Forrester Research analyst Zach Thomas suggested that, “By making this acquisition, Monster is putting a real emphasis on search and they believe it will help them leap-frog the competition.” Others were less generous.

The answer has been coming ever since Monster began beta testing Power Resume Search several months ago. A few weeks ago, confident that its $100 million investment was the homerun it expected, Monster turned Power Search live, premiering it during an analyst meeting that was also webcast over a marathon five hours or so.

Tuesday, the company demoed the new search for a group of recruitment consultants and bloggers. And the result was no mere home run; think grand slam.

In a word, Monster’s new Power Resume Search is stunning. Stunning in its simplicity. Stunning in its speed. Stunning in its ability to intuit skills from a title, and to rank and rerank the resulting candidates depending on what skills and other qualities you decide important. Stunning in its potential for changing the job board business.

If you haven’t tried it for yourself, go here and test it out. What you’ll discover is that you can source candidates (if you really want) simply by entering a job title. Look at the results. Add a specific skill or a degree or some other parameter and the ranking changes.

What makes Power Resume Search different — and better — than the typical keyword resume search is that it has the intelligence to cut through the duff. The examples the Monster folks used in the demo were searches for bankers and lawyers. But try your own search, for, say a bookkeeper. Instead of getting a list of hundreds of resumes with bookkeeper in the text, you get a few dozen candidates who are bookkeepers and are most likely to be looking for that kind of work.

Trovix built its job-matching capability around context and concepts. A bookkeeper doesn’t need an understanding of Sarbanes-Oxley; a CFO does. You know that. But unless you exclude candidates with that term in their resume in a standard keyword search, you’re going to get CFO candidates with bookkeeping in their backgrounds along with accountants and … you get the idea.

It’s “the world’s best search engine,” said Monster’s Javid Muhammedali at the beginning of the demo. Google might take issue with the boast, but he is certainly on the mark when he says one of the virtues of Power Resume Search is that it is a search engine “that really helps you stop searching.”

One incidental, yet valuable feature is how a search can unearth skills not listed in the job req, which could or should be. It helps drive the recruiting process forward by arming recruiters with information they can take back to the hiring manager, Muhammedali explained.

It has some other nice touches, including how it presents candidate information and the side-by-side comparison of candidates.

Power Resume Search has a counterpart for job seekers in Power Job Search.

I ran a few job searches on a variety of different titles and got great results, which, in my case, meant fewer, but more accurate results. Monster showed this off during the demo using “business development manager” for the search with the result that all nine listings were specific to the title.

Monster points out that this search has benefits for the employer: the ad visibility improves, as does the likelihood that the applicants will be of higher quality since an ad won’t just turn up in a search because it happens to contain the seeker’s keywords.

Before you go away thinking all your sourcing problems are solved, know that this is a premium service, for which Monster will charge $845 for a two-week access. Right now, it’s a bargain at $260 for three days of searching in an area.

It’s also better at sourcing some types of jobs than others. New job terminology has to be added by Monster, though you can search for a specific keyword in a resume. And it won’t store search histories for OFCCP auditing until early next year.

Even so, it’s a big step. For Monster, it’s a $100 million-plus step. The company spent $72.5 million to acquire Trovix and $30-$35 million more integrating it into the job board. Monster intends to get back its investment and then some.

Muhammedali and Louis Gagnon, SVP Global Products, said the new search opens the door to differential pricing for resume sourcing. It probably won’t be long before Monster puts a higher price on CFOs than on bookkeepers.

Why can’t they do that now? They probably could, but the technical management is a challenge, since the resumes of CFOs and bookkeepers may well be part of the search results in a standard keyword search. But the Trovix powered search is smart enough to know that when you’re looking for a CFO, you don’t want a bookkeeper who reports to a CFO.

Narrowing down results with high precision saves time. Lots of time. And gets better results. That’s worth something.

“Soon hundreds of thousands (and, eventually, millions) of geographical .jobs domain names will come online,” boasts the website, Universe.jobs. It’s home base for what the partners are calling The Dot Jobs Universe, a heady name for the job boards that will officially make their debut in January.

These boards are powered by the DirectEmployers Association, a recruitment focused consortium of employers that includes many of the top brands in the U.S.  The job boards will have occupational or geographic Web addresses or addresses that are a combination of the two.

Some of these are already launched. There’s NewYork.jobs, Boston.jobs, India.jobs, and more. A video on the Dot Jobs Universe site offers other possibilities; FloridaNursing.jobs, for instance.

Employers who are members of the DirectEmployers Association will have their jobs posted to these sites automatically, with their corporate logo, at no cost. Non-members who own a .jobs address will also be permitted to post jobs for free.

There’s no indication on the site of what happens to employers who are neither members of DirectEmployers nor holders of a .jobs address.

When I spoke with Sowash a few weeks ago, he said they might have to pay a posting fee or have some limitations. “The rules haven’t been hammered out,” he said then.

However, the partners are selling premium placements on the sites. At rates ranging from $1,500 to $5,000 an employer can buy a listing position for a year on one or more sites. The more sites you buy, the lower the per site cost.

Placement.jobs explains how it works and takes your order. Members of DirectEmployers get preference in ordering these premium positions. A webinar is scheduled Nov. 17th to detail the .jobs Universe and the premium positioning program.

The relationship between DirectEmployers and Employ Media has raised eyebrows and apparently prompted enough questions that Ray Fassett, VP of operations and policy with Employ Media, felt compelled to blog about it.

“Why has .jobs chosen DirectEmployers Association to lead this project?,” Fassett writes in a blog on the Dot Jobs Universe site. “By offering an answer to this question publicly, I think I can dispel some myths that have come to my attention from commentators in other forums.”

