Tech workers get an average of 23 recruiter inquiries a week — yes, a week, says a survey from TEKsystems, a global IT staffing and services firm.

That’s a remarkable number, which, even if is skewed by respondents with very in-demand skills, would still go a long way to explaining why you’re not getting calls back. In fact, the survey shows that IT professionals are picky about whose call they will return.

The best thing a recruiter can do when leaving a message or speaking with a potential candidate is to be as detailed about the job as possible. Hearing details about the specific job, the team, the nature of the work, and the company culture is the kind of information that would lead 88 percent of the survey respondents to return the call.

Less important, but still high on the list for the IT professionals surveyed, is the professionalism of the recruiter and the reputation of the company.

“The best recruiters take the time to get to know the client and the candidate in detail. He or she with the most intelligence wins the matchmaking process,” says TEKsystems Director, Rachel Russell.

The findings come from the company’s quarterly IT Professional Perspectives Survey, which surveyed 2,424 IT workers last quarter about how they look for jobs. First, when a tech worker begins to consider a new job, they take stock of their skills, goals, and interests. Then, 96 percent say they hit the job boards.

“Job boards are the quickest way for IT professionals to feel like they’re getting out there and searching for a job,” says Russell. “But given that so many people are on the job boards, it’s a hard place to stand out.”

Perhaps knowing that, once a tech job seeker finds interesting opportunities, the next step for 72 percent of them is to network with other professionals. At some point, many will work with a recruiter. According to the survey, 59 percent say a recruiter is the main resource; 54 percent say colleagues; 53 percent say friends; and, 46 percent rely on their networks.

Recruiters who help job seekers, even if they don’t end up placing them, may still reap rewards. With 45 percent of the survey respondents saying they have 10 or more top professionals in their network, recruiters who remain accessible, helpful, and professional may be able to get a referral. The survey found 65 percent of IT professionals willing to share names if they had a positive experience with the recruiter.

Like the Giants and the Patriots, CareerBuilder and its controversial band of chimpanzees will be making a return appearance at this year’s Super Bowl in Indianapolis.

In this year’s 30-second commercial airing during the fourth quarter on Feb 5, the chimps wreak havoc with their human co-worker during a business trip, ordering 46 banana daiquiris, while brainstorming a poison ivy shampoo.

The chimps have proven to be an audience pleaser since making their debut in CareerBuilder’s first Super Bowl ad in 2005. The company’s three ads all made it into the top 10 in most of the popularity polls. The company reprised the monkey concept the following year, then tried a variety of other concepts, including viewer-conceived ads.

Last year, the chimps returned in an ad called “Parking Lot.” It ranked sixth in the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter poll, but prompted a complaint from PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, over the use of chimpanzees. The organization, once monitored by FBI counterterrorism investigators, released a letter from Angelica Huston calling on CareerBuilder not to air the commercial and to never again use chimps.

CareerBuilder explained that it’s again using chimps, despite the complaints of PETA and other animal-rights groups, for the simple reason people like them. “The chimpanzees were brought back by popular demand. It’s been a very successful campaign that job seekers identify with and act upon,” CareerBuilder VP of Communications Jennifer Grasz told Forbes.

Monster, whose 1999 “When I Grow Up” commercial is considered one of the best Super Bowl commercials of all time, has yet to appear on any list of this year’s advertisers. The company last ran a Super Bowl commercial in 2010.

