In the paperwork submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook said it expects to raise $5 billion from the public sale of its stock. That’s based on the registration fee it paid. The New York Times says it could end up raising much more.

Facebook reported in its S-1 filing that it earned $1 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion, most of it coming from advertising. It reported having 845 million monthly active users as of the end of the year, a 39 percent increase over the year before. In the U.S., Facebook saw a 16 percent bump over 2010, ending last year with 161 million monthly average users, or about half the country’s total population.

Its average daily user count is 483 million, meaning more than half those who visit the site in a month do so every day. The company also reported 425 million monthly mobile users, a number it expects will grow with some of it replacing PC access.

With numbers like these it’s not surprising that employers have been flocking to build Facebook profiles and encourage their workers, customers and others to “like” them.

Recruiters began embracing Facebook years ago, seeing it as a way to expand the reach of their employer branding. Many began by combing through Facebook profiles as part of candidate vetting.  Now, companies regularly see Facebook as both a branding tool and a way to develop prospect communities.

Increasingly, Facebook is becoming a sourcing tool. BranchOut, which launched on Facebook 18 months ago, enables users to create business-only networks that can be accessed by recruiters. BeKnown, launched by Monster last summer, is similar.

Both BranckOut and BeKnown also connected with LinkedIn. But not long after the BeKnown launch, LinkedIn shut off access. That hasn’t put much of a damper on either site. BranchOut has about 2.7 million monthly average users. BeKnown has 260,000.

A third site is poised to announce its own Facebook connection later tonight, Pacific time.

Data out this morning from a study of Facebook’s Gen Y members (18-29) shows that, on average, each has 16 co-workers as friends. While the average is skewed by those who have many more, the study found that half have more than five workers as Facebook friends.

What’s the significance?

“When they go home,” says Gen Y branding guru Dan Schwabel, “they are still connected to the workplace… Their co-workers are their friends. And because people change jobs so often and have so many friends, their friends become co-workers.”

Ironically, Schwabel says, most Gen Yers aren’t intending for Facebook to be a business tool; 64 percent of them don’t bother to list a single employer in their profile.

That’s why, he says, Facebook is “inadvertently a part of their business life.”

His company, Millenial Branding, analyzed data from Identified.com uncovering the inadvertent consequence of friending co-workers. While BranchOut and Monster’s BeKnown are intentional business networks for Facebook users, at least for Gen Y business networking is occurring on the mainstage.

Another key discovery, says Schwabel, is how few Gen Yers work at large companies. Only 7 percent of those listing a job currently work for a Fortune 500 firm.The largest share (7.2 percent) work in the hospitality and travel industry, and 2.9 percent give their job title as “server.”

However, ranking 5th among titles is “owner,” suggesting, says Schwabel, that Gen Y workers are entrepreneurial. For recruiters looking to hire Gen Yers, the implication is clear. “Large corporations need to rethink their corporate recruiting strategy,” he says. ” Companies have to be more flexible and give Gen Y more control over schedules, and their work.”

The best way to reach a Gen Yer, he says, is through their friends or by friending them directly. Don’t message them until you are a friend, he recommends. “They don’t think of Facebook that way.” Referrals by friends are the best way to reach out. “They trust their friends. They listen to their friends.”

Schwabel also had some counsel for his Gen Y peers — advice anyone with a workplace friend should keep in mind: “Be careful what (you) say. It could be the office gossip next morning.”

• You may remember CodeEval from a year ago, and from an update we did when part of its service became free. The company has opened up its database for searching by employers. So if you want to look up one of the thousands of developers who’ve solved programming challenges, you can view their solutions, and contact info. It’s $500 a month, though you can search free to see how many matches you get, before spending the money to get identifying information.
• CareerBuilder says the staffing industry is in for a strong few months as companies ramp-up their temporary hiring. A survey commissioned by the careers publisher found 36 percent of companies plan to hire temp or contract workers this year. The first quarter may well be the easiest, as 27 percent of companies say they’ll be adding temp staff in the first three months of the year.