“Let me be clear that .jobs has not provided the DirectEmployers Association with an exclusive. .jobs has not provided DirectEmployers members with an exclusive. So let’s dispel these myths right out of the gate.”

Fassett goes on to list six points that apparently made DirectEmployers an attractive partner. These include its non-profit status, the quality of the management team, its board of directors, and the participation of Fortune 1000 companies.

The argument that there’s no exclusive seems weak, if not plain wrong. Rules on the Employ Media site itself say only company names can be registered; occupational and geographic names are “reserved.” While DirectEmployers doesn’t own the addresses for the new job boards, it manages them, collects the money, and provides special opportunities for its members.

There’s no evidence that other job boards or organizations were invited to offer proposals for making use of the occupational and geographical domains held by Employ Media. Indeed, there’s even some question whether they can be used at all.

Tom Embrescia, CEO of Employ Media, told me that DirectEmployers approached him with the idea for the universe of job boards. The conversation turned earnest about the time Embrescia publicly floated the idea of selling off the reserved names.

When Employ Media and the Society for Human Resource Management, which sponsored the domain, applied for the designation, they said a .jobs address would only be issued in the name of the requesting company. That condition — and others, including adherence to the SHRM code of ethics — was written in the agreement by the approving agency, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Steve Rothberg, founder and president of CollegeRecruiter, wrote in a post, “This new domain was promoted as only being available to employers to promote their own jobs. Clearly that hasn’t been the case.”

However, Gary Rubin, SHRM’s Chief Publishing and E-Media Officer, said in an email, “SHRM is responsible for ensuring that Employ Media is complying with the terms of their charter with ICANN… The names that you have cited such as atlanta.jobs and sales.jobs appear to be in compliance with the terms of the charter.”

ICANN’s Chief gTLD Registry Liaison Craig Schwartz told me in an email, “…it’s not possible for ICANN to police every name in every registry and more importantly it’s not our responsibility to do so. What ICANN is responsible for is to ensure that its contracted parties are in compliance with their agreements. To that end, I will be following up on your inquiry (about the appropriateness of the use of geographical and occupational terms) with the appropriate staff at ICANN.”

I put the same question to Embrescia: How is it Employ Media can allow these domains to be used, when the agreement with ICANN says, “These (geographical and occupational terms) restricted lists are in addition to the restriction that .jobs domains comprise only trade names or commonly-known names?”

He didn’t respond to the question. But in the blog post on the Universe.jobs site, Fassett writes, “The question for us has been, since inception, how can geographic and occupational names exist in .jobs to serve the interests of the global human resource management community? I admit many did not realize this question was out there…

“We are working in cooperation with SHRM. We are approaching our community as ICANN expects us to do. I also fully admit there is not a single definitive answer to this question. But there are answers. Our obligation is to select one or more.”

Purello’s departure marks the third change in the CEO office since Mullarkey left the job in 2006. His successor, Deepak Gupta, was gone less than a year later, succeeded by in February 2008 by Purello, who held general manager positions with Workstream subsidiary 6FigureJobs and the career networks business. Purello had been with the company since 2003.

The company has also gone through two CFOs and had a complete change in every C-level position. This morning’s announcement said Andrew Hinchliff was rejoining the company as senior vice president of North American sales. He previously held the job from 2001-2003.

Workstream hasn’t made a profit at least since it began reporting its numbers publicly in 1999. For the most recent quarter, it lost $360,000 on sales of $4.2 million. That compares to a $2.1 million loss on sales of $5.6 million for the same period in 2008.

(The company’s fiscal year runs from June 1 through May 31, so the most recent quarter is the company’s first for the 2010 fiscal year.)

In its last fiscal year, Workstream lost $4.9 million compared to the $52.6 million loss for the 2008 fiscal year. That loss included a $28 million hit for a writedown of goodwill.

An expected merger with human capital management and outsource payroll company Empagio fell apart in mid-June 2008.

The financial turmoil has taken a toll on Workstream’s stock price, which sank to an all-time low of  2 cents a share last December. Though it recovered and rose to a year high of 48 cents in May, today’s price is 28 cents a share, down a penny on the day.

The stock trades on the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board, an exchange typically for very low-priced stocks,  following its delisting by NASDAQ in the spring for failing to meet exchange requirements.

Despite all that, Workstream’s products have won praise from HR analysts. TalentCenter 7.0, released in fall 2007, was called a “truly integrated” HR platform and “not just a bunch of disparate applications” by Leighanne Levensaler, principal analyst with Bersin & Associates.

Job board 6FigureJobs won a place on Peter Weddle’s User’s Choice popularity list this year. It was also named a top 100 job site by Weddle.

And its Workstream Compensation won HRarchitect’s “Beauty Pageant” in April for compensation management systems.

In assuming the CEO position, Mullarkey said in a prepared statement that, “It is my firm belief that this company, now 10 years of age, has significant opportunities for substantial growth. The Board of Directors has asked me to return as our leader in order to accelerate the timelines for this growth, and for a return to long-term profitability, which our shareholders so rightfully expect.”

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

Monster eked out the small profit by tightening expenses. Salary costs were off almost $24 million as compared to the same quarter last year. Marketing and promotion was down $10 million, and another $12 million came out of administrative costs.

Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi said in the press release announcing the results, “We maintained strict financial discipline during the third quarter while preserving our financial strength.”

During the conference call with analysts, held before the market opening this morning, Iannuzzi reiterated his emphasis on controlling expenses, but warned that he expected little improvement in revenue or profit during the current quarter. Sales, he said, would be flat or slightly down. That’s typical of the October to December quarter for all recruitment advertising; employers cut back on hiring during this period to limit year-end expenses and also because of holiday distractions.

Monster’s stock price was off about 4 percent in afternoon trading, selling for just under $16 a share.