At a per ad cost approaching $3.5 million, the Super Bowl is the most expensive TV buy in the world. CareerBuilder says it’s worth it and sent along these data points:

• Revenue – Over the last seven years, on average, CareerBuilder’s invoicing increased 36% year-over-year in the month following the Super Bowl.  This consistently outpaced year-over-year growth in other months.
• Applications – Over the last seven years, on average, CareerBuilder saw a 24% year-over-year increase in applications to our employers’ jobs in the month of the Super Bowl.
• Traffic - CareerBuilder’s traffic grew 43% year-over-year during the month of the Super Bowl when we first debuted as a Super Bowl advertiser. CareerBuilder has seen continued gains and, in 2011, the company had an 18% year-over-year increase in traffic in the month of the Super Bowl.
• Brand Awareness – Per a Millward Brown awareness tracking study, from 2004 to 2011, CareerBuilder’s unaided awareness grew 29%. Total awareness of CareerBuilder’s TV ads doubled in the week following our first appearance at the Super Bowl.

A quick look at some of the goings-on in recent days from the recruiting/human resources world:

• If you’re looking for a gift for the busy New York professional who has everything, you can now get them a “PA for a day.” The new temp firm, founded by a PR/events director for a New York ad agency, offers personal assistants for a day — actually for as little as two hours, at a rate of $20 an hour. The company says that “personal assistants cannot and will not assist with any tasks that are illegal, illicit, or questionable.” In addition, “PA For A Day currently does not offer babysitting/childcare services.” We’re not sure if they’re referring to the boss’s kids, or the boss himself.
• Hey LinkedIn, better sound general quarters. You’re under attack by a Norwegian startup. JobCruiter sent out an announcement about its launch with the in-your-face headline “JobCruiter.com Challenges LinkedIn.” The site, says the announcement, has “ambitions of being the best global career network.” Now, here’s the fightin’ words: “Many see today’s career networks just as boring overviews of their contacts where nothing is ‘happening.’“

• So many job boards launch in a week that we’re tempted to erect our own population clock. Atlanta, which has no shortage of job sites already, has one more as Twitter jobs broadcaster TweetMyJobs gets into the job board business. The city is partnered up with TMJ, which puts Mayor Kasim Reed right on the front page. The site itself does what all job boards do, provides a search box, a dashboard to manage searches and submit resumes, and a way for job seekers to see who of their Facebook friends works at a hiring company.

• Speaking of new sites, CareerBuilder took the occasion of a survey about relocation to announce its new CareerRelocate site. It’s a cool site with a graphical skills demand indicator, which told us that cowboy country is where there are jobs in the “other” industry category. But will the jobs move us? The survey says about a third of employers will. Forty-four percent of workers say they’re willing to go, but when they do 41 percent leave the family behind.

• Bad news on those relocation prospects for recruiters, though. Wanted says job ads for recruiters increased only 4 percent between December 2010 and December 2011. That’s about 50 percent better than what it was back in 2008 and 2009. But that CareerBuilder jobs demand map says most of the country doesn’t have much need for recruiters.

• Jobvite says it’s making it easier for veterans to find jobs. Jobvite customers can flag job opportunities specifically for veterans. Among other features of the application, jobs specifically of interest to veterans can be tagged, after which they automatically get added to the Veterans Job Bank.

Here are some of the events making news during the week:

Recruitment MarComm Firm Sold

NAS Recruitment Communications has been bought from Interpublic Group by a private equity firm in partnership with senior management. The new owner, Stone-Goff Partners, called the acquisition an “excellent match” with its “strategy of investing in strong niche businesses with established track records and experienced management teams.”

Key members of the management team, including CEO James Miller, will stay with NAS. In the announcement of the deal, Miller said, “Interpublic has been a great owner and partner over the last decade; however, under this new structure, NAS will be more nimble and better able to adapt to a constantly evolving set of dynamics in our space.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Unrabble Your Candidate Search

Unrabble is the latest “no resume” candidate analysis and job posting service to hit the market. The startup from KMC Software is aimed at the SMB market. Busy hiring managers or recruiters just fill out an online job description form, edit the resulting job posting, and it gets posted to StartUpHire, Indeed, and SimplyHired. It can also be distributed to the leading social networks.

