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In the movie “The Matrix” there’s a scene where Laurence Fishburne says to Keanu Reeves, “The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes.”

That’s basically the premise of big data, where the potential in recruiting is in getting good candidates to respond. keep reading…

The long-standing legal dispute over the establishment of job boards using the SHRM-sponsored .jobs Internet address has been resolved in favor of the job boards.

This means that the 40,000 site Universe.jobs network, run by DirectEmployers Association, will continue to operate, and can even expand if it chooses. Other job boards now will also be able to use that Internet domain, an extension just like the more familiar .com, .org, and .net. A new round of address issuance is scheduled to open in January.

Industry analyst Kevin Murphy called the decision by the Internet’s addressing authority — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — “opening the floodgates for third-party job listings services.”

ICANN, which issued a breach of contract notice in February 2011 over how the .jobs addresses were being used, did not explain its decision. Nor, for that matter, has it as yet posted any official notice of its decision. Instead, it posted the request to end the legal proceedings sent to an international arbitration group by registrar Employ Media. An ICANN spokesman called to say additional details were unavailable today, but there may be some tomorrow. keep reading…

When job boards first launched, they were supposed to be like stock exchanges — a clearinghouse matching jobs with candidates. This was the future: efficient, fast, and simple. Well, it didn’t quite turn out that way.

Job boards are not in the business of filling jobs. They exist to serve up job ads and get paid for that. One can only speculate but things might have been different had the job board model been similar to that of eBay, where a good part of the site’s revenue depends on the successful completion of a transaction. But frustration with job boards is one reason why recruiters so eagerly jumped on the social media bandwagon, despite much evidence or reason to believe that social networks would let them succeed in filling jobs where job boards had not.

There’s not a lot of definitive data on the effectiveness of social networks, but what’s there suggests that social media hasn’t been quite the silver bullet solution that many were expecting. keep reading…

One of the largest networks of company-owned job boards in the world has just grown a little bigger. Beyond.com announced this morning it acquired Human Capital Solutions, parent company of JobCircle.com, for an undisclosed amount.

JobCircle, like Beyond itself, operates in dozens of regional areas, primarily in the mid-Atlantic states from Virginia to New York, though it serves parts of other states, including California, Alaska, Texas, and Hawaii.

The Beyond network — some 2,500 niche and regional sites, and national specialty sites — also covers these areas. With 12 million unique visitors a month, the network is several times larger than JobCircle, and ranks, says CEO Rich Milgram, as the fourth-most trafficked in the careers category, according to ComScore. keep reading…

Guessing game time: What’s the #1 failure for the year in the recruiting world?

Oh, so many choices for the top (or should that be the bottom?) spot. The irreverent Jason Buss offers his list of seven “Recruiting Fails for 2012,” which includes those shiny new objects, Pinterest (for recruiting? Oh, come on. Did you really believe you could use it to source anything but recipes, cutsey animal pictures, and home decorating ideas?) and BranchOut.

One (that would be us) could quibble over the inclusion of mobile recruiting, and the exclusion of Monster and its slow-motion implosion. And argue about whether the Facebook job board disaster is really worthy of the #1 spot. But you (that’s you, and  us, too) have to give Jason credit for the absolute best recruiting quote of the year. Commenting on the Facebook job board, Jason credits this to an anonymous recruiting leader:

The 5 organizations behind one of the biggest recruiting fails in the past 5 years should be spanked, and spanked hard.

Really Great Discrimination keep reading…

Monster Worldwide laid off an undisclosed number of workers Tuesday, and closed its operations in Brazil and Mexico.

One report put the number at 800, while a Twitter post simply described it as “massive.” keep reading…

Wednesday’s looking like an awfully good day to post a job.

At least that’s what you glean from job-distributor eQuest, whose data indicates a lot of U.S. job-seekers are hunting on Wednesdays, as well as Tuesday and Thursday. It studied more than a million jobs posted online to see when candidates searched and sent in resumes.