Bloomberg News blamed the sales decline for the stock drop, quoting Mark Marcon, a Milwaukee-based analyst for Robert W. Baird & Co., saying, “They are one of the few employment-related companies that reported worse-than-expected revenue.”

CareerBuilder, a privately owned company, reported its North American sales at $135 million, the same revenue the company reported for the previous quarter. CareerBuilder voluntarily reports only its North American revenue, but not international sales or any expenses.

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

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

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

Assuming job seekers ever become aware of the existence of a domain offering only jobs and career information, then those looking for opportunities in a specific geography — Atlanta, for example — need only enter that area and the extension .jobs. Those looking for an occupation-specific opportunity enter the title and the .jobs extension.

Members of the DirectEmployers consortium can request the creation of any site name they think will be of benefit, said Sowash, suggesting an oil company might want to use  refinery.jobs for its openings.

“It won’t belong to any company, but if a company wants us to offer a name, we can. The registrar isn’t selling these domains. They still have them,” Sowash explained. “We can light up every combination someone can think of.”

Tom Embrescia, CEO of Employ Media, the administrator and manager — registrar, in Internet parlance — of the .jobs domain, said the venture with DirectEmployers is a “great way to see what the world wants.”

The domain — technically a sponsored top-level domain — was pitched to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) by Employ Media and its partner the Society for Human Resource Management. The proposal, approved in 2005, argued that a .jobs extension would make it easy for job seekers to find the career site of individual companies and would provide a modicum of protection against scam job postings.

Companies could only get a .jobs address by using the company name and by pledging to adhere to the SHRM code of ethics.

Although about 15,000 companies signed up for the .jobs address, job seekers are largely unaware of its existence. As a consequence, most .jobs addresses get little traffic.

Building sites on the “reserved” occupational and geographic addresses, says Embrescia, is a marketing experiment. “It’s a beta test,” he says, explaining later in the conversation, “We need to build consumer awareness that these (addresses) exist.”

Besides providing the technology to power the job boards, DirectEmployers’ dozens of Fortune 500 and 1000 members will be encouraged to promote them. “Now I’ve got Fortune 1000 companies working,” Embrescia beamed.

Besides members of DirectEmployers, other firms with a .jobs domain address will also be able to post their jobs to the new sites.

For member companies posting jobs to Job Central, the additional placement on geographic and occupational sites will be automatic, Sowash told me. They are also likely to get a premium posting position.

Non-members, who own a .jobs address, might have to post their jobs manually or pay a fee for automation.

Others who want to post to these sites might have to pay a posting fee, or have some other limitation.

“The rules haven’t been hammered out,” says Sowash. There’s also a 40-company advisory group providing input on site names, practices, and feedback on the design and functionality of the job boards, which, Sowash is quick to point out, don’t look like job boards. “These are not going to look like your father’s job board,” he vows.

I asked Sowash whether he and DirectEmployers expected push back or opposition to its exclusive deal with Employ Media. “Yeah,” he acknowledged, “we’ll probably hear from some people who are not too happy.” But he didn’t anticipate resistance from the job boards, most of whom are struggling in the economy and couldn’t take on a project of this magnitude.

Bob Etheridge, a co-founder of JobCircle and a former VP of another job board, GettheJob, says he suspects “job board owners are walking the fence, trying to determine are they friends or are they foes.”

There’s suspicion now that Employ Media is not only a names registrar, but “they are getting in the publisher business.”

Those quoted here and others who talked with me either for background or anonymously all supported DirectEmployers for its aggressiveness and initiative.

DirectEmployers approached Employ Media with a proposal almost a year ago, but Embrescia said he wasn’t ready then. Conversation resumed about the time Embrescia publicly floated the idea of selling off the reserved names.

“They had a good plan and when we were ready we talked with them,” Employ Media’s Embrescia said. Their facility with the technology, flexibility, and non-profit status, and their enthusiasm were convincing factors.

Still, a top executive with a leading job board who asked not to be named, said he initially was upset over the lack of openness in the process of developing the joint venture. Now, though, he doubts the new sites will do anything more than simply add to the already cluttered job board environment.

Coming at it from a different perspective, Gerry Crispin, CareerXroads co-founder and a leading recruitment consultant, complained that the latest turn means an end to “the embedded, implied promise” that all the jobs on a .jobs site would be legitimate and are those of the company whose name appeared before the extension.

“It no longer has the same aspirational goals,” laments Crispin, a member of the original SHRM advisory group that supported the .jobs creation. “It’s still milk, but there’s no guarantee it’s pasteurized.”

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

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

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

There, The Guardian reports that the site is now secure and adds, “It is clear that only a minority of Guardian Jobs users are at risk. Some of the data which appears to have been stolen is up to two years old. We have emailed the approximately half a million users whose data may have been compromised. This is out of the total of 10,328,290 unique users the site has per calendar year. The USA jobs site has not been affected.”

In an FAQ, The Guardian recommends users whose accounts were compromised obtain fraud protection at their own expense.

“The Guardian, in common with our users is also a victim of this crime and we deeply regret that this breach has occurred. We believe our technology and security measures were more than compliant but regrettably the threat from criminal hackers is continually evolving. Whilst our investigation is continuing we suggest that each individual should decide whether to follow the guidance recommended by the police and meet any associated costs.”

The Guardian’s British site is powered by Madgex Job Board Software. The U.S. job site is run by Indeed.com.

The Guardian says that no personal accounts were accessed, but other, potentially sensitive, information was. “Job application data, material such as covering letters, and CVs. We have no reason to believe that any financial or bank data was compromised in this incident.”

Police are investigating the access. No technical details have been released, however some technical publications have offered possible methods.