Candidates apply by filling in forms that, among other things, have them list and rank their skills. Unrabble ranks candidates based on how their skills and self-scoring stacks up against what the hiring manager specs out. The service even allows a hiring manager to research a specific company listed in a candidate’s work history. The site is heavy on visualization and graphic representation of work timelines and the like.

Coalition Says No More Addresses For .jobs Operator

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers began selling new domains this week to almost anyone who can pony up the $185,000. For that, you get the right to append a .pepsi or .toys or even a .smith to an Internet address.

While the whole idea has been mired in controversy, the coalition fighting over how the .jobs domain is being used says the one group that shouldn’t be allowed to get one of the new gTLDs is Employ Media or any of its principals. In a letter to ICANN, the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition says the organization has been lax in its oversight of how the .jobs domain was used and mismanaged the contractual dispute.

“ICANN can still re-gain a measure of regulatory authority by publicly excluding Employ Media, as well as DirectEmployers Association, its alliance partner in this egregious breach, from participating in the new gTLD program,” says the Coalition in a letter.

You can find the history of the dispute here.

Editor’s note: Jeff Schwartzman’s article was the 3rd most popular article on The Fordyce Letter in 2011. It originally ran in April.

I often run across criticism of the recruiting practice dubbed “Post and Pray,” the method of posting online job ads with the hopes the right candidates apply. This practice comes under fire since it is viewed as the lazy approach to recruiting with little to no control over who applies.

Many of you may be thinking at this point, “I have no need to post jobs! I do everything through cold calling and referrals.” Relax — while that may work for you, it may not be the best approach for everyone else. Recruiting offers no perfect source or method to fill positions. In my opinion, to run a successful recruiting desk, it is important to utilize a combination of multiple recruiting methods, both proactive and reactive.

Posting online job ads have many advantages. Job seekers who apply have the opportunity to read through a job description (hopefully well written!) so they typically are already interested in your job when you receive their resume.

The following job posting strategies, approaches, and techniques will help optimize your job ad exposure resulting in both a higher quantity and quality of online applicants.

Optimize Your Job Title

Go to leading job boards, Indeed, Monster, or CareerBuilder. Too many job descriptions contain generic titles such as “Senior Scientist,” “Business Analyst,” or “Software Developer.” Type in “Sr. Scientist” on Indeed and you will see hundreds of job postings with this exact title. When I see a generic title, the first thing I want to know is what kind of Senior Scientist or Business Analyst is this? What is this position working on? Posting a generic job title will just yield a generic and non targeted set of applicants who respond.

The job title is the first thing job seekers see in their search results. An interesting and specific job title will result in a click on the job ad, the first step. Major job boards also score search results based upon the job title so it’s important to write a keyword rich job title and maximize this space. Monster allows for up to 50 characters so, like a tweet, it’s important to make the most of this space. Think of your job title as SEO for a job posting. Be sure to incorporate keywords associated with technologies, activities, and other specific qualifications.

• Instead of “Senior Scientist,” post “Sr. Scientist, BioPharma Protein Purification Process Development”
• Instead of “Business Analyst,” post “Sr. Business Intelligence Analyst, SAP Business Objects Supply Chain”
• Instead of “Process Engineer,” post “Process Engineer, In Vitro Diagnostic & Medical Device Production”

Refresh Your Jobs

Another SEO-like way to optimize job postings is to regularly refresh every few days to a week. Ideally, you can work with job slots which allow you to update, modify, or redo your job whenever — and for free. Monster and Dice among other boards offer job slots.

You can simply tweak your job ads every few days by making slight modifications to the job titles and the job location. So for example:

• Sr. Scientist, Downstream Purification, Monoclonal Antibodies – San Francisco, CA 94101

refresh to:

• Sr. Purification Scientist, Recombinant Proteins – San Francisco, CA 94105

Refreshing your job ads will ensure your job ads get to the top of the job boards and on page 1 of search results.

Your Job Description

Job descriptions should be well written, interesting, and thorough. They should focus more on the background of the position, projects, and responsibilities and less on the requirements. Basic stuff!

