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Little more than a year after introducing video resumes, CareerBuilder has discontinued the service. It was quietly taken offline in June.

The company won’t say how many jobseekers posted videos, but it seems the participation rate wasn’t high enough to warrant CareerBuilder’s effort. Job board spokesperson Jennifer Grasz told us, “We’re always testing the market with new tools and services to enhance the user experience. If the response rates are not there, we’ll reevaluate whether the market is ready and focus energies on other areas to aid in the job search and recruitment process.”

CareerBuilder’s main resume pages are still online, though no longer linked from the site. However, Grasz said the jobseeker videos have been removed. Jobseekers can always post their video to a service like You Tube and include a link in the resume or cover letter they have on CareerBuilder. When an employer downloads the resume, the link becomes hot.

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You’ve done your homework and sold the boss on getting a company video made. In fact, you did such a good job the CEO is hinting around about having a starring role, and since it was your idea, you’re in charge of the project.

Now what do you do?

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No. It is not a typo.

My misplacement of capitalization in the above heading is intentional. LinkedIn spells itself with a double capital so I decided to play along.

There’s been alot of brouhaha over LinkedIn lately. Every conference, convention, and seminar I attend has a LinkedIn workshop. LinkedIn Webinar invitations land in my email inbox semi-weekly.

Here LinkedIn. There LinkedIn … everywhere LinkedIn.

I don’t get it. Is it just me?

Sure, I have an account. And yes I get invitations to “join my network” each week.

I find LinkedIn is little more than an annoyance for the following reasons:

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From the online-recruiting grapevine:

–(You heard it here first): NewmediaHire is going live with a redesign of its site today. If it looks familiar, it’s because it’s based on a platform called “Ning,” popular for building websites. The video-blog-discussion-heavy site is aimed at creating a sense of community — more than just job-hunting — and is aimed at an international audience (the site has a corresponding LinkedIn group and perhaps half of that group is based in the UK, Australia, Canada, Africa, South America, and elsewhere outside of the U.S.) An Indian company helped NewmediaHire build the new site.

–A new site, moneybackjobs.com, is offering employees a “5% to 7.5% bonus for accepting a new job that’s posted on our website.” Employers pay $50 to post, and 10-12% for each candidate they hire. There are incentives for employees to be exclusive, and to take their resumes off of other sites (”trust us, we have ways of finding out,” the company says) as well as big incentives for employers to only post on moneybackjobs. Smart.

–From ThinkPanmure’s Nate Swanson: “We are hearing that several large BrassRing customers are unlikely to renew their contracts when they expire late this year or early next year, but have yet to make a decision as to whether to use their existing ERP vendor or that of a best-of-breed vendor.”

Despite the slowing economy, more employers are requesting proposals for recruitment process outsourcing services. The CEOs of Hudson Highland Group and Spherion commented that RFP activity and the new business pipeline for RPO deals remained strong during each company’s second quarter earnings conference call.

Both CEOs also acknowledged that some existing RPO customers have ceased hiring or have opted to take recruiting back in-house, causing a decrease in RPO revenues for both companies during the recent period.

Despite what he called a severe pullback from two clients, one in telecommunications and the other in the airline industry, Spherion CEO Roy Krause said the company will continue to invest in RPO, adding that while proposal activity has increased, it’s taking longer to close new deals.

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Kenexa (profile; site) earned $9 million or 39 cents a share for the quarter ended June 30, beating Wall Street’s estimate of 35 cents and joining Taleo and Monster in reporting better than expected results.

The company’s $56.4 million in revenue was an increase of 25% over the $45.2 million for the same period in 2007. The company provides full life-cycle talent management software and multiple additional products including assessments and RPO services.

Kenexa’s CEO Rudy Karsan did a little crowing in the financial announcement, which was released after the market closed Monday. “The combination of solid sequential growth and integration of Quorum International enabled Kenexa to become the first independent talent management vendor to pass the $200 million in annualized revenue level during the second quarter,” he said in the typical, curbed enthusiasm of the financial announcements of publicly-held companies.