This is the second major security breach of a British job board this year. Monster’s UK site was hacked in January and some 4.5 million records were stolen.

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

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

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

Recruiters now get the results they asked for, as well as a tab that allows them to see candidates who first submitted a resume more than a year ago and haven’t been back since. The passive candidate results have all been filtered by Dice to make sure the email addresses are still current.

Why pick a year instead of six months? For the same reason eggs are sold by the dozen and reunions are celebrated in 5- and 10-year increments. “When you talk to people you hear they want to go a year back,” Silver explains. “It’s a natural calendar thing.”

Dice’s new feature is a curious twist on the usual recruiter pursuit of the passive candidate, a subject that’s come in for some ethical give and take in this economy.

Job boards typically don’t see a lot of searches for candidates a year or more old.  Job board sourcing is almost by definition a search for candidates who can fill a req now, so limiting results to 60 or 90 days is fairly typical. Job board denizens are, by definition, active job seekers. Thus aged resumes are inventory that is just not all that valuable, one reason the big boards encourage candidates to regularly update their profiles and resumes.

By offering up vintage candidates who now may have another year or more of experience and maybe even stronger skills, Dice is encouraging recruiters to look at job boards a little differently — as a rich repository of passive candidates, which may be why there is no current plan to offer up fresh resumes to recruiters searching for older ones.

It’s actually quite a clever approach:  Give recruiters exactly what they want, but tease them with easy access to vintage candidates they wouldn’t otherwise see. A value-add that may raise the value of aging inventory, and benefit once-active candidates.

What do recruiters who have tried it say about the new feature? It’s “yummy,” Silver told me. Seriously.

Tracked

This new site is not so much tool as resource. It got a positive review by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch the other day. He described the newly out of stealth site as “LinkedIn meets Yahoo Finance, on lots of steroids.”

At its center, Tracked.com is a financial information site, so it gives you all the usual data elements you would expect. It’s what comes next that makes Tracked more valuable. Besides the public companies, Tracked has bits and pieces on many private companies, too. The more public the private company, the more data available.

The LinkedIn analogy comes from the executives and key personnel that are part of a company profile. Tracked’s depth on them, however, doesn’t match what LinkedIn or ZoomInfo offer — not yet, anyway.  But as it layers on a network and a commenting capability, its content sources reach beyond what you are likely to find searching the public databases.

And keep in mind, Tracked.com is free.

To get the full value out of Tracked, you need to register and establish an account. Then you get to create tracking lists of companies, people, industries, and the like. This is an important difference from Yahoo Finance, which, while useful for top news, doesn’t offer near the depth of Tracked.com.

Tracked.com isn’t likely to replace your usual research sites any time soon. But its founder Mike Yavonditte has broad experience in the interactive world. In 2007 he sold ad service Quigo.com to AOL and a year later began work on Tracked.com. His progress and plans for the financial service so impressed Union Square Ventures, the New York City VC firm, that it kicked in heartily to the $11.5 million Tracked has so far raised.

The company reported earning 5 cents a share or $3 million versus the average 2 cents a share analysts had estimated it would report for the quarter ended Sept. 31.  Though revenue was down a third to $26.7 million from last year’s $39.6 million, expenses were cut by 28 percent. The $3 million profit was just under half the $6.4 million Dice earned for the same quarter in 2008.

Revenue at the DCS unit which includes the company’s flagship Dice.com and also ClearanceJobs.com, declined from $27.2 million to $19.5 million. The company also took a $900,000 hit from an unfavorable exchange rate during part of the year, particularly in its eFinancial Careers operations, which have a strong overseas presence.

Despite the tough economy, company executives predicted Dice will do better for the year than analysts expect.

Officials predict revenue of $25 million for the current quarter and $108.3 million for the year. A Thomson Reuters survey of analysts expects the company’s 12 month revenue to be closer to $106 million.

In announcing the financial results, company Chairman, President, and CEO Scot Melland said, “The tone of our customer conversations improved during the third quarter as some customers and prospects became more optimistic about the business climate. This mild improvement is not consistent across geographies or customer segments, but it is encouraging.”

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

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

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

As a human-mediated job search service, RiseSmart doesn’t have a lot of competition. JobSerf, coincidentally also founded in Texas, searches and also applies for jobs on behalf of candidates. It charges either $49 or $98 a week, depending on the number of hours candidates want.

RiseSmart, however, packages Job Search Concierge with phone consultation, resume writing, a bio/profile for posting to social and business networking sites, and some career coaching to provide a low cost outplacement service it calls Transition Concierge.

Unlike classic outplacement services that provide a mix of  counseling, coaching, and personal career consultation, RiseSmart’s focus is on getting the outplaced worker a new job as quickly as possible.

Since the start of the recession, its target market has been companies with layoffs and staff reductions. RiseSmart says its client list now includes some of the Fortune 500.

The company got its first seed money of $1.5 million after its launch in 2007 from a group of recruitment industry heavyweights including Craig Stamm, former CFO at CareerBuilder.com and Headhunter.net, Mark Hamdan, founder and CEO of HRsmart, and Louis Ramery, senior vice president of relationship marketing at Sears Holdings Corporation.

Its first A round in June 2008 brought it $3 million from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).

NVP’s Venkat Mohan, who joined the RiseSmart board last year, said in a press release announcing the new round of investment, “RiseSmart has grown rapidly … The company has gone the extra mile to provide an excellent customer experience to both corporate clients and transitioning workers — and that has paid off in word of mouth and new business referrals.”

“While we still expect soft results for the next few quarters, we are becoming increasingly confident in improvements made to Monster’s product offering and competitive positioning, which we believe bodes well for the company as the economy improves,” analyst Monica DiCenso wrote in a note accompanying her upgrade of the stock from neutral to “overweight.”

