Recruitment stocks were no exception to the hammering stocks took today as investors worldwide drove down markets, sending a message to finance leaders that they were unimpressed with Friday’s U.S. bank bailout.
A spotcheck of several publicly traded HR vendors showed most of them were off by at least as much as the overall markets, all of which closed down. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 370 points, a 3.58 percent drop that was actually considerably improved from the 800 points the Dow was down at one point Monday. The NASDAQ was off 84 points for a 4.34 percent drop.
In the last 90 minutes of trading the New York Stock Exchange saw a sharp upturn that recouped some 400 points. The rising tide lifted most boats, including the shares of publicly traded HR recruitment, staffing, and tech stocks. Even so, among the companies we checked, only Monster (profile; site) was up on the day, closing at $14.81, up 6 percent. Dice Holdings (profile; site), like Monster a job board, was down 7 percent to close at $6.05 a share. Workstream (profile; site), which owns 6FigureJobs.com, closed at 7 cents a share, a 12.51 percent plunge for the troubled company.
Among the HR tech vendors, Taleo (profile; site) was down 9.77 percent to $16.07, while competitor Kenexa (profile; site) closed at $12.94 for a 5.75 percent drop.
Some of the staffing companies performed better, a relative term considering the size of the market drop. Manpower, for instance, was down $1 to close at $36.92, a drop of 2.64 percent. Kelly was off 3.38 percent, down 60 cents to $17.13 a share.
There may yet be more bad news. In after hours trading prices began declining again.