• Speaking of matchmaking, would you believe there’s another new site aimed at matching employer and employee online profiles? This one’s called StreetID, and it’s focused on financial careers.

• SelectMinds has announced something called “Referral Communities.” Basically this is an addition to SelectMinds’ product which we have mentioned before, called TalentVine. Referral Communities allows referred job candidates to get into a talent community if they’re not ready to apply for a job or not ready to send in a resume; with the old system, the person your employees referred would need to go through the full Taleo application process. Clients like eBay and McGraw-Hill can use the system to “drip market” to job candidates who have been referred employees have referred.
• Google is always looking for the best and the brightest coming out of colleges and universities around the world. To encourage interest (and this extends all the way to high schoolers), it has Google Student Blog. It’s about as soft a sell as you’ll see. Of course, career information is among the potpourri of offerings. Next week begins a series of video chats (on Googe+ Hangouts, naturally) with lead engineering recruiter Jeff Moore. He just wrapped up a Recruiter Tips & Tricks series. You can use Hangouts for your own recruiting chats.

• Anthony Knierim, who works for Aon Hewitt’s outsourcing business and used to be with Accenture’s outsourcing business, is starting a company called RadMatter, which he says is a “social gaming place” launching this quarter. It’s going to do a free or low-cost beta with 10 companies (it already has five “yesses” and one “maybe”; he told us some of the beta companies and they are well-known). He says a couple of them are “gaga” over the tool, which will first focus on games to engage college or early-career job candidates. Companies will buy licenses that will allow them to host 5, 10, or 30 challenges annually. Venture capitalists are approaching RadMatter, Kneirim says, but right now it’s holding off on giving up control to a big VC firm, particularly to a firm, he says, that doesn’t understand the recruiting industry and might not realize how big gaming, challenges, and similar assessments can be in attracting people. RadMatter also will offer two-hour workshops for business leaders on the power of games and on best practices with games in the workplace and in recruiting, for about $7,500 for up to 12 participants (and is doing an abbreviated one this January 23 in Milwaukee for more than 30 C-level executives). In addition, it’ll offer three-week, $75,000 “culture audits” for companies on “readiness and recommendations for engaging Millenials.”

Following close behind, Facebook unveiled some sweeping changes of its own, rearranging its News Feed and adding a real-time update ticker to profile pages.

The nearly simultaneous announcements, probably just a coincidence, are nonetheless evidence of the escalating competition between the two powerhouse companies.

Ever since Google+ launched in June (growing quickly to 25 million users who had to be invited to join), Facebook has aggressively added, enhanced, or otherwise changed key features of the site. Hangouts, which lets Google+ users video chat, was Google’s one-up on Facebook. Not even two weeks later, Facebook called a press conference to announce a partnership with Skype and its own video chat service.

When it launched, one of the more compelling Google+ features was its “Circles,” allowing users to organize connections as they see fit. Different messages can be sent to different circles.

Facebook’s one-group approach didn’t allow for different levels of connectedness; lists were available, but so clunky to create and manage that few people used them.  Last week, Facebook addressed that shortcoming, improving Friend Lists. Now, not only can users easily create lists where photos and posts are in one place, but the Smart Lists features automatically assembles groups based on common interests. The latter feature is optional to use.

At the same time as the lists improvements, Facebook also introduced a Subscribe button, letting users choose what they want in their news feeds and to get updates from non-friends.

Now Facebook has gone a step further still, rolling out a reorganized news feed. Instead of presenting status updates in chronological order, Facebook will present what its algorithms decide is the hottest or top news from your friends and people to whom you’ve subscribed. The more frequently you check Facebook, the more recent the posts. But if you visit only every so often, your top news item might be days old. Top news items are marked with a blue corner.

Perhaps needless to say, since every Facebook change seems to be met with resistance, user comments are mostly negative. The Baltimore Sun offers a collection of some of the funniest of them. If you have any doubt about the growing number of Boomers among Facebook’s 750 million users, here’s one of the comments on the Sun’s page: “Zuckerberg apparently hired the genius behind New Coke to run Facebook.”