(In stocks, unlike body mass, an overweight recommendation is good for the company. It means the analyst issuing the recommendation believes the stock price will rise.)

On the strength of the recommendation, Monster’s stock jumped $1.25 Thursday, before closing at $18.07. It ended Wednesday at $17.10.

At midday in New York today, Monster’s stock was at $18.06.

DiCenso, who put a price target of $24 a share on the stock, said in her note to investors that she believes the company “is in a better position today than in recent years to regain some market share in the U.S. and continue its international expansion.”

Monster’s revenue from its international operations has been growing steadily over the last few years. It accounts for 40 percent of the company’s 2009 revenue as of the last report. (The company will issue its financial report for the third quarter on Oct. 29. Yahoo Finance says analyst consensus is that Monster will report $216.7 million in revenues and break even on expenses.)

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

Now, the details:

Allan Schweyer, executive director of the Human Capital Institute for most of the last six years, has left to become a principal in the non-profit Center for Human Capital Innovation.

CHCI is a government human capital consulting firm that says its mission it to “improve the return on people throughout government.” It describes itself as a “trusted advisor, think-tank, thought leader, educator, analyst, and coach dedicated to advancing the science of talent management for organizations in the government sector.”

Author of Talent Management Systems (Wiley & Sons, 2004) and a contributor to HCI’s Talent Management Systems (Human Capital Institute Press, 2009), Schweyer writes and speaks widely on human capital management. In addition to his post as executive director, Schweyer also headed HCI’s extensive research division.

A labor economist by education, the resident of Montreal was previously a consultant with Reed Business Information and senior researcher, analyst, and consultant with HR.com. Schweyer was named one of the 100 top influencers in HR by John Sumser, who is writing a series of profiles for RecruitingBlogs.com.

***

Those of you who attended the Spring 2008 edition of ERE’s EXPO may recall a presentation by an entrepreneur with an ambitious mission: to help people “figure out their next career steps using analysis of publicly available resumes and profiles, community powered advice, and personality assessments.”

Co-founder and CEO of Path 101, Charlie O’Donnell talked about its potential when he took the stage during the Expo’s Startup Panel and on occasions after would energetically describe the plans for the site, including how building a community would make its career mapping tools second to none.

But building a useful database by combing millions of resumes takes time, and then there’s the issue of developing a business model around it.

Meanwhile, the giants of the industry were making their own career tools available for free. Monster launched a major revamp in January complete with a career resource center that resembled much of what Path 101 was to be. That took a good bit of the wind out of the sails for Path 101 as it entered its public alpha stage in the spring. If O’Donnell or his colleagues, co-founder Alex Lines and developer Hilary Mason were discouraged, they never said so.

Until now.

In a post on his blog, This is going to be BIG, O’Donnell says he is taking a new job as Entrepreneur-in-Residence with First Round Capital. That will be his full-time job. Lines and Mason will also be moving to other positions.

However, Path 101 will continue. He, Links, and Mason will manage it during their off-hours and intend to launch the site’s first revenue-producing features soon. He candidly admits, Path 101 “isn’t going to be one of the shoot-the-lights-out deals, but I’m cautiously optimistic that it isn’t going to become a zero either — and may even have some upside.”

***

CareerBuilder announced a partnership with Yahoo to power the company’s career site for Ireland and the United Kingdom.

The deal sends traffic from Yahoo’s combined UK and Ireland site to Careerbuilder’s UK job board. The careers channel link on the Yahoo is already in place.

At one point, Fish4Jobs powered Yahoo’s career center in a deal dating back to 2004.

Although Yahoo owns HotJobs, which is the company’s job site in the United States, its overseas properties have always been able to strike their own deals. In such cases, a site like Yahoo essentially sells its traffic. Depending on the traffic potential, such deals can command substantial sums. The terms of the deal weren’t announced.

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

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

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

Now, just about two years after Goldberg announced he would leave the company, Jobster has been reborn as a recruiting services provider with the name Recruiting.com, which it adopted in the spring. Jobster.com lives on as a classic job board where you can pay to post.

The product now that is the hope of the investors who have poured some $55 million into Recruiting.com nee Jobster is a sourcing, searching, and organizational tool. It’s an ATS without the jobs; candidates only.

The key job of Recruiting.com is to quickly search your talent database (Talent Bank), which can be imported from multiple sources, including an ATS. A recruiter drives — there’s no job matching here. The process relies on keyword combinations or Boolean search to produce relevancy ranked lists of candidates. These prospects can be organized into folders named as the user desires.

Pull up a prospect and you can see from where they were sourced and see if there’s any contact history. You can add a note yourself.

Now what does this sound like? Say it with me, “ATS.” Or, if you prefer, “talent acquisition system.”

Jeff Dixon, the VP of product who handled the demo, was insistent that Recruiting.com is not an ATS. For one, he says, there are no jobs in the system. And without a req and the candidates associated with it, there is no tracking.

In that sense, he’s quite right. He’s also right that many of the systems on the market do a poor job of sourcing. Some of course, do a fine job. The bigger, beefier, and costlier ones can search internal and external candidate databases, social networks, and the web at large, creating lists of prospects and handle the contact management. Just this week a new tool from Jobvite was released that can do the same.

Dixon, though, says Recruiting.com’s market research revealed that even users of these systems find them intimidating. That’s my word, not his. What he actually said was, “What you hear (from recruiters) is ‘My ATS is a necessary evil’.”

Recruiters either can’t source from their ATS (very unlikely), find it too difficult (much more likely), don’t know how (?), or simply don’t. The latter is my choice for the most probable explanation for a datapoint from Dixon that one of Recruiting.com’s test companies discovered that 40 percent of its hires sourced externally were already in the ATS.

