“Job growth is about to begin,” The Conference Board declared Monday. In the second quarter, says Manpower. “We are already seeing evidence,” insists the Association of Executive Search Consultants.
Even coming upon the heels of a robust labor report last week (that fueled a Wall Street mini-rally) these pronouncements probably won’t do much for the pessimists, but for recruiters, consider the collective news a call to reveille.
The Manpower report in particular says the second quarter should see a “modest” increase in hiring, based on the company’s survey of 18,000 employers in the U.S. While 73 percent expect to keep staffing level, 16 percent expect to hire. Only 8 percent expect to cut. (The remaining 3 percent fall into the “don’t know” category.)
“We continue to see encouraging signs in hiring activity in the U.S.,” says Manpower Inc. Chairman and CEO Jeff Joerres.
If you read down in the release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you would have seen that temp jobs took a big jump in February. It’s a good sign. Employers may not be ready to commit, but at least they’re dating.
The leaders of two of the biggest staffing firms in the U.S., Tig Gilliam of Adecco, and Roy Krause, CEO of SFN Group (previously Spherion), expect to see 100,000 temp hires per month before much longer. Gilliam also says Adecco has seen a 50 percent increase in the number of its temps hired on full time.
Like the staffing industry, executive recruiters have seen improvement, though it has been more noticeable outside the U.S. As a whole, the industry took a 32.5 percent year-over-year revenue hit in 2009. But the 4th quarter brought revenue improvement and an increase in search activity.
Globally, Asia/Pacific, Central/South America, and Europe saw increases in executive search activity in the 4th quarter of 2009 versus the same quarter in 2008. Though the quarter was down over the 4th quarter of 2008 by .5 percent in North America (the U.S., represents the biggest share) there were 11.4 percent more searches started than in the third quarter of 2009.
Add these reports to the other reports and data coming in and there’s little doubt that the world economy is improving, with the U.S. trailing, but moving forward nonetheless.
That this is no gangbuster recovery in the U.S. is evident from all the cautious comments and qualified statements. ERE member Keith Halperin has amassed a slew of estimates from well-respected sources suggesting it could take years before the 8.4 million plus unemployed are back to work. Scroll down to the comments to see his data points.
The Conference Board’s various surveys shows that confidence in the recovery is shaky and uncertain, even as its Employment Trends Index rises. Consumer confidence dropped big in February, mostly because of fears about job growth. Meanwhile Monday’s Employment Trends Index posted a sixth monthly gain, and the biggest overall percentage gain for a six month period since 1994.
The February rise to 93.5 from January’s 93.2, modest though it may seem, was enough to lead Gad Levanon, associate director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board, to say, “The continued rise in the ETI suggests that job growth is about to begin.”
If you are wonky about economic indicators and labor market stats, this is your lucky week. No fewer than than three reports came out today; one came out Monday; a fifth — the highly anticipated monthly unemployment report — is due out Friday morning.
Today’s reports, considered a 
harbinger of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ unemployment report, are decidedly positive in that “less bad” way we’ve been seeing since late summer.
The most authoritative of the reports came from the Federal Reserve, which reported in its so-called Beige Book that “economic conditions continued to expand” in February, despite severe snowstorms that held back activity.
The book, a summary of economic conditions in the 12 Fed districts, said consumer spending increased, though the snowstorms had a limiting effect. Loan activity was “soft,” said the Fed. “Most Districts indicated that banks remained cautious about lending.”
Not surprisingly, the Fed reported an uptick in hiring or a slowdown in layoffs in some of the federal reserve districts, but “labor markets generally remained soft throughout the nation, which resulted in minimal wage pressures.”
Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas confirmed the layoff slowdown in its monthly report. The firm said U.S. employers announced in February the fewest job cuts in some three years. Employers announced 42,090 job reductions last month, the least since July 2006, and down 77 percent from the 186,350 of February 2009.
“Employers have shifted away from downsizing and are poised to start adding workers,” CEO John A. Challenger said in today’s release of the numbers. “It may be a couple of more months before hiring begins to surge.”