Location

You will generate the most applicants and best results by posting within the major markets. Jobs posted in LA, San Francisco, Boston, New York, and Chicago will yield far more applicants than jobs posted in Anaheim, Sacramento, Providence, Scranton, and Normal, IL. If you have a job in Scranton or small market region, post your job in the closest large market city where you will be able to attract candidates from within the largest talent pool. Just be sure to disclose in your ad that your position is not in the big city listed and that a relocation package may be offered, as is done in the following example – http://hiring.at/5dids.

Receiving Resumes

I highly recommend making use of an Applicant Tracking System which receives resumes from the candidates who apply for your position. Each position should contain its own apply URL so resumes received are automatically added to your ATS and sorted for the correct job.

A well designed ATS will also be able to automatically score how well applicants match up to the job they apply for. This way you can quickly get to the best applicants first. This will save you valuable time if you receive a large response.

Ask a few screening questions when candidates apply. Applicants who are a fit for a position choose to answer questions with complete and thorough answers. Completed questions contain valuable information about an applicant, better than a cover letter, and can be shared with a client.

Tracking and Metrics

Using a short URL, for example, http://hiring.at/lifsw, it is possible to track back each time an applicant clicks your job and each time an applicant applies for the job. You can use this short URL on a multitude of online sources including free job boards Indeed or SimplyHired; major job boards Monster, CareerBuilder, Craigslist, or Dice; social media Sites LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, and even niche job boards 37 Signals, Stack Overflow, TechCrunch, or Biospace.

Choose the Right Boards

You should also be able to measure which job boards are producing the most candidates and even the best candidates. If one board is yielding more applicants or better applicants than another, you know where to best invest your advertising resources. Other metrics to consider are the amount of clicks/applicants. If you get too many views but not enough applicants, you may want to rewrite your job ad.

You should also evaluate which job boards average the highest traffic and unique visitors and compare the traffic against cost per posting. Top boards include Craigslist, Monster, LinkedIn, and Indeed. Job Board Scorecard is a great resource which compares these metrics.

Posting for Placements

Posting optimized job ads is a recruiting practice which should be used in conjunction with passive direct sourcing techniques, networking for referrals, and database searching. It’s nice to know that while you are sourcing through LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and other passive approaches, your job ads are running in the background producing candidates. They even run on the weekend when you are enjoying precious time off!

Continue to work hard and source passive candidates. Then develop an optimized job posting strategy. Determine a comfortable yearly or monthly budget, choose a few top boards, set up the place you will receive incoming resumes (hopefully an ATS), and measure your results. Candidates sourced from job posting response should account for half of your placements. It works for me!

This week we are counting down some of the most popular articles from FordyceLetter.com in 2011. We hope you enjoy revisiting these articles as we look ahead to 2012!

Last week, Bloomberg reported that Monster Worldwide Inc. (MWW) is being removed from the S&P 500 after losing almost $5 billion in market value in the last five years. With a stock price low enough to force the world’s largest online-recruiting company out of the S&P 500, there’s some very public speculation that the global employment advertising company could be bought by a private equity fund. According to the Bloomberg article, the company has plunged 66 percent this year, the most in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, as American businesses remained reluctant to hire.

Rumors have periodically made the rounds of a potential or even pending sale — 20 of them since 2006, according to Bloomberg. All have proven false. But now, says the financial news service, financial analysts and some of Monster’s largest shareholders say the time and price may be right for a takeover.

“The valuation is absurdly cheap,” Eric Green, a Philadelphia-based fund manager at Penn Capital, told Bloomberg. With 3.2 million shares of Monster stock, Penn Capital is one of the company’s largest shareholders.

“The stock has been a clear disappointment,” Green is quoted as saying. He suggested a takeover price of $15 a share. That’s more than a 92 percent premium over Friday’s closing price of $7.71. “I would love to see someone buy it,” he said.