It found: keep reading…

It’s that time of year in offices all across America where Secret Santas are making their furtive appearance, and the HR department is planning the office party.

(Yes, of course, you can sit at the big table. Now, how about the Secret Santa?)

This is what stress is like in HR: First open enrollment, and then the end-of-year holidays that can land a visit from the EEOC or a process server or — JACKPOT — both. Just think of what your colleagues in compliance are doing: keep reading…

Here’s a taste of a few recent new companies and other moves, from assessments to job-posting technology to screening tools, to job sites for recruiting veterans, young adults, and more. keep reading…

Update: Alex Douzet, co-founder and until today COO of TheLadders, is now the company’s CEO. His promotion was announced this morning in New York by Executive Chairman and Founder Marc Cenedella.

Looking to fill a high-paying position? Now you can search TheLadders and access the resumes of its fee-paying candidates at no charge.

A simple sign-up gives recruiters and hiring managers access to the career site’s millions of resumes, and permits them to post jobs and send alerts about those openings to targeted groups of job seekers.

It was in January 2011 that TheLadders made its posting service free to employers with jobs paying $100k or more. Called Passport, the free posting was a return to the company’s roots. When it launched in 2003, the service was free to recruiters to list their high-paying jobs; job seekers paid — and still do — a monthly fee to list their resume and access the jobs. In 2007, TheLadders started charging recruiters to post jobs.

Making the resume search also free to recruiters brings the company full-circle. keep reading…

Forbes said that recruiting will never be the same. I said in July that a Facebook-driven job board has potential. And after several false starts this summer and fall, it finally released it into the wild this week. Now, millions of people are flocking to it to get a job, right?

Paying homage to the folks at Monday Night Countdown, there’s only two words I have for you: “C’mon Man!”

The entire platform is stalled before it even got started. In many ways, it doesn’t function properly at all. There is bad targeting either for the job itself or for the location parameters (or, in some tragic cases, both). When it works, the results are underwhelming. That’s putting it kindly.

If I were Facebook, I would quietly remove the server that hosts the application, toss it into San Francisco Bay and start over, never to speak a word of it again.

keep reading…

Big news came from Facebook: the largest social network in the world enters the 400 billion-worth market of job search and recruitment!

I’m not sure about others, but this is where my excitement ends. I think Facebook just blew it. keep reading…

The worst-kept secret in the recruiting field, looked at by some as a LinkedIn killer and by others with deep skepticism, is now officially out.

Andrew Noyes, a Facebook manager in Washington, D.C., who handles lobbying-related communications, told me yesterday that Facebook is launching a new feature on its site for job-hunters and employers, focused initially on the U.S.

If you’ve been waiting for a “Facebook job board” where you’d send Facebook $300 and a description of a job — well, this isn’t exactly it. keep reading…

Careers site operator Monster Worldwide is announcing this morning a corporate restructuring that will have the company pulling back from some of its global markets, particularly China where it be looking to sell its ChinaHR job site.

Company officials discussed the restructuring this morning in a conference call with investment analysts after releasing Monster’s 3rd quarter financials showing revenue down in every category, but still managing to earn 9 cents a share exclusive of one-time expenses.

The bad news in the financial report is that revenue was down almost 11 percent overall, with the biggest hit coming from operations outside North America. Revenue there was down 15.3 percent. But even in North America revenue declined, down 6.3 percent. In contrast, CareerBuilder reported it grew its North American revenue by 5 percent to $169 million. keep reading…

It’s impossible to find an HR conference, a business magazine, or a recruiting site — especially this one — that isn’t talking about big data.

Just last month here on ERE Matthew Jeffery concluded his remarkable series on the future of recruiting — Recruitment 5.0 — saying “5.0 is all about… Personalization, self-sufficiency, predictability, big data, and back to basics.”

“Big Data,” he writes, “will become the central point of competition, driving productivity growth, innovation — and this applies to recruiting.”