Surge might be an optimistic term. Most labor economists expect hiring to grow only slowly. That belief got some props Monday from The Conference Board’s Help Wanted OnLine Data Series. The series reports the number of new and total jobs posted online each month. For February, The Conference Board said the number of job postings declined by 66,900. According to the data, 3.957 million jobs were advertised during the sample period in February.
A similar analysis by Monster — the Monster Employment Index — is to be released Thursday.
The ADP National Employment Report, based on the payrolls for the millions of workers ADP processes every month, shows nonfarm, private employment dropped by 20,000 workers in February. Another smallest here; the reduction was the lowest in two years.
The ADP report often varies widely from the official BLS report due to the inclusion of government employment and variances in methodology. In the summary, ADP notes that it expects the BLS report to show a larger workforce reduction than its own because of the adverse weather.
These up and down reports, so widely reported in general consumer media, may in part explain one more survey result. Last week’s release of the Consumer Confidence Index showed a sharp drop in February. The Index dropped 10.5 points from the adjusted January number and is now at 46.0.
Says the report: “Those saying jobs are ‘hard to get’ rose to 47.7 percent from 46.5 percent, while those saying jobs are ‘plentiful’ decreased to 3.6 percent from 4.4 percent.”
Gail Washington quit her job at a university in Dallas when her boss chose to belittle her, rather than help her solve a problem.
Music Teacher at a Brooklyn preschool must be careful not to say “ladies room” around her politically correct boss for fear the fangs will emerge.
Courtney should have expected problems when she ran into her boss at a party. “Drunk and drugged, Michael passed out into a flower box and broke two of his ribs.”
These are but three of a collection of appalling stories about psycho bosses, unwanted sexual advances, dysfunctional corporate culture, and too-sensitive workers. They appear on the aptly named Jobs of the Damned website. The first two stories are winners of a $200 weekly prize, while Courtney’s tale is on pace to be this week’s winner.
Stories like these pop-up periodically on the Web. Everyone has them.
So, naturally, there are plenty of places to “rate your boss.” A Google search turns up a quarter-million sites where that phrase appears with the first few pages full of places to submit a rating or review. One of the better known is Glassdoor, a site you better check regularly if only to know what your hot prospects already know.
Now, indie publisher Heliotrope Books has decided there’s a market for these stories; enough of a market and enough stories that it has decided to issue a series of books called Jobs of the Damned. The samples above are likely to be among the 200 to appear in the first volume, entitled appropriately, The World’s Worst Bosses.
Heliotrope is collecting these stories via a contest. Each week readers will vote on the best story of the week, which gets $200. Judges will pick the top three stories out of all the submissions. First prize is $2,000.
Before you go writing your own story of a monster boss (mine would be of a CEO who weekly berated his C team in language for which mom would have washed out his mouth with soap), before you go rushing off expecting to win, know that Heliotrope is charging authors $10 for each submission. It’s almost a no-lose proposition for the publisher, which judging from the number of submissions on the website, looks to be almost breaking even on the weekly contest.
There’s no way of knowing how many of the stories are true. Authors can remain anonymous if they choose. Don’t expect, however, that this is the place the disgruntled can get even; no names or other identification is permitted.
The ninth Source of Hire report from CareerXroads is out and it shows the 
impact of the U.S. recession on hiring patterns over the last few years while offering some encouraging news about hiring in 2010.
The whitepaper’s top-line findings show that, on average, 41 of the nation’s larger companies filled just over half their vacancies in 2009 by internal transfers and promotions. This is the largest percentage since CareerXroads first reported the data in 2002.
For 2010, however, 48 percent of the participating companies expect to hire and hire robustly. The prediction is for 29 percent growth in hiring. Only 10.8 percent of the surveyed participants expect to higher fewer workers this year. Compare those percentages to the Source of Hire report issued last year at this time. Then, 100 percent of the companies predicted they would hire fewer workers.
“The spike in internal movement is a strong artifact of the recession and suppressed many other sources of hire,” says the report, authored by Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, founders and principals in the recruitment-oriented CareerXroads consultancy. “Expect internal movement to fall to more normal levels in 2010.”