Quorum International was a London-based RPO provider to Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The company was purchased for an undisclosed sum in April.

Kenexa told investors and analysts that it expected its current third quarter to come in at between $57 million and $59 million, which is about $10 to $12 million more than during the third quarter of 2007. After expenses, that translates to 38 to 39 cents in earnings, the company said. Analysts were expecting 40 cents a share earnings on $61.7 million in revenue.

Taleo (profile; site) reported its second quarter results today, saying revenues climbed to almost $39 million, a 25 percent year-over-year increase. It also picked up 225 new customers and bought Vurv (profile; site).

The big news in its financial report is that the company turned a profit and beat analysts’ estimates. The company earned and adjusted 15 cents a share, which is 2 cents more than the consensus estimate. In terms of dollars, the company reported earning $1.1 million for the quarter vs. losing $1.8 million for the same quarter in 2007. (Numbers here include both GAAP and non-GAAP reports. See here for an explanation of what these mean.)

It got a boost from an 83 percent growth in international sales, which now represent 13 percent of company revenue. New customers from outside North America include Cargotec, Veolia, AirFrance, Baloise, Eiffage, Manpower, and Vic Roads.

“Taleo achieved record performance across the organization, posted record revenues, and set a record for the number of new customers. Our results highlight both the growing demand for talent management solutions in large and small companies regardless of the economic environment,” said Michael Gregoire, Chairman and CEO of Taleo.

Big news from Monster (profile; site) today. It bought jobmatcher Trovix (profile; site) for $72.5 million; settled that class action shareholder lawsuit over the stock options backdating for $25 million, and managed to beat Wall Street’s expectations for its 2nd quarter financial performance, earning 40 cents a share excluding one-time expenses. The Street consensus was the company would earn 37 cents a share.

Total revenue grew 9% to $354 million, from $324 million in the comparable quarter of 2007, boosted by a favorable exchange rate. Even without the benefit of the exchange rate Monster grew revenue by 4 percent. Wall Street analysts had estimated revenues would come in at $361 million.

International sales fueled the company’s growth during the quarter, as it has for the past year. While revenue from North American operations fell by $10 million during the quarter to $164 million. But sales elsewhere in the world jumped 34 percent (23 percent when you exclude the effect of currency exchange rates). International sales now account for 44 percent of company revenue.

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With the Carl Icahn proxy fight averted and the Microsoft buyout dead (today, but check back tomorrow), Yahoo! can resume the reorganization it announced last month. It should be easier than most of the previous reorganizations the company went through as this time several top corporate positions are vacant.

(Watch out, though, for the fireworks expected at Friday’s shareholder meeting when almost anything may happen.)

For the past several months, senior managers and top-level executives have been leaving the company in numbers large enough to attract attention from bloggers and tech writers. In June TechCrunch published a list of 114 director and VP level personnel who left Yahoo!, many in 2008. Not long after the site published another story saying Yahoo! could see another 100 senior people leave in three weeks, after options vest worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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There’s a new recruitment site where a candidate doesn’t need a resume, doesn’t need to say who they are, doesn’t even have to go looking for the job.

Some companies have made hires that way for years. It’s just that those “special” candidates are the boss’s relatives. For the rest of the world, the new site is an experiment in anonymous sourcing. It’s called Scopings and it sort of reminds us of those old computer dating programs. Candidates put in a little bit of information about themselves; employers put in a little more information.

The computer compares the candidates to the job description and suggests possible matches. Then the courting begins.

Only when both of you show enough signs of interest is the cloak of anonymity dropped. keep reading…

Job boards? Social networks? Search engines? Wikis? Blogs? Microblogs? The list could go on and on. What are you using? Some of the above? All of the above?

Recruiters and sourcers have a wealth of options at their fingertips to find, reach out, and connect with active and passive talent. Every recruiter and sourcer has a different set of sites, tools, and communities that they use to find their talent. This is what I like to refer to as the “recruiting portfolio.”

