Simon Le Bon days of big tax cuts and the Reagan economic boom, the Monster CEO seems somewhere in between to me. Obama stacked a lot of the summit deck with his supporters — like any president would do. From what I can tell, though, Iannuzzi had no previous affiliation with the administration; indeed, he says he was “surprised to be on the docket.”

Iannuzzi agrees with my December 4 comment that America’s corporate taxes, among the world’s highest, are a big problem. On the other hand, he supported the first Obama stimulus. “The economy was in extremely bad shape,” he says. “There was a lot of damage, a lot of concern out there, and I think the stimulus certainly helped. We can always argue about this much vs. that much [spending and tax cuts] but it gave people something to hope for, that there was hope on the way. You can never underestimate the psychological impact. It has provided the stabilization or the creation of some jobs. And a lot of the money has yet to make it out of the system — they wanted to sort of drip it in over time.”

After the conference, an assistant to the president sent Iannuzzi (and others) a copy of President Obama’s recent speech proposing a second stimulus, asking for feedback. Though Iannuzzi doesn’t necessarily agree with every detail, he’s generally supportive. “We can argue about this point or that point,” he says, “but overwhelmingly the things in that speech — the things he said need to be done — are very much on target. The direction is certainly right. If we get it 80% right, it’s definitely the right thing to do.”

Freefall Over

It’s hard to figure out what’s going on with jobs. You’ve already read about some of the good signs. There are more trickling in daily. At LinkUp, for one, new job listings rose 9% in November. And temp hiring, Adecco says, seems to be growing steadily.

On the other hand — the glass-half-empty hand — there’s some re-thinking about the jobs data, with the bottom line being that if you look more closely at the government numbers, unemployment may look a little better, but hiring has not picked up. On top of that, some say a coming commercial real estate implosion and consumers’ newfound love of value will re-doom the U.S. economy.

Iannuzzi’s view is that “things have stabilized,” pointing to the recent Wall Street Journal story saying that Fedex is becoming more optimistic. “Fedex is a great indicator, a great barometer,” he says, adding that U.S. productivity data is, too. Companies will need to hire more folks, as they can’t squeeze their existing staff much more.

“I spend a lot of time talking to my sales force, the people really in the trenches,” he says. “What we hear is a much more positive attitude. Companies are planning to hire, they’re planning to do things, they’re thinking about expansion. They’re still hesitant to pull the trigger, but the conversation is a lot more positive than it had been. I’m hoping we’re sort of at the bottom. I would have to say that if what we are seeing right now is sustained, we are through the worst of it. But there are still an awful lot of people who don’t have jobs.”

Iannuzzi, in fact, believes unemployment is really worse than it appears, if you add on farm workers and young people who aren’t being included in the tallies.

Naturally, Iannuzzi mentions that he “spent over $100,000,000 in the middle of a very sharp recession, creating a match technology in order to connect and match people most accurately to the opportunities out there.” A half a billion has been spent, he says, over the last 2 1/2 years to improve Monster’s products. His point is not that his 6,000-employee outfit is going to save the world, but rather that, going back to the point I made earlier about him not being a full-on big-government guy, the private sector and not the government is ultimately the job creator. “The government can’t fix this all this on its own,” he says.

Iannuzzi mentions the terrrorist attacks on the U.S., and how so many companies in New York came together, regardless of politics and ideology, to help rebuild. He hopes this happens again, and sounds optimistic that the various business, government, and education reps he met in Washington are committed to such a pragmatic approach.

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

Arranged by Stifel Financial Corp., Ferguson shared his take on the economy, the job board business, and competitor Monster during a free-ranging 45 minutes Q &A.

Not surprisingly, Ferguson took a few swipes at the Monster, shrugging off the company’s $100 million investment in a site redesign and, especially, in a new, enhanced resume search.

Matt Ferguson

Despite the chatter about Monster’s Power Resume Search on blogs and elsewhere, Ferguson said he has yet to hear it mentioned by any of CareerBuilder’s customers. What’s more, he suggested the new search tool may be limited in its usefulness, since corporate recruiters do much of their work via an ATS.

“They have not integrated” the new Monster tools with the systems, Ferguson said, adding that for CareerBuilder, “It’s business as usual… We have had a recommend engine for five years.”

He declined to discuss the size of CareerBuilder’s international business, saying he wouldn’t talk about a report the company’s dollar volume was in the $50 million range. Acknowledging that Monster had the lead in Europe — but suggesting that might not be true in most of the rest of the world — Ferguson said CareerBuilder was “closing the gap in traffic.”

However, in the pay-for-performance area, Ferguson was adamant that it wasn’t gaining traction within the job board industry, despite Monster’s suggestion that variable pricing for resumes (at least) could be in the company’s future.

“I don’t see it going to a price per hire,” he said. “It’s still an advertising medium.”

Nor, he said, does he feel the pay-to-post model is threatened by the job search engines.

Services like Indeed, which just celebrated its fifth birthday, and SimplyHired,  collect job listings from across the web and aggregate them so job seekers don’t have to conduct multiple searches. By using freely available applications, content publishers and other job boards can make some or all of the aggregated jobs available on their own site.

The sites have aggressively promoted a pay-for-click pricing model that allows an employer to get higher visibility for their position, while paying only when a job seeker clicks on their post.

While the traffic Indeed and SimplyHired receive have pushed them into the top tier of job sites, Ferguson said, “I don’t know that the aggregators have had much impact.” Their biggest customers, he said, “have been the job boards themselves.”

Social media such as LinkedIn does present a challenge to the traditional job board industry, Ferguson said, noting that CareerBuilder has a partnership deal with Facebook. The site itself doesn’t present a direct threat to job boards, at least not the way LinkedIn does, he added.  But, “social media in aggregate” does.