Another key finding — and one recruiting managers and HR executives should take to heart (a subtle way of saying, “Fix it”) — is that 30 percent of the respondents were clueless about the size of their contingent workforce.
Technically speaking, the survey choice selected by the 30 percent was “do not know and cannot even guess” the size of the contingent workforce. Of those who did report a size, the average was 13.6 percent of the workforce was contingent.
However, the large number of respondents who couldn’t even guess is troubling. Crispin and Mehler warn that “staffing leaders not in touch with this contingent (workforce) are likely to fall behind. If predictions that contingent workers could become 25-35 (percent) of a company’s workforce in the next few years are correct, then the business plans and staffing functions have a ‘disconnect’ that must be addressed.”
The bulk of the report deals with the source of hire of full-time workers.
As Crispin and Mehler have reported for the last eight years, referrals are the largest source of external hires. Not only were 26.7 percent of the external hires made from referrals from employees (who account for the biggest share), vendors, alumni, customers, and others, but referrals are an efficient candidate source.
“The yield for referrals is one hire for every 15 referrals, making this category the most efficient source by far,” say Crispin and Mehler. “The growth of social media could change the dynamic of referral, and firms need to re-examine their efforts to stay ahead of the curve.”
Next to referrals, corporate career sites, at 22.3 percent of the total external hires, produce the most hires.
This is a category that has caused Crispin and Mehler to hold their nose even as they list it as a source of hire. In every one of their reports on the subject, they counsel that corporate sites should be considered a “destination” and not a source.
Their reasoning is that candidates get to the company site from somewhere else; perhaps from a search engine or a job post link or an email from a friend. As the authors write, “So when more than one in every five external hires is attributed to the firm’s career website you can only imagine how many other sources were also involved.”
Personally, as I have seen more and more effort being put into corporate career sites (Microsoft, for instance), I’ve begun to think it may be time to reconsider them as true sources. So it was interesting to see Crispin and Mehler wave the white flag on this.
“Ok, we’re over it,” they write. “We’ve accepted the notion from our colleague Elaine Orler, Talent Function Group, that ’source’ should be viewed as a channel. We like the nautical feel of this imagery and that it evokes a desire to map the entire course — the waters, shore, shoals, and narrows as an aid to navigation.”
A few more details from the report:
- Job boards accounted for 12.3 percent of external hires, which translates into 6.3 percent of all hires.
Say the authors, “Every respondent reported success in hiring employees from job boards. We wanted more and designed one question to tease out the number of hires attributed to each job board. Unfortunately only 61% of the respondents can track back to specific sites.”
Don’t count out job boards, they add.
- Direct sourcing accounted for 6.9 percent of the external hires. This year, direct sourcing includes social media, SEM and SEO, the corporate ATS, and mining external databases for leads.
Write the authors: “We asked respondents to enter the number of hires they could attribute to social networks and related SEM strategies such LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Entice Labs, Jobs2Web, and “other.” The total reported, fewer than 500 hires, represents less than 1% of external sources.”
An added observation: LinkedIn accounts for 60 percent of all hires attributed to social media.
There’s much more great information in the whitepaper than I can hope to include here. It’s so detailed and so full of suggestions and recommendations that Crispin presented the report in a one-hour webinar today. If you missed it, the webinar will be archived and made available here.
The free whitepaper will be posted to the CareerXroads site shortly, if it’s not already there now.
One caveat, which is especially important if all you do is read this summary and glance at the chart: source of hire reporting is not entirely reliable and, as they say in the commercials, your results may vary.
Or, to quote Crispin and Mehler, “There are dozens of reasons why source-of-hire data is replete with errors. Dr. John Sullivan pointed out as much in his excellent September, 2009 ERE article. He argued that source of hire was the first step in developing functional excellence. In his usual understated style he noted, ‘It’s (SOH) almost always wrong’. We agree.”
Yikes! Here it is two days before Valentine’s Day and not a romance story in sight on ERE.