A recruiting portfolio can be comprised of countless sites and tools.

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From a report today by Nate Swanson, who analyzes HR/recruiting stocks for ThinkPanmure:

“We believe that companies are beginning to realize that the value proposition of the large, generic job boards (Monster/CareerBuilder/HotJobs) is waning, at best, as they increasingly provide a large volume of low-quality candidates. With recruiter in-boxes being filled with the equivalent of “resume-spam,” these large job boards are becoming less effective and eliminate many of the efficiencies of the online model. We believe that growth in these generic job boards is slowing, with online postings moving to niche job boards that are geographically or vertically focused (StepStone and Dice), or to sites that offer a pay-for-performance or “all-you-can-eat” pricing model (SnagAJob).

Second, we see the recruiting process becoming more complex and believe that recruiters will be spending an increasing amount of time on “employer-branding” initiatives, which target passive candidates and employee referrals. Here, companies will look to leverage their existing employees or alumni groups as a valuable source of new candidates. In fact, studies show employee referrals to be one of the largest and most cost-effective sources of new hires. Popular social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook bring the power of an extended network to the recruiting process, although it’s still very early and a highly manual process. We think that social networking sites are becoming more and more like job boards. In fact, one HR manager to whom we recently spoke views the content on these sites as more valuable than those in a resume, as the content is public and therefore verifiable, and more current than the profiles listed on a job board, which could be more than a year old.”

For the first time in many quarters Workstream (profile; site) was in the money - sort of - eking out a half-million dollar finish to its 2008 fiscal year. The talent management software company reported Thursday evening that it had an EBITDA of $516,000 for the fourth quarter that ended May 31. That compares to an EBITDA of ($4.5 million) for the previous quarter and ($1.3 million) for the fourth quarter last year.

Still, the company reported losing $14.9 million in the last quarter and $39.4 million for the year.

Only sketchy and incomplete numbers were released by the publicly traded company, so it isn’t possible to detail the company’s income and expenses other than to say the fourth quarter revenues were $7 million, up from the $6.2 million of the third quarter.

The company attributed the incomplete financial statement to an “on-going goodwill analysis.” “This item does not have an impact on EBITDA, revenues or cash,” the company noted in the announcement of its financial results. However, goodwill is a business asset that has to be adjusted if its fair value is different from the value carried on the books. Workstream valued its goodwill at $45.3 million in an April filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But in the financials it released Thursday appears to be anticipating a reduction of $13.6 million.

Regardless of the eventual accounting decisions, Workstream is a troubled company. Its operating expenses have exceeded its revenues every year since the company went public in 1999 and for two years before that as well. It is very likely to be delisted by NASDAQ, where it trades under the ticker symbol WSTM. To remain on the active exchange Workstream would have to lift its stock price to at least $1. It closed today at 16.27 cents. A planned merger with payroll processor Empagio fell apart in June.

Still, Chief Executive Officer Steve Purello says in the press release announcing the financial, “Workstream had a solid finish to its fiscal year.”

Purello could not be reached for additional details.

If video resumes are the future of recruiting, then FutureResume.com is a peek at what’s to come. The brand new site showcases candidate videos that are linked to digital resumes, cover letters and references packaged together with a rudimentary skills and background profile to make candidates searchable.

The slickly designed site launched a few weeks ago with a handful of employers. More are to be added when the site officially opens up to employers, who, like the jobseekers, can also post videos to supplement traditional job postings.

There’s nothing especially remarkable about FutureResume. CareerBuilder has been offering video resumes for more than a year. FutureResume takes it a further step, making the video the main attraction, rather than an additional element. Even though jobseekers can post a “paper” resume and skip the video, they’ll be discouraged by the $14.95 monthly fee FutureResume will begin to charge next year.

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FriendFeed is a social networking community of roughly 75,000 people currently. FriendFeed is technically a microblog, in the same space as Twitter, but with more options.