Think of the waste, even if the percentage was half that.

Considering that many companies have decimated their recruiter ranks, Recruiting.com may have just caught the tide of another trend, not as glamorous as social recruiting, but eminently more marketable in this economy: efficiency.

“Our tool is much more of a how-do-we-make-the-lives-of-recruiters-easier approach,” Dixon said.

My demo didn’t cover all the ground, but compared to some ATS search demos I’ve seen, Recruiting.com is simple to use. Once, that is, you have built the Talent Bank index. Some ATS databases are easier to port to Recruiting.com than others. Inbound resumes still go through your ATS or can be processed by a Recruiting.com connection, which I didn’t have time to see.

Capturing and parsing data from LinkedIn I did see and it was a snap. Dixon told me it was equally easy for resumes found elsewhere on the web. As a pure sourcing tool, it’s not as versatile as some of what’s coming on the market now, but it does the job.

Oddly, Recruiting.com shies away from the social networks. Certainly the unpredictability of formats and the content, as well as the accessibility issues are all, undoubtedly, part of the reason. But Recruiting.com CEO Jeff Seely’s belief that social networking is not  recruiting’s “secret sauce,” as he put it, is a factor.

“I just don’t get it,” he candidly said during a conversation earlier this week. “I’m a reluctant participant in Facebook. I’m not on Twitter.” He believes that the social networks will never be fertile ground for recruiters.

So in the year after he assumed the CEO job, he decided the company’s best bet was focusing on products to improve business performance. With Recruiting.com, that’s what he has done. It’s a bet that needs $55 million just to cover.

You can see Recruiting.com for yourself if you are heading to Chicago next week for HR Tech. The company will officially unveil the new product at the show.

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

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

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

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

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

Riffing on the popular CSI franchise, one of the new commercials has a detective’s tag-along friend mucking up the evidence in a crime scene. Another has a job shadower pulling on surgical gloves anticipating he’ll assist in what the video implies will be a proctology exam as the patient frets and the doctors says no.

“Until there’s take your friend to work day,” says the voiceover, “There’s career mapping.”

Adweek called the videos “mildly amusing.” They’re better than that, even if they’re not knee-slapping hysterical, which, considering the number of desperate job seekers out there, might not have been entirely appropriate.

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

So what gives?

Why upend the most common job board model (where employers pay to post jobs and view resumes)? Listen to Chris Anderson, in his recent book Free: “In a marketplace with low marginal costs and many competitors, (free) feels inevitable for most digital goods.” (For a roundup of the arguments pro and con surrounding this assertion, go here).

Hmm? I guess I wasn’t the only one who choked on that: “I do agree with Anderson and Godin’s underlying point, the “freemium” model — giving away some content while offering a more valuable experience for a premium — but it’s neither a new idea nor a terribly innovative one,” said Guy LeCharles Gonzalez in a recent blog post. “The containers may change and get cheaper, but it’s the content that gives them value, and the creation and distribution of quality content isn’t free.”

Freedom’s Just Another Word for …

Aha! So ‘free’ really isn’t ‘free’, at least as far as Anderson and his followers are concerned. ‘Free’ is another word for ‘roping them in’ with a free job post, or a test run on the resume database. I imagine most job sites are already offering some version of ‘free’.

But what about the true believers: those jobs sites that are completely free to the employer? How can they exist — and can they thrive? Let’s take a look at some of the factors involved:

• Super low barriers to entry: If you have 20 minutes, you can set up your own job board with SimplyHired’s Jobomatic. They take care of everything except the traffic — that, you must supply. What could be easier? Well …
• Social media: Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media channels have yet to settle on their business models, so in the meantime, recruiters can use them just like job boards (ok, kind of dimwitted and poorly focused job boards). Cost? Nothing much but your valuable time.
• Inadequacy at the top: The big three job boards continue to display a lack of initiative in solving employers problems. Results? Recruiters continue to turn to niche job boards and social media.

Each of these has played a role in the growth of free job boards. But you have to ask…

Can ‘Free’ Really Stay Free?

Is it really plausible for a ‘free’ board to stay that way? Can employer really expect an eternal ‘free ride’?

I doubt it. Any job site worth its salt has to fulfill one basic function: it must provide a targeted, high-quality stream of job seekers who respond to employer offerings. Generating and maintaining this audience costs money. So too does the operation and improvement of the site itself. Jobomatic and its ilk are limited in what they can provide to seekers and employers. Maybe that will change. But again, I’m betting that change will come with a price tag.

Those sites relying on job seeker revenues will always be limited because the majority of seekers have been trained over the past 15 years to expect access at no charge. That’s a hard lesson to unlearn (even a site like TheLadders also garners revenue from recruiters).

Where does that leave the ‘not-free’ job boards? Right where they were: scrambling to maintain relevance and value in a tumultuous recruiting world. The best (and a few lucky ones) will survive.

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

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

“ValuateMySite.com uses different resources on the web combined with mathematical and statistical methods to estimate how many visits a website has. The site also analyzes available information on the Internet about a site to come up with a reasonable estimate for the site’s worth.”

Valuate My Site is one of several website valuation calculator sites that turn up with a Google search. MyWebsiteWorth values HotJobs at a more reasonable $500 million. Over at BuildReciprocalLinks.com CareerBuilder is worth $544 million.  Finally, YourWebsiteValue puts Monster’s valuation at $7.8 million.

If it isn’t obvious that these valuations bear no resemblance to reality, consider that Monster Worldwide has a market cap of about $2.1 billion. That’s not necessarily a selling price, but it is a valuation based on what real people are actually paying per share.