Let me remedy that with some tales from the gurus, starting, appropriately, with the good news from HRGuru (by Monster) that “office relationships are no longer taboo.” In the how-to article, HRGuru notes that 58 percent of workers have had an office romance (quoting Vault and not, understandably, the CareerBuilder survey I’ll mention in a minute).
Citing another survey, the article says almost everyone thinks it’s OK to date a co-worker. But date a boss? No way say workers, with women (at 82 percent) much more opposed than men (73 opposed).
Sadly, the very next issue addressed in the article is sub-headed “Sexual Harassment Claims.”
But that’s an HR problem. Oh, yeah. Most of us are recruiters, but oh so many of us also wear HR generalist hats and sooner or later will wind up dealing with some form of office romance or harassment issue.
I once had to deal with an issue where one of my best directors was involved with a subordinate who also was first rate. The two had kept it a secret for months; there wasn’t even gossip about them. I only discovered it accidentally. They eventually moved in together, changed jobs together. Alas, just months before their wedding, they broke up.
Fortunately, a CareerBuilder survey finds that for about a third of workers who date each other, the romance ends in marriage. Now that’s an employee benefit you don’t see on corporate career sites, unless eHarmony or Match have it there somewhere.
The CareerBuilder survey also found that co-worker dating is not as prevalent as Vault found it was. Only 37 percent of workers said they have dated a co-worker at some time during their careers, a data point in line with CareerBuilder surveys of past years.
Some other survey findings:
- “Eight percent of workers currently work with someone who they would like to date, with more men (11 percent) than women (4 percent) reporting they would like to do so.”
- ” Twelve percent of workers reported that their relationships started when they ran into each other outside of work.”
As you end your workweek and look forward to Valentine’s Day, let love blossom. Next week is soon enough to check your company’s sexual harassment and office conduct policies. Just make sure you do.
UPDATE FROM 9:28 A.M. EASTERN ON MONDAY…USA Today has the results of its Ad Panel up online. Monster’s fiddling beaver ad ranked #10. CareerBuilder’s casual Fridays commercial was 51 out of 63 ranked ads. The first place winner was the Snickers ad featuring Betty White.
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Peyton Manning? Who dat? Who DAT! The Who Dat Nation has spoken. The Saints won the Super Bowl. Decisively, without a doubt, without a question, and in a game that was one of the rare ones that got better and better after every play.
But you didn’t come to ERE to read about the game. You already know the Saints whipped the Colts 31 to 17.
Now comes the other important scores: Whose commercials made it into the top best. For the details on each of the commercials that ran, go to USA Today and its widely watched Ad Meter. All the commercials are available there.
But in the contest between CareerBuilder and Monster for the best job board ad, the highly populist, if less-well-known ERE poll has Monster in the lead by a touchdown. The fiddling beaver commercial had 40 percent of the vote to 30 percent for CareerBuilder’s casual Friday ad.
I’m reporting these results at 11:05 p.m. ET Sunday night, a little more than an hour after the game ended and four-and-a-half hours after our poll went live. The results may have changed by the time you check (just go to the poll and check the results), but since halftime, the percentages have held fairly steady.
If you missed the ads or want to see them again, just click here and you can check them out and still vote in the poll, which we, in a completely shameless attempt to kick up the hype, will leave open until no one cares.
You’ve also probably noticed (unless your Super Bowl party was a lot more fluid than mine) that the poll numbers above only add up to 70 percent. The other 30 percent of the voters said both ads were about the same. (I told you we were into populism.) You can read that to mean anything you like.
While you’re reading into things, here are a couple of coincidences I noticed that you might as well read something into as well.
Wildlife of one sort or another figured in several of the commercials. Like Monster, CarMax had a commercial featuring a beaver. Vizio did, too, though their beaver had a minor role. There was a squirrel in another ad and Bridgestone had a whale.
The CareerBuilder ad, featuring a nearly naked casual Friday office, was followed by a pantsless Dockers ad.
Who had the best Super Bowl commercial? Yeah, we know, it probably was Budweiser. The beer company’s advertising hegemony is so nearly complete that Anheuser-Busch should probably be given the lifetime achievement award and let somebody else have a shot at the top spots.