Monster’s stock price has declined steadily since hitting a 10-year high of $59.28 in May, 2006. In the last 12 months, the stock has been as high as $25.90, reaching there in January, when the economy seemed ready for a hiring surge. Since August, it has been under $10 a share. The market value of the company is now about $1 billion, $5 billion less than it was worth in 2006.

Part of the reason for the lackluster stock performance is the weak hiring outlook and the global economic climate of the last few years. Another part is the rise of alternative recruiting channels, especially social media, and especially the launch of LinkedIn as a public company. It bears noting that as hot a launch as LinkedIn had, rising almost immediately upon the start of trading to a high of $122.70, it has been under $75 a share since November. Dice Holdings, the other pure play job board, is also off its 12-month high of $18.75, closing Thursday at $8.75. LinkedIn closed at $66.38. CareerBuilder is privately held by a group of newspaper companies with Gannett owning the majority.

“When the employment market recovers, we’re going to see Monster’s revenue recover,” Avondale analyst Jim Janesky told Bloomberg. “If Monster doesn’t earn the value it deserves in the stock market, then there are various other avenues of recognizing value, and one is certainly a merger or an M&A opportunity.”

Monster declined to comment to Bloomberg and didn’t respond to our email asking for comment.

You’ll see how many people are looking for jobs; how the Swedish military is advertising; and who beat out Booz Allen in a Best-place-to-work list, all in today’s roundup. 

Your Staff Is Job Hunting

If you think the headline is wrong, you may be in for a surprise. Right Management (a Manpower division) says 84 percent workers are looking or will be looking for a new job next year. That’s the same percentage as last year, according to the firm, which surveyed almost 1,100 workers for this year’s survey via an online poll.

So now you’re thinking, “Some poll. More than 84 percent of the staff is still here.” But the survey doesn’t mean everyone is headed out the door. The findings are a barometer of worker distrust in management as well as job commitment.

Says Right Management Executive Vice President Bram Lowsky, “It’s a workplace equivalent to whether or not ‘the country is moving in the right direction.’ Sometimes called ‘flight cognition’ by behavioral psychologists, intent to leave is far from an unusual phenomenon, but when it applies to four-out-of-five employees for two years running it has to be of top concern to senior management.”

Creative Forecasting

The first-quarter 2012 outlook for marketing and advertising professionals is pretty decent, according to a new survey.

Here — at right — is what marketing and advertising executives said when asked, “In which of the following areas do you expect to hire in the first quarter of 2012?” (with multiple responses allowed).

Military Recruiting, Swedish Style

The Pentagon recruits American youth with a high-tech appeal that makes military life look like more fun than the best video game. If you’ve seen that space command commercial from the Air Force, then you know what that means. The Swedish military takes, ahem, a somewhat more down-to-earth approach.

Get Paid to Tear Things Down

Who wouldn’t want a job in demolition? Some of us would even do the work for free, especially if it involved stuff blowing up. (Yes, this might just be a guy thing.)

If this interests you, click on over to the National Demolition Association’s new job board, which it calls Demolition Career Connection. It’s a JobTarget site that backfills with construction jobs from construction job boards. Alas, it turns out even laborers have to have certain skills and training to work in demolition.

Applicant Tracking and Referral Systems Partnering

Taleo, a system for managing job candidates, has a little partnership going with SelectMinds. SelectMinds (written up here) has a tool to manage employee referrals, allowing employees or alumni to match open jobs with their contacts, and recruiters to keep track of referral activities, applications received, and so on. This referral product will now be integrated (though not free) for users of Taleo’s applicant tracking system.

Speaking of Taleo partners: TALX also is integrating with Taleo, offering larger employers WOTC help.

Home Health Report

A new report’s out on the home health and personal care industry. The 121-page PDF includes sections on training, wages, hours worked, and labor shortages in the field.