Meanwhile, Google, which used its heavily trafficked search page to promote Google+, began offering a mobile version of Hangouts. Now users with Android-powered phones with front-facing cameras can hold video chats. An iPhone version is coming, Google promised.

The other improvements to Hangouts (the 100th was the public launch of Google+) include screen sharing, Google Docs integration, and a broadcast feature it calls Hangouts On Air, which makes recording and broadcasting of a session. Not all of these are fully available, but they are on their way.

The interest in the competition between Google and Facebook is evidently high. New features and enhancements in services will usually get a mention in the tech blogs. But the Facebook changes and the Google+ public launch has garnered wide interest. Event the Christian Science Monitor has weighed in with a post it headlined “Facebook changes vs. Google+: Who made the best updates?“

This “Apply With LinkedIn” feature wraps up the candidate profile in a tidy package that feeds directly into any one of the several tracking systems it has or will partner with. No ATS? No problem. LinkedIn will email the profile to you.

This portable feature can be used on any job, anywhere, on any site, including any job board.

Five ATS providers — Peoplefluent, Jobvite, SmartRecruiters, Bullhorn, and Jobscience — turned on the automatic feature this morning. Taleo, Lumesse, and Kenexa will have it enabled in a matter of months.

However, as LinkedIn’s VP of product management, Adam Nash, explained, the company designed the “apply” feature to be used by small, as well as large employers. It’s “really trivial” for a hiring manager at even the smallest of firms to add the button to a job posting, and specify how and where the resume is to be received.

Even candidates with resumes already on file with a job board may find the LinkedIn apply feature of more use, since it allows them to update their LinkedIn profile before submitting it, and also tells them who in their network works or knows someone at the company.

Those who click the link without having a profile — a not-too-common occurrence given the 100 million members LinkedIn has — will be given an opportunity to join.

Candidates can always opt to use some other source for their resume submission, Nash said. “This won’t be the only option there,” he said. If, though, recruiters begin to use the “apply” button in numbers, job seekers will find it easier to keep one profile updated, than the 12.6 LinkedIn says the average seeker has.

“Users,” he added, “will vote with their clicks.”

Its one major drawback is that it doesn’t yet work with smartphones. It will with some portable devices such as an iPad. Full mobile compatibility is coming, Nash promised.

“Apply With LinkedIn” has very definite consequences for job boards, which derive a third or more of their revenue from resume searching. Almost two months ago Dan Schawbel wrote about the feature, still then under wraps. Touting the advantages of the plug-in, he said, “Job boards and traditional resumes are going to fade faster than I even predicted!”

This morning, I emailed three of the largest job boards for their reaction. I haven’t yet heard from any of them,  but I can’t imagine this is a development they’re welcoming. Corporate career sites, search engines, and social media all have impacted the pay-to-post business of job boards. Now LinkedIn is making a frontal assault on resume search.

Earlier this month, it shut down access to its network for sites like Monster’s BeKnown and BranchOut. Those services leveraged information on social networks, including LinkedIn’s, to build profiles for their members. Now, in a bit of a turnabout, LinkedIn hopes to leverage job postings to increase its own recruitment value. Whether it succeeds will depend on convincing recruiters and employers to adopt the plug-in and use it on every job posting. Netflix, LivingSocial, and Photobucket are among the initial users.

“Like everything transformative, you can argue both sides of the equation,” Nash said, when I asked him what reception LinkedIn expected from the job boards.

In the last three years especially, LinkedIn has been encroaching ever more aggressively into job board territory, offering premium search tools for recruiters,  job postings, experimenting with career tools, adding a resume-maker for candidates, and now the apply button.

There’s no mystery why LinkedIn is transforming its business network into what Gerry Crispin called a “job board for the 21st century.” In 2010, recruitment products accounted for 42 percent of LinkedIn’s total revenue. In 2008, it was 22 percent, third behind marketing solutions and premium subscriptions.

Noel Cocca, owner of Novo Medical Careers, and his partner Tim Spagnola bought the four-year-old site at auction Tuesday for $95,000. The two also have a small blog they started last year, RecruitingDaily.com.