But we’re a recruiting-focused site, so we’re asking you to choose between Monster’s fiddling beaver and CareerBuilder’s (very) casual Friday.
If you’ve actually been paying more attention to the game than to the commercials , the two videos are below. If you’ve been mostly watching the commercials, then you should know that as this is being written, it’s half time and the Colts are ahead of the Saints 10-6.
So much for the high scoring game me and everyone else was expecting. The Colts’ defense, by the way, is amazing.
But back to the poll. Conveniently, both commercials aired before the half. So take a look at the commercials, and cast your vote.
Here’s Monster’s fiddling beaver:
Here’s CareerBuilder’s casual Friday ad:
The following was written Friday, before the Monster ad was available.
Our poll, unlike the USA Today poll or those marketing professors at Western Michigan University is limited to only the two job boards whose ads ran during today’s Super Bowl.
As this is written on Friday afternoon, Monster hasn’t released its Beaver-themed 30-second spot. CareerBuilder, which offered a choice of three for visitors to its website to vote on, hasn’t said which it will run.
So even though we’re opening the poll at the kickoff, you really do need to wait until both ads have run. When the game is over, we’ll try to remember to find the ads online and either post them here or provide links.
If you can’t wait for us, then try going to Spike.com, which religiously posts all the commercials that run during the Super Bowl.
We’ve set the poll up to allow everyone one vote. And don’t waste your time clearing our poll cookie; we’re also tracking your IP. We’re wise to you.
After a week of serious stuff – Monster buys HotJobs and says “We’re No. 1.” CareerBuilder says, “No you’re not.” — Sunday brings us more of the same.
At some point when the Colts and the Saints aren’t going head-to-head, CareerBuilder and Monster will go head-to-head with TV commercials that will set the tone for the great 2010 matchup between these titans of job-boarding.
We’re going to have some fun ourselves with these multi-million dollar branding campaigns. (The ad time alone is running between $2.5 million and $3 million.) A few minutes after the 6:25 EST kickoff on Sunday, our poll goes live asking you to pick the best of the two job board commercials.
I can’t show you those commercials now, because neither company has posted what will air. But here’s a preview.
CareerBuilder began building buzz months ago with a $100,000 contest for the best user-created Super Bowl commercial. After reviewing more than 1,000 submissions, CareerBuilder awarded three of the $100,000 grand prizes. Its ad agency turned them into professionally produced spots and the world began voting for a favorite.
Go ahead and vote. But don’t expect the fan favorite to actually wind up being broadcast. CareerBuilder’s little disclaimer says, “The results of voting will not affect the outcome of CareerBuilder’s choice of commercial to air during the Big Game.”
Still, it could. Here’s the video that got the most votes on You Tube.
Monster, which returned to the big game in 2009 after a six-year hiatus, hasn’t posted its commercial online, yet. It’s got that negative buzz thing going. Get the world jonesing to see it by making them wait.
That hasn’t kept Monster from teasing us, though. The company ran an ad during a playoff game two weeks ago featuring an inept Boogeyman who finds his true calling on Monster.com. The ad was great.
Within days, The New York Times was reporting that Monster’s Super Bowl commercial would feature a beaver. Said beaver, fiddling away on what appears to be a subway platform, then turned up in an online teaser. Another got posted to YouTube on Thursday, which is what’s below.
At the same time, there’s a whole website devoted to beaver-mania called fiddleafriend. According to an incredibly straitlaced business story on Monster’s hometown newspaper, the website will “allow viewers to personalize their own friendly dam-building rodent in music videos and photos.”
Hmmm. That sounds vaguely like the monkey campaign that CareerBuilder ran several years ago. So successful and popular was it, that CareerBuilder still has the Monk-e-Mail online.
We’ll have to wait to see just what Monster has up its sleeve. But heck, I’ll go out on a limb. Based on what I’ve seen, the early edge has to go to Monster.
But don’t listen to me, go here to place a bet on what ad will come out on top. (Isn’t Internet betting illegal?) Check the odds here. And here’s a list of all the ads that will get ranked by USA TODAY.