Deloitte Tops Vault’s Tech Consulting List

1,500 consultants ranked Deloitte’s IT consulting group as a best place to work, moving it from third last year to first for 2012. Vault compiled the rankings based on weighting a number of qualities including prestige, firm culture, pay, and work/life balance. Deloitte Consulting LLP earned a weighted average of 7.964. Just behind it was last year’s first place winner, Booz Allen Hamilton with a 7.866 score.

Besides the rankings and scores, Vault also compiles an abstract of what the survey respondents had to say — good and otherwise — about each of the top 25 companies on the list. See it all here.

Manufacturing Optimism

Many manufacturing execs envision certain operations coming back to the U.S. Why? Higher wages in China and elsewhere; a smaller supply of skilled people overseas; and patriotism.

With a stock price so low Monster is about to fall out of the S&P 500, there’s some very public speculation that the global employment advertising company could be bought by a private equity fund.

Rumors have periodically made the rounds of a potential or even pending sale — 20 of them since 2006, according to Bloomberg. All have proven false. But now, says the financial news service, financial analysts and some of Monster’s largest shareholders say the time and price may be right for a takeover.

“The valuation is absurdly cheap,” Eric Green, a Philadelphia-based fund manager at Penn Capital, told Bloomberg. With 3.2 million shares of Monster stock, Penn Capital is one of the company’s largest shareholders.

“The stock has been a clear disappointment,” Green is quoted as saying. He suggested a takeover price of $15 a share. That’s a 92 percent premium over Thursday’s closing price of $7.83. “I would love to see someone buy it,” he said.

Monster’s stock price has declined steadily since hitting a 10-year high of $59.28 in May, 2006. In the last 12 months, the stock has been as high as $25.90, reaching there in January, when the economy seemed ready for a hiring surge. Since August, it has been under $10 a share.

The market value of the company is now about $1 billion, $5 billion less than it was worth in 2006. Its 66 percent decline since the start of this year is the largest of any company included in the S&P 500. As a result, Monster is being moved by Standard & Poors to its MidCap 400 after the market closes today.

Part of the reason for the lackluster stock performance is the weak hiring outlook and the global economic climate of the last few years. Another part is the rise of alternative recruiting channels, especially social media, and especially the launch of LinkedIn as a public company. It bears noting that as hot a launch as LinkedIn had, rising almost immediately upon the start of trading to a high of $122.70, it has been under $75 a share since November. Dice Holdings, the other pure play job board, is also off its 12-month high of $18.75, closing Thursday at $8.75. LinkedIn closed at $66.38. CareerBuilder is privately held by a group of newspaper companies with Gannett owning the majority.

“When the employment market recovers, we’re going to see Monster’s revenue recover,” Avondale analyst Jim Janesky told Bloomberg. “If Monster doesn’t earn the value it deserves in the stock market, then there are various other avenues of recognizing value, and one is certainly a merger or an M&A opportunity.”

Monster declined to comment to Bloomberg and didn’t respond to our email asking for comment.

After almost five months with no sign of progress, a coalition of job boards and business associations is charging that the Internet policing authority is complicit in the “consensual delay” in arbitrating a contract dispute over the so-called Dot Jobs Universe.

“As the arbitration idles in its dormant state, Employ Media and its alliance partner DirectEmployers Association have aggressively expanded the reach of non-compliant Dot Jobs Universe, which was the very basis for the issuance of the breach notice,” charges The .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition.

In the letter it sent to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — and distributed publicly — the Coalition says “ICANN’s reluctance to enforce contractual compliance is of grave concern” giving “the impression to the Internet community that ICANN is unable or unwilling to enforce its rules…”

Early in May, after months of negotiation over the creation of thousands of job boards with a .jobs Internet address, Employ Media sought to arbitrate ICANN’s charge it had breached its contract with the organization. ICANN said that by awarding DirectEmployers Association thousands of occupational and geographic names on the .jobs domain, Employ Media and its partner the Society For Human Resource Management “intend to use the .JOBS TLD (top level domain) primarily to compete with other internet job boards.”