“We’re both very excited about this,” Cocca told me by phone, not long after RecruitingBlogs founder, Jason Davis, revealed the identity of the buyers. “I don’t know what we’ll do with RecruitingDaily, but we’re going to keep the status quo on RecruitingBlogs.”

Noel Cocca

No changes are planned, said Cocca, adding that it works well as is. What they do hope, he said, is to grow the audience and participation. “We might add something ,” he said. “I really can’t see us making any changes.”

“The philosophy that Tim and I share,” Cocca said, “is we are open people. We believe in simplicity. And to pay it forward.”

A periodic contributor to the site, Cocca said he and Spagnola have long been fans of RecruitingBlogs. When Davis decided to sell it and return to hands-on recruiting, Cocca said he and Spagnola immediately considered buying it. “We had already started our own blog, and we both just wanted to make a contribution, to put something out there,” he explained. RecruitingBlogs “trumps it (RecruitingDaily) in every way.”

Tim Spagnola

Acknowledging that $95,000 “is a lot of money,” Cocca said they don’t have any specific plans on monetizing the site beyond the occasional ads and sponsorships already there. “We’re very new” at trying to monetize a private website, Cocca said, adding, “I don’t see banner ads all over the site.”

Nor, he added, will the 28,000 members begin receiving email blasts. While Cocca said, “I do see a value in being able to communicate with the community,” his mailing business — Accurate Mailing Services — wouldn’t be involved. “It’s a direct mail service.”

Cocca, who was on vacation in St. Kitts in the waning days of the auction, joked about making bids via his phone from the airport and elsewhere. “It was exciting,” he said with some understatement.

The deal is expected to close next week. Davis will work with Cocca and Spagnola during a transition.

LinkedIn launched its revamped company profiles Monday, adding the products feature, and upgrading the layout flexibility of profiles — now called Company Pages — to make them more visual and encourage even broader use.

You do, of course, have a company profile on LinkedIn? Get one if you don’t. Either way, this is an opportunity to add visual excitement. You can use the products and services channel to highlight the kinds of projects and products that new hires will work on. Pair the description with a relevant video — say a couple of team members talking about the project — connect it to the job opening posted elsewhere on the company profile, and you have a strong presentation.

It’s even more critical that the message be as authentic and honest as possible, since LinkedIn members can post reviews and recommendations.

Sure, this new feature is intended to promote a company’s products and services, not especially for recruiting. And marketing and sales may have a different vision for how best to use this section. But even if they want to highlight the company’s various widgets and gizmos, recruiting can still piggyback to show just what it is the company is all about.

Ever since LinkedIn began allowing members to follow specific companies — some 1 million companies are now being followed by 30 million users — it has been obvious that it was gunning for Facebook. On that site companies have been creating their own pages for some time, just like they did on MySpace before. With the launch of the rebranded Company Pages, LinkedIn is sending the message that it intends to remain the dominant business-oriented network on the planet.

Beyond a doubt, it has established its identity as career-focused. The Universum study discussed Monday in a post about social media surveys, found that among college students 75 percent use LinkedIn for career purposes. Only 1 percent use it exclusively for social connections. Contrast that with Facebook, which the Universum study says 76 percent use purely for social purposes.

You can choose to have some or all your tweets posted to your LinkedIn groups and vice versa. This is a boon for recruiters who now can more easily reach their entire network with news of jobs and opportunities, while job seekers can use it to enhance their personal brand.

“More and more, people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways,” said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, in a video he made with LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman.

Stone likened the deal to “bringing the peanut butter and the chocolate together to make the perfect combination,” which explains our use of the otherwise inscrutable graphic from the LinkedIn site.

The two services, of course, serve different purposes and different constituencies. Twitter users tend to be younger and tweet about social activities. LinkedIn is very specifically focused on business networking.

The integration takes these differences into account, giving Tweepl a choice where there tweets go. Use either #li or #in to post your tweet to your LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn messages will generally go to all your Twitter followers, unless you choose to post only to LinkedIn.