Per its site, FriendFeed “offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.” I have been using the site for the past few months; it’s a new craze among the technically savvy and Web 2.0 crowd. If you are looking for a way to connect with passive technical talent and the young Gen-Y crowd, this is a site you want to invest some time on.

With FriendFeed, users setup a free account and customize a “feed” of content they share from other sites online. Everything then funnels into FriendFeed for people to see. The content shared can be from sites you have accounts with and use already to include news, bookmarking, status, video, photos, blogging, music, and more. These sites can include Twitter, YouTube, Digg, LinkedIn, Google, Blogs, and up to 30+ others. My feed allows others to see status updates and comments I posted out on Twitter, in addition to updates to my LinkedIn profile and articles and posts from several blogs. If you don’t use a lot of sites for sharing content, you can simply post and share anything directly on FriendFeed. It’s dead simple to use.

Users of FriendFeed have the option to subscribe to “feeds” of other users and in turn they can discover yours. When a user shares something in one of their feeds, they are telling the rest of the site and users who subscribe to them what they are doing currently, what they are interested in, and what they want to talk about.

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While U.S. recruiters debate the value of text messaging, one of the largest franchise operators in the Middle East has jumped in with enthusiasm.

“From now on,” says Nic Beesley, a senior HR vice president with M.H. Alshaya Co., “All jobseekers applying for Alshaya vacancies will henceforth know exactly where they stand. Whether they are short-listed or called for an interview, every candidate will receive real-time SMS updates, regardless of which part of the world they live in.”

The company operates some 1400 retail outlets for brands such as Starbucks, Estee Lauder, Mothercare, Foot Locker and Pearle Opticians. More than 14,000 people work for Alshaya in 15 countries, mostly in the Middle East, but also including Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic.

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• Zacky has settled with the OFCCP. Because of hiring practices the Labor Department believes disproportionately rejected female applicants for some jobs, the company will pay about $347 to women turned down for jobs; hire some who weren’t hired; and monitor its hiring process to make sure it’s not discriminatory.

• A new report on healthcare and manufacturing in Ohio finds that, regarding healthcare, “In a worrisome trend, some of the healthcare occupations that experienced the strongest growth also had declining real median wages. These jobs tended to be healthcare support positions that required little or no classroom training. This trend was exemplified by the home health occupation, which grew by 56 percent in just three years by adding 17,100 jobs. The real median wage in this occupation fell by 5.6 percent.” And regarding manufacturing, “Guidance counselors do not understand the opportunities available for manufacturing careers or choose to direct students to other fields.”

• One group says it has “something exciting” to announce, which it says will be the “next best thing in Web 2.0 recruiting.” Meanwhile, InovaHire says its “design and functionality will be Web 3.0.” What’s on the Inova site isn’t much now, but we’ll keep in touch with the company and fill you in.

• CareerBuilder has launched a new job board, for retail.
  

• Speaking of CareerBuilder, which recently launched a new iPhone app … Nate Swanson, who analyzes HR/recruiting-related stocks for ThinkPanmure, says the recruiting/HR field will move quickly into mobile-device adoption. He writes: “With early movers such as salesforce.com, Oracle, and CareerBuilder already live with mobile applications on the App Store, we believe that it is only a matter of time before the human capital management space begins to push into the mobile frontier … we actually project an inflection point in growth 12-18 months from now as HCM applications converge with social networking and Web 2.0 technologies … We believe that the iPhone is pushing these boundaries fast, really fast, and other mobile device manufacturers are now scrambling to catchup.”

• A lousy candidate experience? According to Dubai-based Hiring Solutions, its client Alshaya, also in Dubai, is one exception. Hiring Solutions says in an email: “Every job seeker at Alshaya will henceforth receive SMS updates on their job application, regardless of which part of the world they live in. The SMS will inform candidates whether they are short-listed or called for an interview and ask them to check their email for complete details. This spares jobseekers the agony of second-guessing their application status and helps Alshaya to reduce its average time-to-hire.”

Sliced bread it’s not, even if Jim Stroud is doing a happy dance over ZubedJobs.

