Monster’s Financials Better Than Expected; Year Ahead Brightens

Were it not for one-time expenses in the not-yet-completed HotJobs purchase, Monster broke even in the 2nd quarter. But even considering the $5.2 million expense, the recruitment advertising company still managed to do better than the consensus of Wall Street analysts.

Analysts expected a loss between 3 cents and 5 cents a share on revenue of $216 million. Monster, which reported its financial this afternoon, came in at break-even on earnings per share and $214.9 million on revenue.

Counting the HotJobs expenses and a few other smaller, one-time costs, Monster reported losing $2.96 million on revenue of $214.9 million. That translates into a 2 cent a share loss. Without those one-time expenses Monster’s loss was just under $200,000, which is break-even on a per share basis.

In the report, and reiterated during a 5 p.m. (EDT) conference call with analysts, Monster officials said the company expected a better year than it had previously forecast. Crediting an increase in bookings (contract sales), and sales of  its power resume search, CEO Sal Iannuzzi and CFO Tim Yates said the company now expected to lose between 6 and 14 cents a share, a significant reduction from a previous high of 20 cents.

Despite the bottom-line performance, Monster’s domestic and overseas revenue shows the continuing softness in recruitment. Though the picture is vastly better than in 2009 when revenue dropped 37 percent in the second quarter over the same period in 2008, lackluster job growth in the U.S. was the biggest drain on the company. North American revenue was $96.9 million, a drop of 5 percent over last year.

Still, Monster’s North American second quarter revenue was virtually unchanged from the first quarter and the international revenue was up. Between the 1st and 2nd quarters, Monster’s revenue was basically flat. That’s evidence that the U.S. economy is not getting any worse.

CareerBuilder, meanwhile, reported its North American revenue was $139 million, up 3 percent over the same period in 2009 and up 5 percent over the first quarter of 2010. The privately held company volunteers only its domestic revenue. It won’t disclose international revenue nor its expenses.

How the acquisition of HotJobs will change Monster’s financial picture isn’t clear, though in the near term it’s expected to contribute $20-$40 million before taxes, interest, depreciation, and amortization. Yates said HotJobs is expected to be a particular help in the staffing and healthcare areas.

The deal is to close sometime in the the current quarter. No HotJobs contributions were factored into the full-year financial estimates.

Dice, the other major publicly held job board operator, reported earlier this week that it earned 6 cents a share.

.Jobs Expansion Is On Internet Board’s August Agenda

The Internet’s naming authority will take up the controversial plan to expand the .jobs addresses at its Aug. 5th telephone conference.

The agenda of the board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was released a short while ago and includes consideration of the proposal.

Also on the agenda for the three-hour meeting is the even more controversial proposal to approve a .XXX extension for porn sites. For obvious reasons, that request has garnered wider public interest, including 13,325 comments posted to the ICANN forum. The .jobs expansion plan garnered 316 comments.

The board’s telephone conference is not open to the public. An ICANN spokesperson said that the board’s decision on all agenda items will be made available following the end of the meeting. The spokesperson didn’t say exactly when the results would be reported.

The proposal by Employ Media, and endorsed by its partner, the Society for Human Resource Management, seeks approval to permit the use of geographic, occupational, and other names in conjunction with a .jobs Internet extension. (Complete coverage of the issue on ERE is available here.)

Currently, only employer names can be used. However, some non-employer names have been registered. The Chicago Urban League has one. It runs a job board on NextMove.jobs. At least a few others have been registered, including MakeItHappen.jobs, which is registered to Lee Memorial Health System and forwards users to Lee’s career site.

Employ Media wants permission to use the so-called generic names and assign them in one of three ways: first via an RFP process; then an auction; and finally on a first-come, first-serve basis.

The proposal has been widely condemned by the job board industry, which objects to the power it vests in Employ Media to decide who will get the names.

The beneficiary is widely expected to be the recruiting consortium DirectEmployers Association. The organization launched several job boards using the restricted addresses last fall and announced plans to launch tens of thousands — possibly a million.