I tried to set this up several times last night and this morning, but got error messages. Some of them were the usual Twitter overloaded kind, but the others were likely the result of the rollout. According to the original announcement, the integration will take a few days to complete, accounting for the lack of a setting on Twitter itself for the LinkedIn connection.

You can also set up an account on Ping.fm. This is a free service that lets you organize all your social media sites so you can post to some or all simultaneously. In addition to LinkedIn and Twitter, the Ping network includes Facebook, Diigo, Yammer, Plaxo, MySpace, and 39 other sites.

The LinkedIn/Twitter integration comes on the heels of announcements over the last couple of weeks that Twitter messages will now be indexed by Bing and Google. Search results now include tweets.

Our community has evolved as well, expanding to include over 50,000 recruiting professionals, and growing more every day. Today, I’m proud to announce the next step in that evolution of the ERE community — community.ere.net.

When you check out the new community site, you’ll recognize many of the same discussion groups and people that you have followed for years, but you’ll also see lots of new features.

Some of the features that I have been using the most are:

• The new activity feed. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring how to make this more visible on our home page, because it does a great job of showing just how much activity is happening in real time.
• Voting. Finding ways to separate the wheat from the chaff has always been one of the most challenging aspects of running a professional community like ERE.net, and the new voting system will let the community collectively decide which posts bubble to the top.
• Blogs. A select few have had blogs for a long time on ERE.net, but now every ERE member will be able to express themselves in their own personal space.  We will be featuring the best of the blog posts more prominently on the site.
• New discussion emails. We’re trying to cut down on the number of emails that you get from us, so we’ve consolidated our community emails into one community newsletter that will be easier to navigate and read.

Jim — who did a great job developing the site with Hunter — put together a video to introduce you to the features of the social network. Check it out, and then give the new features a try!

Jim, Hunter, & the rest of the ERE team will be spending the next couple of weeks responding to your feedback and making changes, so don’t be shy. Tell us what you think and how we can make this a better tool for you to share your ideas and connect with other recruiters!

There’s a preview up at http://beta.community.ere.net/, and we’re looking for your feedback on how to make it better before we go live on the main ERE.net.

So what’s new? Here are some of the highlights:

• Easier to use. You will find it easier to post discussion messages, and you’ll be able to add links, pictures and HTML without jumping through hoops.
• Threaded Discussions. To make it easier to follow conversations in the longer threads, all the discussions are now threaded.
• Community voting. We’re testing a new voting system for determining which discussion messages are most valuable to readers.  The best content will be voted up to the top of threads by the community.
• Activity Feed. There is now a central activity feed for all activity on the ERE Network, so it will be easier to see where the action is!
  
• Blogs. Every person in the ERE Network now has a Blog! Blog posts will have more prominence within the community, and we are working on integrating the best posts into the main feed on our home page to highlight the best content created by ERE members.
• ERE Forum. We’re bringing back the ERE Forum — a single, central place to post messages where everyone can see them without joining the smaller, specialized, groups.
• Following. Everyone has their favorite contributors on the network, and we’ve made it easier for you to follow just the ERE Members that you want, so you can see their content anywhere on the Network! This will replace the notion of “friends”, which as several members pointed out does not have a lot of practical use.

Why are you still reading this? Go kick the tires over at the preview site, and don’t be afraid to post messages to test it, because messages posted on the preview site will not appear on the main ERE.net.

Let us know in the feedback thread what you would change about it before we go live – we’re listening!

We ran a webinar today with Elaine Orler and Jason Corsello of Knowledge Infusion about what changes we should expect from recruiting technology in the next year.

I learned a lot on the call, but one of the polls that we took really made me stop and think. Here it is:

That LinkedIn was the most popular did not surprise me — it’s not exactly a secret that it has become one of the critical tools of our profession. I was surprised that LinkedIn was such an overwhelming favorite – nobody else was even remotely close.

The way we asked the question had people answering which of these services they are most likely to use the most. But I wonder — if we had phrased the question to ask if recruiters are using these sites at all for professional services, would the answers have been any different?

Asked a different way, aside from a very small portion of the recruiting community, are we really using social media effectively?