The latest import to hop the pond is a job board with a mapping utility so jobseekers and employers can find each other by entering a location and skills. Look closely and you’ll see that Zubed is a mashup of Google Maps and geocoded resumes and job offerings.

It’s kind of fun to see how many Java programmers are being sought in London or how many of them there are in the area. But this isn’t exactly new nor the money dance. keep reading…

Ron Hanscome’s serious thoughts of moving from HRchitect to Kenexa (profile) began during Kenexa’s “analyst day” this past April. But Hanscome, the new veep of product strategy, met Kenexa’s CEO more than five years ago, when Hanscome was at the META Group, and always had in the way back of his mind that Kenexa could be an interesting future employer.

At the analyst day, “the connection got rekindled,” he says. The company was looking for someone who could “bring it all together, think holistically” — with “it” referring to the company’s diverse group of products.

Hanscome’s name and face are as familiar to recruiting-conference-aholics as Jason Corsello, Sammy Jo’s Pop, and stress balls. Before Kenexa and HRchitect (profile), he was an Oracle VP, overseeing its HR tech products.

Hanscome had joined HRchitect about a year ago, and led that company’s creation of the “The Suite Life of Integrated Talent Management” report.

“Ron is not the kind of resource that is easily replaced, and he brought a lot to the table,” says HRchitect’s bizdev director Matt Lafata. “Fortunately, everything we do at HRchitect is done in a very collaborative manner so one person doesn’t make or break any project, or practice. Ron worked with a team of consultants who are continuing on projects without skipping a beat. Ron was very good at sharing knowledge and working as a team player. As a result of all of that, we are certainly keeping our eyes and ears open for a similar-caliber person to lead our strategic planning group and in the meantime, our VP of Consulting Services, Dan Katavola, is overseeing the handful of people we have involved in strategic planning projects.”

Hanscome found Kenexa attractive partly because of its emphasis on the science of assessment and “fit”; it brags about its 100 I/O psychologists on staff. “They’ve got science around measuring fit, measuring assessment, that really adds to the technology as the delivery vehicle,” he says. “Case study after case study.”

Three Favorites

In a recent report for Think Panmure, Nate Swanson analyzed Kenexa and its competitors from a Wall Street perspective, writing:

Our best three HCM ideas are Taleo, SuccessFactors, and Kenexa. Taleo and SuccessFactors, pure-play on-demand vendors within the HCM space, are pulling away from competitors such as Oracle and SAP with product depth, breath, and functionality. We see Taleo and SuccessFactors creating innovative ways to further extend their product reach through the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and the integration with new social networking sites. With recurring revenue contract terms lasting three to five years, Taleo and SuccessFactors should have some near-term insulation even if the current economic environment gets worse. We expect each company to meet or beat our estimates. We like Kenexa as an attractive value play within the HCM space, but note the company’s recruitment outsourcing services may be more sensitive to the current economic headwinds. The company’s recently announced acquisition of Quorum should help diversify this risk as the company is able to expand and strengthen its services in EMEA, an area previously identified as a weakness.

At mid-year, employers are choosing to dip their toes in the outsourcing pool, rather than jump in feet first. Attempts at wide-scale HR outsourcing haven’t been successful, mainly because vendors are underestimating the costs and companies won’t settle for cookie-cutter solutions.

A more selective outsourcing approach allows vendors and employers to tackle each function independently, understand the requirements, and then customize the implementation and refine the processes before moving on. At least for now, that’s the direction managers are taking.

“Comprehensive outsourcing of HR administration hasn’t worked out as expected for either party,” says Mark Marcon, senior research analyst and director for Robert W. Baird & Company, Inc. “I think most of the vendors under-estimated the costs and the profitability of these contracts, so there’s been significant pull-back and a more selective adoption approach.”

A survey of 182 U.S. companies by consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide validates that selective, rather than comprehensive H.R. outsourcing is the clear preference among employers, with 6% of the respondents indicating they plan to outsource recruiting in the near future. keep reading…