Led by its trade association, the International Association of Employment Web Sites, hundreds of comments opposing the plan were posted to the ICANN forum. Monster and CareerBuilder posted notes, as did many other operators. Besides objecting to the distribution method, the opponents complained that the job board industry was not consulted, and that as a major player in sourcing and recruiting, it is part of the international HR community.

Proponents of the expansion, though not as numerous in the public comments, pointed out that a job board operator participated in the SHRM committee that considered the plan. Aaron Matos, CEO of Jobing.com, resigned before the vote on the plan was taken. The committee endorsed it 7-1 and the SHRM board later approved it, too.

SHRM was a sponsor of the creation of the .jobs address in 2005 and has since played a role in advising Employ Media on the program. One of its responsibilities is to review and recommend proposed changes.

Recruiting Passive Candidates — How to Get Top-notch Referrals

Without question, having a large LinkedIn network is a competitive advantage for any recruiter working on hard-to-fill positions and hard-to-find candidates. This advantage is lessened dramatically with LinkedIn Recruiter, since it includes complete visibility to the 70mm+ people in their network. Since this full-visibility product is off-limits to TPRs, it levels the playing field somewhat for corporate recruiters. But this is not as significant a disadvantage as it would seem to those of us who have to find top candidates the old-fashioned way — networking. Getting pre-qualified referrals from people who will call you back is the real secret of recruiting passive candidates.

With this in mind, I’d like to offer a few of my favorite passive candidate recruiting secrets.

Networking Secrets of an Old-time Headhunter

1. Network in 3D. While the names on LinkedIn are great to have, getting the names of their best connections is even better. As you begin your quest for great referrals, don’t just consider peers. Consider those who these people have mentored, who mentored them, who they most likely worked with on cross-functional teams, and who they regularly work with outside the company, including vendors, customers, and consultants.
2. Track your effectiveness. Don’t waste your time. Networking is not about dialing for dollars. Instead, track how many people call you back, how many are interested in talking about your position, how many are qualified for your opening, and how many referrals you get per call. If you’re not tracking this daily, you can’t get any better, since you won’t know what to work on. If you do track these metrics, you’ll soon discover that great referrals from well-respected people can increase your productivity 5-10X. That’s why the first name found on LinkedIn is not nearly as valuable as a referral from one of these people.
3. Get three referrals on each call. The most important metric you can track is how many high-quality referrals you get on each call. You need to become adept at getting these names. Make sure you highlight the fact that you don’t want to know anyone who’s looking. Instead, ask the person for the best person they know who’s absolutely not looking, but would be open to discussing a potential career move. Thinking in 3D helps here. For example, I’ve called buyers at major retailers looking for salespeople, product marketing people looking for engineers, ad agencies looking for product marketing people, and CPA partners looking for CFOs. The key is not to hang up until you have three great referrals if the person you called isn’t appropriate for the job at hand.
4. Don’t call people who won’t call you back. Great people will call you back if you mention the name of another great person. That’s why step three is so important. Track your callback rates. If you make sure that 80% of the people you call are warm, pre-qualified referrals, your call-back rate will be 75% or better. If you just make outbound cold calls, your callback rate will be closer to 25%. This is a huge difference in productivity.
5. Only call people who are worthy. While getting people to call you back is important, if they’re not worth talking to, it’s a waste of time. That’s why it’s important that you pre-qualify the referral. Just ask the person giving you the name why the person is a top-performer. As far as I’m concerned, a worthy person is someone who is either qualified for the job or knows someone who is.
6. Leave professional and career-oriented messages. Whether it’s a voicemail or an email, suggest you’d like to enter into a discussion regarding what could potentially be an important career move for the person. You must include some substantive proof as part of the message, not hyperbole. For example, “You might have heard that we just merged with XYZ Resources, and are looking for a product manager to lead the first integrated development project. I’d like to chat with you to see if this could offer a significant career move for you.” If you can mention the name of the person who provided you the referral you will more than double your callback rate. Hyperbole — “the greatest position in the world” — will cut it in half.
7. Create instant careers. If you’ve asked the person if they’re open to discussing a possible career move and they answered yes, don’t tell them much more about the job; instead, get them to first tell you a little about them. This is essential. As you quickly go through the highlights of the person’s work history, look for gaps in the candidate’s background your job fills. This could include staff size, scope of the project, impact the person can make, exposure to management, and the like. Mention these as reasons to proceed in the discussion. Of course, if the gaps are too big, or non-existent, smoothly switch your focus to getting three referrals.
8. Don’t take “no” for an answer. In addition to doing everything described above, you also need to be adept at overcoming objections. These cover the range from I’m not looking, what’s the comp, I’m happy where I am, to I’d don’t like the industry, your company has a bad reputation, and I don’t want to relocate. It’s impossible to put 20 years of advice into a single paragraph, other than to say that persistence is the key here. If your position represents a true career move, you owe it to your hiring manager, yourself, and the person on the phone not to give up until the person has the information needed to compare your job to what they’re doing today or whatever else they’re considering. Don’t give up until they do. Even if the person decides it’s not a true career move, you’ll still be able to get your three referrals.
9. Recruit first, network second. You’ll increase your networking productivity by directly recruiting the person first, rather than calling the person on some “networking” premise. To me this later approach should only be used when calling someone who clearly is not a candidate for the job. Recruiting the person first allows you to find out about the person’s background before revealing much about the job. This allows you to determine if you should recruit the person or get referrals. You also establish a different relationship once the candidate has shared some confidential information with you.
10. Become SWK (someone worth knowing). Top prospects want to stay connected with top recruiters who handle important jobs. To become SWK you must know the job, the hiring manager, your company, your industry, and your competition. You need to be seen as a reasonably objective career counselor who is only willing to proceed if the job represents a true career move. You know you’re SWK if you get unsolicited referrals from top people in your area of expertise who want to work with you and give you other top referrals.

