According to CareerBuilder.com:

This one I vote to be the best recruiting ad this year

In today’s tough market the goal of every job board is to increase traffic statistics. More visitors are equal more money they can charge for advertisement and more companies choosing them to post jobs. In my quite recent post I already mentioned big mismatch between official press releases and stats published by internet analysts.
This time I will add 2 more set of numbers that just become public.

According to Nielsen-netratings for the week ending January 8, 2008 standings are:
1. CareerBuilder - 5.6 million users
2. Monster - 5.3
3. HotJobs - 3.3

According to Hitwise situation is quite different. By the end of January standings are:
1. CareerBuilder - 12.96% market share
2. HotJobs - 11.18%
3. Monster - 4.32%

HotJobs marker share is comparable with one for CareerBuilder? Who are they kidding? Monster having only around 1/3 from CareerBuilder’s market size is just not true.

Let’s see… Hitwise is a subsidiary of Experian. Easy googling tells us that “Experian has been the exclusive provider of credit reports, content and resources in Yahoo! Finance”, “Experian Automotive the leading provider of vehicle history reports for Yahoo! Autos”, “Experian Selected by Yahoo! PayDirect to Authenticate Consumers Online”. Sounds like they are good partners.

I vote this to be the worst Super Bowl commercial this year.

Also read this up, quite interesting, looks like they realized how bad it is and are trying to remove it from any place they can. Let’s see for how long YouTube will resist.

Recruiting on the Web : Smart Strategies for Finding the Perfect Candidate

At beginning of the first chapter author is trying to scare reader with large numbers. 350 million people, 200 million of resumes, 40000 job boards and so on. Author did well with googling all this info but when I see stuff like that I just see that author has nothing to say so he tries to fill more pages with numbers he found on internet.
After reading father book got better, but never went above intermediate level. Might be suitable for some old fashioned recruiters who still doing business mostly on paper, but for anyone who is already using internet heavily book has no value at all.
Here are some negative and positive facts about this book:
- Despite been published only like year ago, a lot of information is outdated.
- Too much self promotion. You can see that author (Michael Foster) has problems with too high self esteem.
- Many facts he uses in the book he googled somewhere but provided no source or proof.

+ Book is still quite good for people who are new to those “Web” or “Recruiting” things. Anyone with very beginning to almost intermediate level will most likely find there something useful.
+ Book will be very valuable for someone who is not recruiter, but who is just trying to hire one or two new employees without hiring professional recruiter.

Dice.com 2007 Annual Salary Survey just got published. Key points:
- Average IT professional’s salary rose 1.7 percent to $74,570
- Leaders are Project/MIS Managers with 5.0% and 7.8% raise
- Banking/Financial industry was almost flat - 0.6% growth

Apparently terminally ill multimillionaire Monster.com founder Andrew McKelvey just confessed in falsified SEC filings and back-dated stock options for company employees. As part of a deal McKelvey has agreed to pay Monster.com $8 million and convert his 4.7 million shares from super voting to common type (voting power went from 10 to 1 per share).
One might wonder is recent departure of EVP of Sales Steve Pogorzelski has anything to do with this.

Steve Pogorzelski, Monster.com’s executive vice president of global sales and customer development, appears to be leaving the company. Officially he is planning to stick with the company as advisor. Advisor? I am not buying that. That’s what company officials are usually coming up with to make investors less nervous. Apparently, by the time of announcement there was no one to take his place. Coincidentially, this all took place in about a week prior to company’s quaterly earnings report.

I see a lot of quite different stats published on the web about market coverage for these jobboards. Every report has some different one ranked as number one.

Let’s see Alexa ranking (today’s data):
CareerBuilder - #99, traffic rank 639 (all will be 3 mos avg)
Monster - rank, 641
HotJobs - unknown, it’s merged with Yahoo which has rank 1

You can see Monster and CareerBuilder are pretty close. What’s up with HotJobs?
I see Yahoo is spending a lot of money recently on PR. Whole spread of them or have direct information or just have hints about supposedly increased traffic on Yahoo websites. Some of those articles and blog posts tell us that HotJobs became #1 job search engine. Where all that new traffic came from? Wasn’t they complained not that long time ago about Craigslist stealing their employment traffic?

In the middle of 2005 Nielsen//NetRatings rated career related sites and HotJobs were lagging quite a bit. Top3 were rated like this: CareerBuilder with 4.1m visitors, Monster with 3.56m and HotJobs with 1.6m.