(SHRM sponsored the creation of the .jobs domain and provides policy oversight. For a complete history of the .jobs issue, go here.)

ICANN’s response to the arbitration request was filed July 22. The next step is for an arbitrator to be selected to chair the three-person panel. (Each side gets to name one arbitrator, which they have done.) There is no sign that has been done, leading the Coalition to note, “ICANN’s failure to keep the ICANN Community apprised of the status of the arbitration is a regrettable standard practice.”

Besides the arbitration pace, the Coalition’s letter raises two additional issues:

• It complains that ICANN kept from the public correspondence dating back to 2009, when Employ Media first allowed Direct Employers to use address names on a reserved list. Among that correspondence is a January 20, 2010 email telling Employ Media using those names was a violation of the contract.

• Why ICANN allowed Employ Media to make, as the Coalition termed it, a “fundamental change” to the database description of the purpose of .jobs. The original wording said the .jobs extension was “reserved for human resource managers.” ICANN approved changing it to “reserved to serve needs of the international human resource community.”

The wording change might seem innocuous, but one of the claims made by ICANN in its notice of breach of contract is that Employ Media is permitting persons other than human resource professionals to obtain .jobs addresses. When the Coalition requested the rationale for approving the change, ICANN sent documents with so much of the text deleted that it was impossible to understand.

Emails were sent to ICANN and Employ Media requesting comment and a status update on the arbitration. No response has been received.

Monster is adding some new features to its BeKnown social network, enabling companies to post jobs and creating some 3,500 college pages.

Built on the Facebook platform, BeKnown is a jobs-oriented network that allows users to build career profiles and connections separate from those on Facebook itself. By adding jobs to corporate sites and including colleges, Monster is encouraging users to conduct their job hunting within BeKnown.

For employers and schools that already have a Facebook career presence — and thousands do — the BeKnown sites are largely duplicative. But for those brand sites where jobs aren’t the main focus, a BeKnown site can become the gathering place for career discussions.

That’s the point Tom Chevalier, Monster’s BeKnown product manager, was making during a demo call today. A BeKnown site is a “secondary or duplicate offering,” he said, if a company or campus career center already has a recruitment presence on Facebook.

For everyone else (and that would include all those companies who simply stream their openings onto their Facebook site) a BeKnown site is where employees, alumni, students, job seekers, and potential candidates can engage in career conversations. Chevalier observed that a company isn’t very social if  it’s not carrying on active discussions with its fans and visitors.

In that regard, colleges will have it easier than employers. Alumni are vocal supporters of their school, and they are the very ones to talk about how their degree and their college years have paid off. And to post jobs.

Employers, whether direct or agency, need to invest time to make social media work. This isn’t unique to BeKnown or any other social site. Simply streaming jobs onto your site is not a social media strategy.

Engaging with candidates requires real interaction. Chevalier says BeKnown facilitates that because of its orientation. The way the site is designed, a BeKnown user can quickly see who they may know. If the employer adds the job feature — free and easily added — current listings appear on the main page. Right now, only jobs posted to Monster automatically show up. Soon, Chevalier said, XML and RSS feeds will be added to automate the process.

Colleges have it even easier. Monster has created pages for some 3,500 colleges in the U.S., populating them with content that includes a bit of history, costs, financial aid, and alums registered with BeKnown. A school need but claim its page.

While Monster was announcing its latest enhancements, Facebook was already the center of attention over its rumored plans for a $10 billion IPO next year. In a story repeated in hundreds of posts, the Wall Street Journal said the company was expected to file papers for its initial public offering possibly even before the end of the year. Based on the shares already outstanding, a $10 billion offering would value Facebook at $100 billion, ranking it among the most valuable companies in the world.