What’s great about LinkedIn and its Recruiter product is it gets you in the major leagues on day one. This is an invaluable gift. Regardless, since everyone will soon have access to the same information, your ability to convert a list of names into hot prospects and great hires is the real difference-maker. In my mind, this is the essence of great recruiting.

Are You an HR Person With an I-9 Mess on Your Hands?

While you may be a very capable Human Resources expert concerning Form I-9 issues, what if your predecessor was not?  Your company may be at tremendous risk because ICE auditors will not only look at your current I-9 forms, but will also request all of your terminated employees’ forms for the past 3 years.

Link to article

W. Garnett & Associates
Human Capital Management
1-888-884-3910

Taleo Grows Revenue; Beats The Street

HR software vendor Taleo grew its revenue and customer count during the second quarter of this year and though it also grew its net loss, the company beat Wall Street’s earnings estimates.

The company reported this afternoon that it lost $1.4 million, up from just $113,000 in the same quarter last year. Stock options and costs relating to previous acquisitions totaling $6.9 million were responsible for the loss. Not including these expenses (which analysts don’t include in their estimates) and some minor other one-time expenses, Taleo earned 14 cents a share. That was 2 cents better than the analyst consensus.

Revenue from applications (software)– $47.9 million —  was almost 12 percent than the same quarter a year ago. That boosted the quarterly revenue to $56.3 million, for an overall increase over the year before of 14.6 percent.

Of the 226 new customers signed in the quarter, eight of the deals exceeded $250,000 annually.

Taleo also reported that CFO Katy Murray would leave by Oct. 1. She earns $315,000 and received a 2009 bonus of $126,000, according to the San Francisco Business Times.

Even Antarctica Has a Job Board, as Job Search Engines Expand Globally

Looking for a job as a chef in the Antarctic? Try looking here. Or if you’re a recruiter looking for an experienced vuvuzela sales person, then this South African job site is one place to start.

Talk about global recruiting. In the last couple days, both Indeed and SiumplyHired have announced country-specific (or, in the case of Antarctica, continent-specific) job search sites.