Neither CareerBuilder nor HotJobs trade publicly, so a similar calculation can’t be done. However, when Gannett, one of four partners who own CareerBuilder, bought an additional 10 percent interest from the Tribune Company last year, it set CareerBuilder’s value at $1.35 billion.

Why would ValueMySite so badly skew the valuations of the three biggest U.S. job boards? Probably because the site’s algorithms can’t clearly distinguish Yahoo’s traffic from HotJobs and thus reports that the job site has something like 6.7 billion pageviews a day, while Monster gets 6.4 million and Careerbuilder gets 10.7 million.

comScore, which collects traffic data from actual server reports and proprietary counting methods, ranks CareerBuilder well ahead of HotJobs in unique visitors, a metric that actually has a bigger significance than pageviews.

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

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

The backdating plan worked by granting employees options at the lowest price during a particular period, guaranteeing that they would be “in the money.”

Prosecutors claimed during Treacy’s federal trial that he made as much as $24 million from the 450,000 backdated options they said he was given. They asked for a 12 1/2 year sentence.

Treacy’s attorneys, presenting some 200 letters from friends and colleagues, asked for leniency, saying no executive in any other backdating case in the U.S. has been sentenced to more than 21 months.

The backdating scandal forced Monster in 2006 to restate its earnings for prior years by $271.9 million. That changed the company’s financial picture for several years, most significantly for 2001 when the initial $69 million profit was restated to be $3.4 million.

Treacy was given until Oct. 20th to report to prison.

First, the headlines:

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

E-Verify

This is the electronic employment verification program the U.S. Department of Homeland Security operates. If you haven’t used it, chances are you eventually will, since the government is slowly expanding its mandatory use and has made its voluntary use very attractive to employers.

The program is free and (mostly) insulates employers from legal sanctions for hiring undocumented workers if they have verified I-9 information through E-Verify.

Come Sept. 8th, federal contractors will be required to use E-Verify if their contracts exceed $100,000. Their subs, if they earn more than $3,000, will also have to use E-Verify. President George Bush first ordered the program in 2008, but between presidential extensions and a lawsuit, the implementation deadline kept getting pushed until Sept. 8th, a date expected to actually stick this time.

BrightFuse

This is CareerBuilder’s version of Facebook for business. Instead of content a job seeker may come to regret, BrightFuse offers a place for your face in a pantsuit. It’s a professional profile that can be used in place of a standard resume. Recruiters will like it since the data is neatly structured, making it conveniently available for digital capture.

It clearly shows a LinkedIn influence, what with the section for contacts and another for recommendations and the ability to create and join interest groups. It also has taken some cues from Facebook, allowing user to add Twitter feeds and RSS feeds to blogs. There’s also a tab for a portfolio to showcase work and a way to export elements of a BrightFuse profile to Facebook. Though with the CareerBuilder survey showing just how fast employers have embraced online backgrounding for candidates, some job seekers may want to keep their BrightFuse profile separate.

SixFigures

I can’t tell you much about this relaunch, except to report what was in the press release I got the other day. Here’s what it says about the site that may already be live when you read this:

“Due to growing demand by high salary earners for more specific career and industry related content, Six Figures is meeting demand by catering for additional aspects of a professional’s career, with career development, directorships, education and industry news forming a part of its extended offering. “

According to the PR, SixFigures has about 25,000 members, a seemingly small number until you consider that the entire labor force in Australia is only 11.2 million. How many of them pay the AU$66 a year wasn’t disclosed.

Incidentally, since the press release came from Australia, which is on the other side of the International Date Line, it wasn’t clear until today whether the new site’s launch date was Aug. 21 in Australia or in the U.S. It’s today, using the North and South American time zones.

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

UpMo

Because this is a subscription-based service, there is just so far you can get before you must enter a credit card. From what we could see and from what its founder and CEO, Promise Phelon, says, UpMo is a career guidance resource that seems especially well-tuned to the young professional who will work for upward mobility (ergo, the UpMo name).

UpMo takes the pulse of your current employment readiness by assessing such things as the quality and breadth of your network. How often are you in touch with the people who can help you? It also compares you against a representative role model, charting your career against the hypothetical (or actual) individual whose career path you want to emulate. Like a good financial planning program, you can do “what-ifs” with your career to see how it changes the trajectory. Write a book; become a conference speaker; get an advanced degree are among the multiple choices. Of course, if you can’t write or speak, then those wouldn’t be good choices for you. UpMo is realistic about life, but it’s not going to tell you what you can or can’t do; only how actually doing it will make a difference.

Once you’ve got something you like — and can actually do — then UpMo creates a career plan so detailed it will break out the tasks into calendared increments and remind you to make that networking phone call or send a courtesy email. Ignoring it, of course, is optional. But the program is built on networking principles espoused by every career professional, so if you can keep to the schedule (which, by the way, you set) then that career timeline UpMo created for you can be achieved.

ResumeFit

You need an accountant who can handle all the financial details of your business, from cash accounting to preparing the tax returns for your growing, but still small business. So you post the job and get 200 resumes in the first 24 hours. As you work your way through the resumes, you quickly realize that it’s easy to weed out the obvious nos, but the resumes in the pile of possibles are all beginning to sound alike. Here is where ResumeFit fits in.

As Managing Partner Scott Runkle explains, “Our goals are simple near term: help a job seeker better differentiate themselves from their peers, and help the employers better understand how the job seeker may fit the role they are applying for.”

ResumeFit helps differentiate candidates by providing an assessment of their “soft skills,” those personality traits and work habits that help define “fit” and which can mean the difference between success and failure on the job. The assessment used by ResumeFit is called the WorkPlace Big Five Profile, which is based on the Five Factor Model of Personality. Job seekers take the assessment, then pay to make it available to employers.