Before big data can, as Kevin Wheeler put it a year ago, “change everything” about recruiting, recruiters will need to have access to it and know how to use it. Considering how few tap the full power of their own ATS, that’s a task on a par with getting PC users to see their first computer as more than just a word processor.

“Even if you have the tool,” says CareerBuilder’s Brent Rasmussen, “They don’t use it correctly; they don’t use it efficiently.”

Rasmussen wasn’t talking about anyone or group in particular; he was talking about the challenge of introducing a whole new way of dealing with information. In September, CareerBuilder bought employment and labor data and analytics firm EMSI (Economic Modeling Specialists International). It’s Rasmussen who has responsibility for integrating the EMSI data with CareerBuilder’s products, principally its Supply and Demand Portal. keep reading…

A new employee referral tool, a new way to source IT employees, a career site for developers and engineers, a young startup working on verifying resumes, and an applicant tracking system. It’s all below.

First, out of Bangalore comes WhistleTalk. The CEO tells me the company has closed a round of seed funding, and have seven full-time employees and a few freelancers.

In short, WhistleTalk’s a way for people to earn a bonus by sharing a job opening with their friends via social media. Here’s a short video about it. keep reading…

Propelled by its flagship tech site, Dice Holdings this morning delivered a financial report so strong it sent the company’s stock up 12 percent.

The company, the first of the publicly traded career sites to report, said it earned 17 cents per diluted share. That beat Wall Street’s average estimate of 12 cents. Dice also reported revenue of $48 million, an increase of 2.6 percent over the same quarter last year and a million more than analysts were expecting.

CareerBuilder, which is privately held, voluntarily reported revenue of $169 million from its operations in North America. That’s a 5 percent increase over the third quarter of 2011. The company doesn’t release other revenue numbers or earnings. LinkedIn will report on Nov. 1.

Monster, curiously, has yet to set a date for release of its numbers. Typically, the company would have done that by now. It also would typically report its numbers this week. There were rumors of a possible sale to (among others) the German media company Axel Springer. The company denied the reports this week.

Dice Holdings, meanwhile, is looking ahead to a strong finish to the year, and product improvements and growth next year. keep reading…

Over the last two years, LinkedIn has used its fast-growing user conference to roll out products that have become such a part of the daily life of LinkedIn-o-philes that we barely remember when they didn’t exist. The idea of pushing really targeted jobs to passive job-seekers was highlighted in 2010. Last year, LinkedIn unveiled the since-improved tool for managing candidates called Talent Pipeline. Those looking for an even-bigger announcement this week may be disappointed, but LinkedIn is, however, rolling out multiple improvements to existing products, and launching significant new ones.

It’ll soon make big, not-yet-specified changes to the profile pages. For now, though, here’s what’s new: a way to measure your brand against others; an index of the most in-demand employers; “sponsored jobs” to get your listings up higher in the results on LinkedIn; and, upgrades to LinkedIn Recruiter. keep reading…

Just out this morning: Jobvite’s annual Social Job Seeker Survey and this third edition says fewer working Americans are actively looking for a job, even as the survey found that most of us are open to opportunity should it come knocking.

Of the 1,029 employed workers taking part in the survey, 9 percent said they were actively looking for a job. Last year, 16 percent said they were looking.

Yet even as the active seekers declined, more employed workers moved into the “active” passive category this year. Jobvite says 69 percent of the employed are either seeking a new job or would be open to hearing about one. Last year, 61 percent were in that category.

Add in the unemployed respondents, and it turns out 75 percent of the workforce — employed and unemployed alike — are open to opportunities. Last year, that percentage was 69 percent. keep reading…

Calling it the “most optimistic fourth quarter projection since 2007,” CareerBuilder said this morning that 26 percent of employers expect to add full-time, permanent workers by the end of December.

The percentage rivals those for the same quarter pre-recession, and is a full 5 points higher than the 21 percent last year who predicted their company would be adding permanent staff. keep reading…