SimplyHired added South Africa and Argentina to its roster. Indeed added 24 countries.

In five years the two job search engines have gone from start-up to grown-up, indexing millions of jobs a year. They’ve built enough of a presence to land themselves among the top 10-most-trafficked career sites.

Indeed’s new sites now give it a presence in a remarkable 53 countries. It offers its listings in 24 different languages, among them Norwegian, Turkish, Greek, and Russian.

SimplyHired, based in Silicon Valley, across the continent from its Connecticut rival, is now in 21 countries, providing its listings in 10 languages that include Chinese, Korean, German, and Spanish.

The two search engines now have a presence in more countries than CareerBuilder and just behind Monster. And Indeed may have the only job board devoted to Antarctica, which is almost certainly more for fun and marketing than anything else.

What’s particularly surprising about the two search engines is that after five years their business model is almost unchanged. Jobs are free to post and free to search. They don’t collect resumes and don’t require registration. You won’t find a single credit card come-on or vocational school ad. (At least, none I’ve ever seen.)

The two search engines survive on revenue from premium listings and  Google AdSense, which might bring in enough in a year to pay for outings like SimplyHired’s staff winery visit.

The fact that both companies have survived, and even grown through this global jobs drought, is evidence of the strength of the appeal of the pay-per-click model. Borrowing from the success of Google’s keyword ad program, the two sites allow employers to set a budget and pay only when a potential candidate clicks into the ad.

They’ve also been particularly clever in how they built networks. Where CareerBuilder and Monster pay for the traffic partnerships they have (the HotJobs acquisition is a traffic play), Indeed and SimplyHired offer tools that enable bloggers, niche sites, and in fact almost anyone, to offer jobs on their site. The publisher customizes the job feed to target jobs to the audience and they get to share in any revenue that is generated through their site.

In the early years, when both sites were scraping listings off other sites, including most of the major job boards, a concern was what would happen if the pay boards decided, as Craigslist did, to cut them off. Today, every job distribution service and most (if not all) ATS vendors send jobs directly to Indeed and SimplyHired.

With their traffic continuing to grow and their global footprint expanding, both sites are regularly included by employers as job posting destinations. It would almost unthinkable for a job board to turn off the feeds to either site. What would be the point? So many employers are sending their jobs directly to the search engines, that it would be a loss only to those who don’t.

What will be interesting to see is how the services evolve. While they’ve resisted collecting resumes up to now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that change in the next five years. That they haven’t yet is partly technical and mostly practical. Resumes would have changed the competitive dynamic. Without resumes they are a distribution network. Collecting and selling resumes makes them a direct job board competitor, which might have choked them off at the starting gate.

If you haven’t checked into either site in a while, you might be surprised at the tools and utilities they offer, including integrations with Facebook and LinkedIn. Even if you don’t need to post a job, use the sites for business intelligence. Running searches is a good way to keep up with the local economy and to track what the competition is doing.

Are You an HR Person With an I-9 Mess on Your Hands?

While you may be a very capable Human Resources expert concerning Form I-9 issues, what if your predecessor was not?  Your company may be at tremendous risk because ICE auditors will not only look at your current I-9 forms, but will also request all of your terminated employees’ forms for the past 3 years.

How many costly I-9 compliance mistakes have been made that you may not be aware of?  We encourage you to take a look at your I-9 files on a regular basis.  You may be shocked at what you find.

If you have inherited an I-9 mess, it may be quite difficult to take those concerns to your boss.  However, you must take a proactive approach to make a good-faith effort to correct the documentation in order to avoid serious government fines.

Form I-9 Compliance Action Steps

1. Realize the Form I-9 is not as simple as it may appear and that fines for basic clerical mistakes start at $110.00 per form, per employee.
2. To help your boss understand the serious consequences of Form I-9 violations, emphasize employment eligibility verification is a legal requirement and non-compliance could result in substantial fines for the company.  The best way to avoid disaster is to focus on a full scale clean up of company I-9 procedures.
3. Get help!  You probably wouldn’t think of auditing the company’s tax records by yourself and you certainly should not consider auditing I-9 compliance by yourself. Over the years, the requirements of the Form I-9 have changed and it is important that any retroactive attempt at compliance be done within the constraints of the law.
4. Consider electronic completion and storage options.  This may be the best approach to cleaning up the I-9 mess in your file cabinets.
5. Identify and document “best practices” for moving forward in full compliance.  A qualified I-9 specialist can help develop the right procedures and practices for your business.