It’s not a replacement for job-specific testing or those designed to measure how well a candidate fits within a very specific corporate culture, but for the majority of jobs and companies, a ResumeFit profile is a way to differentiate among candidates.

“For many small to midsize companies who may not even use assessments, the employer gains valuable insight into a candidate they may not otherwise gain from just the resume alone,” Runkle says.

ResumeFit offers a corporate screening service, in addition to the job seeker assessment. Role Fit Screener compares and ranks candidates against the profile of a company’s best workers.

BigDogHub

This is a site with a name to which we’re partial, even if it is misleading in that it has nothing at all to do with big dogs, literal or figurative. Instead, this is one of the new crop of profile sites, where resumes are enhanced with videos, pictures, personal data, and so forth. Ditto for employer sites, where the sample company profile is of founder John Hughes’ search and recruitment company.

The biggest differentiator here is that employers can post questions to the profiles. As the questions and answers grow, recruiters get a clearer picture of a candidate and their abilities and skills. Candidates get to do the same to employers.

Because of the nature of the site, job postings and profiles are only available to registered members.

Jobaphile$

Another “me too” job auction site, this one appealing to students, is built around the eBay model. Employers post a job; job seekers bid. Employers choose the bid they prefer based on price and the bidders qualifications.

What makes this different from the pack of other freelance and project sites in the world? Nothing that we can see. Yet we’re hesitant to dismiss it entirely, since Jobaphiles was nurtured by startup incubator Dreamit Ventures. It’s also gotten a bit of gee whiz publicity from Fox and an NBC affiliate.

The auction job genre keeps trying to gain a foothold outside the freelance world, but the concept has never taken hold. Instead, those college student jobs like tutor, nanny, research assistant, and so on gravitate to the “Gigs” section of Craigslist.

The money comes from IDG Ventures and Foundation Capital who, together with investments from News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media, Garage Technology Ventures, and individual investors, brings to $22.3 million the capital Simply Hired has raised.

Today’s announcement also made a point of saying the jobs site is cash flow positive and has been for a year. The privately held company also announced that it has seen its revenue grow for each of the last 16 quarters.

Its East Coast rival, Indeed.com, is also profitable, and both job sites now rank among the top-10 most trafficked job sites in the U.S. That’s no mean feat considering neither existed five years ago. Even accepting that it’s a lot easier for Simply Hired to achieve a 209 percent traffic jump, as it did in 2008, than it is for CareerBuilder, Monster, or HotJobs to do the same because of their much higher starting point, the year-in and year-out growth for Indeed and Simply Hired has been nothing short of remarkable.

Nielsen says Simply Hired had 3.8 million unique visitors in January, while Indeed had 5.8 million. A year before, they had 1.2 and 3.3 million respectively. comScore’s numbers, for the June to June period, tell a similar, if somewhat less robust, story of annual growth.

Nor is this a matter of simply buying traffic. Neither site had the investment dollars to match what CareerBuilder did in 2003 when it outbid Monster and signed traffic deals with AOL and MSN that were worth up to $265 million. Instead, both Simply Hired and Indeed have put together networks of redistribution partners who carry some or all of the job listings the two sites cull from the Internet. In fact, it is because of the listings provided by the aggregators that some job boards have any listings at all.

The success the job search sites have had — especially in making sales — suggests that the predictions about the demise of job boards are overblown. When Indeed and Simply Hired first made their appearance, the obvious question was, “How does a site that aggregates listings from others and makes them available for free survive?” Both sites — and the handful of others out there doing the same thing — have answered that question with pay-per-click listings, employer traffic drivers, and some minor additional ad forms.

While neither company releases financial information, at least at Simply Hired the revenue is sufficiently ample to fund a staff of 50, according to the announcement. The new investment dollars will allow for increasing that to 80 this year.

Both Indeed and Simply Hired have expanded beyond the U.S. Simply Hired now operates in 13 countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Some of the $4.6 million will fund further expansion.

Indeed has a presence in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain,  Switzerland, and the UK.

“Job search is a global problem, and Simply Hired is committed to reaching both active and passive job seekers globally at both SimplyHired.com and at other online destinations through our network,” said Gautam Godhwani, co-founder and CEO at Simply Hired. “IDG Ventures enables Simply Hired to continue to expand its international footprint with additional resources and facilitates our relationship with the global network of 450 IDG online properties.”

In fact, it may well be the partner properties that IDG brings to the table that will, in the long run, prove more valuable than its money. Broadening the reach of Simply Hired not only means more and diverse traffic, but it provides an appeal to multinational employers whose hiring is global and whose choices to reach overseas markets are nowhere near as extensive as they are for the U.S. market.

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

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

Ron Shapiro, assistant program director for Hot92.3 — the signature name for the station — said that offering the program was a natural. The station already had job listings and resources on its website and promoted events on the air. “It was a logical step for us to do it,” explained Shapiro, who handles the logistics of the program.

The program got off to a slow start, he says, suspecting that the concept was foreign to most people. But now that they hear the resumes, the number of people wanting to participate has grown into a “nice, steady stream.”

Job seekers selected each week get sample scripts, but write their own copy. It sometimes takes a few tries before the recording is just right. “If they sound nervous, I’ll tell them to take a couple of breaths and we’ll do another take,” Shapiro adds.

It’s too soon to tell how effective the program will be at landing jobs. But two of the participants have gotten interviews, Shapiro says. More may have been contacted by employers or recruiters who can look over the candidate resumes before deciding to reach out to them. The station isn’t tracking the results, depending on the job seekers themselves to report their success.

Unfortunately for this article, the station doesn’t post the actual radio spot on its website. But here’s a sample. Having heard two or three of them, we can report that they sound professional, clear, and to the point; much like a good elevator speech shared with hundreds of thousands of listeners.

Click here to listen to the station online.