This morning’s monthly jobs report was a mixed bag offering something for both the bears and the bulls.The good news: Unemployment dropped from 10 percent to 9.7 percent. The bad news: The economy continued to lose jobs, shedding 20,000 in January when economists expected jobs to at least be flat, if not grow.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also revised its reports for November and December. In November, the BLS now says the economy gained 64,000 jobs, up from its previous estimate of a 4,000 job gain.
That improvement was more than offset by the bureau’s revision to its December number. Instead of the 85,000 job loss it first reported, the BLS now says 150,000 jobs were actually lost.
The report prompted Morgan Stanley’s David Greenlaw to tell Marketwatch, “All in all, we see encouraging signs of progress in labor market conditions and expect to see much better payroll performance in coming months.”
Economists had been expecting a job gain in January, but also a slight worsening of the unemployment rate. A Reuters survey said the average of the economist predictions was for a gain of 5,000 jobs. Marketwatch’s survey put the job growth at 25,000.
The BLS report was complicated by adjustments the bureau made to its data and the introduction of expanded reports, including reports detailing the labor situation of veterans, individuals with disabilities, and the foreign born, and more depth in other areas.
The data revisions adjusted the size of the labor force back to January 2009, which meant that the monthly job changes as first reported were too low. The revisions added 617,000 more lost jobs to the 2009 totals, making the official count for the year a loss of 4.78 million jobs. And the December number is subject to still further revision.
The BLS also reported that the number of unemployed persons by reason of job loss decreased by 378,000 to 9.3 million. Nearly all of this decline occurred among permanent job losers (which, according to the BLS, means “persons whose employment ended involuntarily and who began looking for work”). However, the long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was up in January to 6.3 million. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of long-term unemployed has risen by 5.0 million.
Other indices reflected essentially the same yin-yang as the BLS. The Monster Employment Index was down 1 point, while The Conference Board’s count of new, online jobs, showed a gain of 381,800 over December. That’s the biggest jump in new online postings since the Help Wanted OnLine Data Series began in May 2005. But the total number of jobs posted online is still lower than every month in 2008 except for December.
The Consumer Confidence Index also ticked upwards slightly, mostly due to consumers’ more positive outlook for the short term. (The Consumer Confidence Index is a composite of multiple indices derived from a monthly survey conducted by The Conference Board.)
Says Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center, “Consumer Confidence rose for the third consecutive month, primarily the result of an improvement in present-day conditions. Consumers’ short-term outlook, while moderately more positive, does not suggest any significant pickup in activity in the coming months. Regarding their financial situation, while consumers were less dire about their income prospects than in December, the number of pessimists continues to outnumber the optimists.”
Monster is getting beat up on Wall Street today. The stock opened down and went lower, and is off 16 percent right now, a clear signal that the markets don’t like what the company announced yesterday.
The HotJobs purchase brought it a sharp rebuke from Deutsche Bank analyst Jeetil Patel who downgraded Monster from a HOLD to a SELL. He said Monster “overpaid” for the acquisition, which will cost it $225 million. His change of heart about the company was also based on Monster’s 4th quarter loss and his belief that improvement in the job board industry will be slow.
No other analyst took as strong a position as Patel. The AP reported that Credit Suisse analyst John Blackledge, who has a “Neutral” rating on Monster, said while current operating results are not impressive, things are improving.
Meanwhile, CareerBuilder issued a four-point statement this morning, that essentially contradicts Monster’s claims of traffic supremacy, questions the wisdom of the deal, and wonders what impact regulatory review of the transaction may have.
The statement’s four points are:
- CareerBuilder is the clear leader in North American revenue and will continue to be even if the deal goes through.
- CareerBuilder has been the U.S. traffic leader since 2004 and will continue to be in the future.
- History could repeat itself and Monster will have a difficult time securing regulatory approval.
- Yahoo traffic does not monetize effectively.