Consumer Confidence Erodes On Job Fears

The much-watched Consumer Confidence Index hit a five month low in July, dampening investor enthusiasm after three days of big gains in the Dow and most other markets.

The Dow closed in positive territory, but just barely. Both the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 lost ground for the day.

The Conference Board’s Index fell to 50.4 from a revised 54.3 in June. The Index was last this low in February, when it stood at 46.4. Despite encouraging quarterly financial reports that have been trickling in since the end of June, the percent of consumers who expect business conditions to worsen rose in July to 15.7 from 13.9 percent in June.

Even more consumers are pessimistic about job growth over the next several months.

One in five (21.1 percent) expect fewer jobs to be available in the near future. The percent of optimists about future growth — those expecting more jobs — fell to 14.3 percent from 16.2.

“Concerns about business conditions and the labor market are casting a dark cloud over consumers that is not likely to lift until the job market improves,” says Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center. She warned that this year’s back-to-school retail season may be “challenging” due to “consumers’ heightened level of anxiety, along with their pessimistic income outlook and lackluster job growth.”

Consistent with the decline in The Conference Board’s Index, the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan confidence index dropped almost 10 points, going from 76 in June to 66.5 in July. That’s the lowest in a year.

Bloomberg News quoted Guy LeBas, chief fixed-income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia, declaring “Faith in the economic recovery is failing. It’ll be 2013 before we see any semblance of normality in the labor market,” he predicted.

Economists, job seekers, and recruiters will be watching closely next week as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the critical employment situation numbers. July’s numbers are expected to offer a sharper picture of job creation, because the counts should finally be cleared of most of the influence of the hiring and termination of hundreds of thousands of temporary Census workers.

Especially watched, as it has been since the Census ramp-up began, will be the private sector employment. The ADP National Employment Report, to be released Wednesday, will offer some clues about the BLS report, which will be out Friday morning.

The Index is a composite of the results of responses to an economic survey conducted monthly by TNS for The Conference Board, a private business economics research group.

Dice Bests 2nd Quarter Estimates

Job board owner Dice Holdings reported this morning that it earned 6 cents a share on 2nd quarter revenue of $29.9 million, coming in better than Wall Street’s expectations.

Analysts estimated revenue would be right around $28.7 million with an average earnings estimate of 5 cents a share.

Investors bid up the price of Dice Holdings share by better than 5 percent. In afternoon trading in New York, DHX shares were selling at $8.29.

Growth was driven by ClearanceJobs.com, a job board for workers with security clearances, by international operations — especially in Asia — of its financial sector job site, eFinancialCareers.com, and by contributions from the company’s smaller units, including AllHealthCareJobs and Targeted Job Fairs.

Dice.com, the company’s flagship IT specialty job board, wasn’t detailed specifically, though it is the largest contributor to revenue. Dice reported that the DCS Online unit — Dice.com and Clearancejobs.com — contributed 71.3 percent of the total company revenue in the first six months of the year. That’s down from 74.4 percent for the same period in 2009, likely reflecting the continued softness in the tech sector.

Looking ahead, Dice said it expected revenue to continue growing. It estimated 3rd quarter revenue of $31.5 million and $121.5 million for the year. That compares to $26.7 million for the 3rd quarter of 2009 and $110 million for the year.

In addition to an improving global job market, Dice is also moving strongly into social recruiting. Today it launched the Dice Talent Network on the Dice.com site.

Monster will report its 2nd quarter financial results after the market closes on Thursday. CareerBuilder, as a privately owned company, isn’t required to report its numbers, but it typically does provide its North American revenue.