In detail, here’s what CareerBuilder had to say:
“CareerBuilder is the clear leader in North American revenue and will continue to be even if the deal goes through.In 2009, CareerBuilder’s North American network revenue totaled $542 million compared to Monster’s $407 million. Estimates of HotJobs’ 2009 revenue were $80-$100 million. CareerBuilder’s positive revenue trend and associated increasing market share have been steadily increasing since 2006 when we became the undisputed market leader. As of today, even if the acquisition is approved and it is completely accretive to Monster, CareerBuilder’s $542 million revenue remains greater than the combined Monster/HotJobs at approximately $487-$507 million.
“CareerBuilder has been the U.S. traffic leader since 2004 and will continue to be in the future. Monster will most likely run the business as two separate companies with separate products and separate revenue streams. In that situation, CareerBuilder’s industry-leading 21 million unique visitors per month will remain the leader over Monster’s average of 11 million unique visitors per month. In line with CareerBuilder’s current portal traffic deals and Monster’s previous portal traffic deals, Monster should expect an additional average five million unique visitors per month from Yahoo, leaving CareerBuilder the undisputed leader in traffic in the U.S.
“History could repeat itself and Monster will have a difficult time securing regulatory approval. Monster attempted to buy HotJobs in 2001. After an initial review that spanned several months, the federal government announced it would conduct a second round of reviews. The HotJobs board ultimately chose to sell the company to Yahoo instead. This transaction will require an intense U.S. Department of Justice review. This deal could take an extended period of time to close. During that time both Monster and HotJobs will continue to lose market share to CareerBuilder.”
(Here’s some background on the previous bid by Monster for HotJobs. The deal in 2001 had gone so far that Monster even issued a press release saying it was buying the company, only to find Yahoo had outbid it. Marc Cenedella, now CEO of The Ladders, was on the negotiating team back in 2001 and posted the press release on his blog.)
“Yahoo traffic does not monetize effectively. Yahoo purchased HotJobs in 2001 for $436 million. They are planning to sell HotJobs to Monster for $225 million today, a decline in the value of HotJobs by nearly half. During the same period, CareerBuilder’s revenue has grown 500 percent, while HotJobs revenue has declined over that period of time. It is clear the Yahoo traffic does not lead to revenue growth and market share gains. We don’t expect that to change when Monster takes over that traffic.”
What’s particularly interesting is CareerBuilder’s estimate that HotJobs had 2009 revenue of $80-$100 million.
Besides being in line with the guesstimates of others in the industry, it’s an indication that the chaos at Yahoo has made HotJobs a poor cousin. While all job boards have seen year-over-year declines in revenue, even at the upper end of the estimate, HotJobs would have been losing ground faster than many others, and this would have been occurring while its traffic was surging.
That certainly lends support to CareerBuilder’s fourth point about the value of the traffic. “It is clear the Yahoo! traffic does not lead to revenue growth and market share gains,” CareerBuilder’s statement says. “We don’t expect that to change when Monster takes over that traffic.”
Them’s fighting words, but probably a bit overstated. Yahoo’s internal struggles over what business it wants to be in — and its C-suite shake-up — certainly diverted focus. And, of course, HotJobs has been for sale since at least the summer of 2008. Monster, incidentally, began making a serious run at the company at least as long ago as October 2008 when it signed an NDA with Yahoo! No wonder at yesterday’s analyst conference call Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi said, “This was a long and interesting negotiation.”
While CareerBuilder didn’t think much of the purchase, Dice Holdings CEO Scot Melland had a contrary view. He told me the deal “has the potential to be a win-win for both” Monster and Yahoo.
The devil’s in the details, of course, but Melland says Monster will get a big traffic boost and picks up some 600 media partners that have strong local sales teams. Even accounting for the overlap in customers, Monster will see revenue growth.
For its part, says Melland, Yahoo manages to shed an asset it no longer considers core to its business, while getting a brand-name player for its career channel. And it gets paid for the traffic.
Melland wouldn’t discuss whether Dice had taken a run at the HotJobs deal, though more than one industry source told me it had. However, he said the HotJobs acquisition would have little impact on Dice, which operates a few niche job boards, including the technology focused Dice.com and one for the financial industry.
For the broader industry, Melland said he thought the impact would become clearer over time. It does make Monster a much stronger player, he said.