Catch Me if You Can

You have a great candidate who seems ideal for the job you’re looking to fill and you start researching her online. You land on her Facebook page where you see a picture of her and your spouse or partner, which suggests that they’re more than friends. What do you do?

1. You shred the resume and delete it from your ATS
2. You make up a reason why she’s unqualified
3. You look up the classifieds in Soldier of Fortune magazine
4. You decide to interview her anyway

If you picked #4, you’d be in the minority.

In a recent survey by Microsoft 84 percent of U.S. recruiters think it is proper to consider personal data posted online when evaluating a candidate and do online research using search engines, social networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter, online-gaming sites, and even classifieds, and auction sites like Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, etc. What they expect to find in that last category is a mystery, but I guess you never know. Now whether all this “research” does anything to improve the quality of hires, or it’s just an excuse for voyeurism, is something we’ll likely never know. The survey doesn’t address results or even ask about the respondent’s perception of results.

Sauce for the Goose

If the survey numbers are true, then thousands of hiring decisions are being made based on information that may or may not be valid, from sources that may or may not be reliable, and using criteria that may or may not be relevant to hiring. What could go wrong? The Shirely Sherrod case that has been in the news is a perfect illustration of what can happen when an employment decision is made without understanding the context or the credibility of the source. And that involved dozens of people up to the level of the White House.

The survey mentions that concerns about lifestyle, inappropriate comments, and unsuitable photos and videos top the list of reasons that those surveyed give for rejecting a candidate. Well, since these criteria are so well defined with no possibility for ambiguity, it must be all right to use them. But recruiters also rejected applicants because of inappropriate comments by friends, family, and colleagues. So it’s acceptable to reject candidates based on gossip?

Relying on online information in a hiring decision can cut both ways. Already, services like Reputation Defender are offering to clean up people’s online reputations by bombarding the web with positive information about its customers, either creating new Web pages or by multiplying links to existing ones to ensure they show up at the top of any Google search. What’s to stop candidates from creating largely fake online personas when they know that recruiters put so much weight on information they find online? Almost half of the recruiters in the Microsoft survey said that a positive online reputation influences the candidate’s application to a great extent.

Be Careful What You Wish For

The danger for employers is that continuing to make hiring decisions based on data collected online will generate a legislative backlash. Several states –New York, California, and Colorado — already prohibit employers from taking any employment related actions based on legal off-duty conduct. It’s not a reach to see those provisions being extended to hiring decisions. And Congress may get in on the act. In times like these when jobs are scarce, an issue like this can garner plenty of bipartisan support. And that could be a disaster, since laws made in response to populist anger will likely make life difficult. For starters, they would impose very onerous reporting burdens on employers.

Some would argue that any such laws would be difficult to enforce, since a lot of this kind of research on candidates can be done anonymously. But that’s not quite true. Digital forensics is the fastest growing field in the legal profession, and the tools to discover where someone’s been online are getting very sophisticated.

The bigger issue: what’s the value being gained from all this online research? Few, if any, employers have specific policies and rules about how to interpret online information. Unlike information obtained from background checks, which is highly structured and obtained from very credible sources, virtually everything seen online is unstructured and from sources of unknown credibility. Ninety percent of respondents in the Microsoft survey claimed that they take steps to corroborate the authenticity of information they collect online. How exactly does one do that? If they see a picture of a candidate holding a glass of what appears to be beer do they track down the others in the picture and ask if the candidate is routinely drunk?

It appears that much of this activity is done because it’s possible, not because it results in better quality hires. It gives the appearance of having done a good job in evaluating a candidate when there’s no evidence that it makes any difference at all. There are examples of some employer that avoided making a genuinely bad hire because of something discovered online, but those stories don’t establish that aimless trolling for information improves the hiring process.

Interestingly among the survey respondents almost 90% of male recruiters check out candidates online, compared to only about 60% of female recruiters. So maybe it is about voyeurism and not hires. But recruiters are hard-working people, who often get little respect and appreciation. Who’s to deny them some fun?

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